Deuteronomy

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Tanakh
Torah | Nevi'im | Ketuvim
Books of the Torah
1. Genesis
2. Exodus
3. Leviticus
4. Numbers
5. Deuteronomy

Deuteronomy (Greek deuteronomium, "second", from to deuteronomium touto, "this second law", pronounced /ˌdjuːtəˈrɒnəmi/) is the fifth book of the Torah of the Hebrew bible and the Old Testament. Its Hebrew name is Devarim, דְּבָרִים, "spoken words" [1], from the opening phrase Eleh ha-devarim, "These are the words...". The Greek title comes from the erroneous Septuagint rendering of the Hebrew mishneh ha-torah ha-zot, "a copy of this law" (Deuteronomy 17:18).

Contents

Deuteronomy consists of three sermons delivered by Moses to the Israelites in the plains of Moab, at the end of the final year of their wanderings through the wilderness. The book ends with the death of Moses.

Deuteronomy 1-4 recapitulates Israel's disobedient refusal to enter the Promised Land and the resulting forty years of wandering in the wilderness. The disobedience of Israel is contrasted with the justice of God, who is judge to Israel, punishing them in the wilderness and destroying utterly the generation who disobeyed God's commandment. God's wrath is also shown to the surrounding nations, such as King Sihon of Heshbon, whose people were utterly destroyed. In light of God's justice, Moses urges obedience to divine ordinances and warns the Israelites against the danger of forsaking the God of their ancestors.

Deuteronomy 5-26 is composed of two distinct addresses. The first, in chapters 5-11, forms a second introduction, expanding on the Ethical Decalogue given at Mount Sinai. The second, in chapters 12-26, is the Deuteronomic Code, a series of mitzvot (commands), forming extensive laws, admonitions, and injunctions to the Israelites regarding how they ought to conduct themselves in Canaan, the land promised by the God of Israel. The laws include:

The concluding discourse sets out sanctions against breaking the law, blessings to the obedient, and curses on the rebellious. The Israelites are solemnly adjured to adhere faithfully to the covenant, and so secure for themselves, and for their posterity, the promised blessings.

Moses conditionally renews the covenant between God and the Israelites, the condition being the loyalty of the people, and appoints Joshua as his heir to lead the people into Canaan. There follow three short appendices, namely:

During the nineteenth century, secular biblical scholarship abandoned the traditional view that the Torah, and therefore Deuteronomy, was composed by Moses in the second millennium BC. Deuteronomy instead came to be seen as the document whose discovery is described in 2 Kings 22:8-20:[5] the High Priest Hilkiah finds an ancient lost scroll in the Temple and takes it to king Josiah; what Josiah reads there causes him to embark on a program of religious reform, suppressing the worship of all other gods but Yahweh and centralising the worship of Yahweh in the Temple.[6].

According to the hypothesis the original element of Deuteronomy, the scroll found in the temple, is the Deuteronomic Code at Deuteronomy 12-26.[7] Two alternative editions were created, possibly by the same author, and published simultaneously; one version contained the Code, the historical introduction (Deuteronomy 1-4),[8] a simple hortatory conclusion, and a list of curses (Deuteronomy 27),[9] the other contained the core, the theological introduction (Deuteronomy 5-11);[10] and a more extensive hortatory conclusion (Deuteronomy 28-30).[11] The first version presented the law as Moses's account of the events at Sinai, the second took the form of a suzerain-vassal treaty, of a form similar to the much older Covenant Code. At some point shortly afterwards the two were combined in a single document known as "Dtr1".

The Deuteronomist author or authors also produced a history of Israel from Joshua to Josiah, consisting of the books of Joshua, Judges, the Books of Samuel, and the Books of Kings. In this history Josiah figured as the greatest of all the kings, the only one who never wavered from the law given by Moses, and the one who would restore the ancient kingdom of David and Solomon. But in 609 BC Josiah was killed at Megiddo by the Egyptians, and in 586 BC the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem and took its people into captivity. Consequently, at some point after 586, a second edition known as "Dtr2" was produced, containing additional warnings about faithlessness and exile, as well as promises of restoration in the event of repentance. This second edition inserted two originally independent documents, and framings for them, which now comprise the two poems at Deuteronomy 31-33,[12] and the account of Moses' death was moved to where it lies now, Deuteronomy 34. In the final redaction of the Torah, c.450 BC, Deuteronomy 34 gained additional verses describing the death of Moses from two other originally independent documents, the Jahwist and the Priestly source.[13]

