Deuteronomy Review

Apparently, there is some controversy around Deuteronomy’s provenance.  As I started reading it, I noticed that the style of its writing, the way its contents are presented, and the nature of those contents do not match the style of the preceding books, all ostensibly authored by Moses.  Granted, they are more likely recordings of oral traditions, but especially Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers possess a certain similarity in approach and style (as much as style can be deduced in translation of a work so long adapted, repeated, copied, and translated) which suggests there may be some truth to the notion they share a single author.  Deuteronomy is different, though, even if you don’t know to look for it.  A major difference is immediately apparent: it is largely written in the first person.

Biblical scholars like to divide the book into four parts: three sermons from Moses, and a conclusion in which Joshua assumes the mantle which Moses bore through the previous books (although Joshua never quite has the same relationship with God that we’ve highlighted for Moses).  There is no framing story provided, so the sermons are presented as Moses would have presented them, addressing the audience in the first person, telling stories, relating experiences, and, well, preaching.  More than half the book is devoted to reviewing the events since Exodus, including Moses lamenting how he is barred from the Promised Land by his association with the sinful.  It seemed strange to me until I read some of the history behind the book, which strongly suggests it, well, doesn’t quite belong where it’s placed.

I have a tendency to ignore a lot of the research people do surrounding the Bible.  Some of it is surely legitimate, but it all seems rather contrived, trying to answer questions that don’t need the sorts of answers the scientific method can provide, and the people involved in it, no matter how well-intentioned, are inevitably affected by the nature of the subject they’re studying and their relationship to the religion.  Like people attempting to write histories of things that happened in the last decade, almost anyone involved with such research will be too close to the subject, simply from the pervasive influence of the Abrahamic faiths on modern society.  The sensationalist headlines these sorts of studies produce don’t help.

Since Deuteronomy is so obviously different from its predecessors, despite covering much of the same subject matter and involving many of the same “characters,” I made a bit of an exception and conducted some brief research on its history.  Nothing extensive, and there is little that can be said definitively about these matters, but the consensus amongst people who study these things more closely than I do is that Deuteronomy was probably written much, much later, circa 500BC.  Furthermore, it is thought to have been written for politico-religious argument, as a way of persuading people to the author’s point of view, with emphasis on the Jewish life in exile and the laws.  In that sense, it really is a restatement of what had gone on before, a restatement for a rather different audience than the one Moses is purportedly addressing in a textual sense.  To put it another way, Deuteronomy can be read as having an implicit framing story and an explicit one, the explicit one being the events we’ve read about in the preceding books, and the implicit one being the events of the time and context in which the book was written.

This matter of dating also leads to some controversy around the placement of the book within the larger “series” (apparently, even the Bible has those confusing discrepancies between “in-world” chronology and publication order).  The Christian Old Testament consistently places it here, as the fifth book, but the Jewish tradition places it differently, and it’s actually been moved around to different places in the sequence throughout history.  It makes sense chronologically for it to be placed where it is, but it does interrupt the flow of the narrative, especially since it largely retreads, and even repeats verbatim, events and commandments from previous books.

After the digressions and repetitions, we reach the last few chapters, in which Moses dies and Joshua assumes his mantle. Considering the role and relevance of Moses throughout the previous books, his death comes as a bit of an anticlimax, almost an aside, despite his unique relationship with God. Nor do we learn much new about Joshua beyond what we already knew (which wasn’t very much). That will have to wait for the next book, Joshua.