More recently Meredith G. Kline has proposed that Deuteronomy should be viewed as a suzerein/vassal treaty between God and the people of Israel. According to Kline, a conservative scholar who wished to restore the case for the book's Mosaic provenance, these treaties were based on Hittite treaties of the second millennium BC. Moshe Weinfeld subsequently argued that Deuteronomy’s extensive list of curses (28:23-35) fits better the style of seventh century BC Assyrian treaties. "Deuteronomy adapts the literary form and the vocabulary of a treaty but places the deity Yahweh, the God of Judah, in the place of the Assyrian king. ... The writer(s) are therefore deliberately taking an instrument of Assyrian subjugation, the client treaty, and using it as a mechanism to bolster Judean commitment to their national deity and to reinforce national identity".[14]

Polytheism was a feature of Israelite religion down through the end of the Iron Age.[15] "[T]here is no clear and unambiguous denial [in the Hebrew bible] of the existence of gods other than Yahweh before Deutero-Isaiah in the 6th century B.C. ... The question was not whether there is only one elohim [god], but whether there is any elohim like Yahweh."[16]. The theological position underpinning Deuteronomy is that Yahweh is the patron god of Israel, as Chemosh was the patron of Moab and Marduk of Babylon: "When the Most High ("El Elyon") apportioned the nations, when he divided humankind, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the gods, the Lord's ("Yahweh's") own portion was his people, Jacob his allotted share" (Deuteronomy 32:8-9)[17]

The concept of the biblical covenant also plays a central role in the theology of Deuteronomy. Israel is Yahweh's vassal, and Israel's tenancy of the land is conditional on keeping the covenant, which in turn necessitates tempered rule by state and village leaders who keep the covenant. "These beliefs, dubbed biblical Yahwism, are widely recognized in biblical scholarship as enshrined in Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic History (Joshua through Kings), with pronounced affinities to the Pentateuchal E source and to the prophets Hosea, Jeremiah, and Malachi."[18]

Closely linked to the emergence of monotheism in Deuteronomy is the prohibition of divine images (aniconism).

Deuteronomy 17:14-20 contains the "kingship law", delimiting the role and duties of a king. The king is to be humble: "One from among your brethren you shall set as king over you", but "his heart shall not be lifted above his brethren."

Deuteronomy 6:4-5: "Hear (shema), O Israel, the Lord (YHWH) is our God, the Lord (YHWH) alone!" has become the basic credo of Judaism, and its twice-daily recitation is a mitzvah (religious commandment). The shema goes on: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and all thy soul and all thy might;" it has therefore also become identified with the central Jewish concept of the love of God, and the rewards that come with this.

The authors of the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles reinterpreted Deuteronomy's Israel as the Church, the people both Jewish and Gentile to whom Jesus had come (Luke 1-2, Acts 2-5). Jesus himself was the "one (i.e., prophet) like me" sent by Yahweh and predicted by Moses in Deuteronomy 18:15 (Acts 3:22-23). St. Paul, drawing on Deuteronomy 30:11-14, explains that faith in Christ and the keeping of Torah ("righteousness") are one and the same: For Moses describeth the righteousness which is of the law, "that the man which doeth those things shall live by them, but the righteousness which is of faith speaketh on this wise, Say not in thine heart, Who shall ascend into heaven? (that is, to bring Christ down from above:) Or, Who shall descend into the deep? (that is, to bring up Christ again from the dead,) but what saith it? The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and in thy heart: that is, the word of faith, which we preach; that if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved" (Romans 10:6-9).[19]

  1. ^ morfix online dictionary; in modern Hebrew this meaning has been retained only in the "smichut" (genitive noun construct), e.g. "לפי דבריך" = "according to what you said".
  2. ^ http://bible.cc/deuteronomy/23-1.htm
  3. ^ Deuteronomy 32:1-47
  4. ^ (Deuteronomy 32:48-52)
  5. ^ 2 Kings 22
  6. ^ Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?
  7. ^ Deuteronomy 12-26.
  8. ^ Deuteronomy 14.
  9. ^ Deuteronomy 27.
  10. ^ Deuteronomy 5-11.
  11. ^ Deuteronomy 28-30.
  12. ^ Deuteronomy 31-33
  13. ^ Deuteronomistic History overview.
  14. ^ Peter Bedford, "Empires and Exploitation: The Neo-Assyrian Empire, p.23
  15. ^ Mark S. Smith, "The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts", (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), at Bible and Interpretation
  16. ^ John McKenzie, "Aspects of Old Testament Thought" in Raymond E. Brown, Joseph A. Fitzmyer, and Roland E. Murphy, eds., The New Jerome Biblical Commentary (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1990), 1287, S.v. 77:17.
  17. ^ Deuteronomy 32
  18. ^ Norman K. Gottwald, review of Stephen L. Cook, The Social Roots of Biblical Yahwism, Society of Biblical Literature, 2004
  19. ^ J. G. McConville, "Deuteronomy", in Dictionary of the Old Testament: The Pentateuch (IVP, 2002)

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