Tag Archives: Deuteronomist

Literary Form of Deuteronomy

Posted on July 30, 2012 by Steven DiMattei

Concerning its literary form, Deuteronomy presents itself as a set of orations or farewell speeches delivered by Moses on the plans of Moab shortly before he dies. That is to say, the Deuteronomist uses speeches as a literary device to disseminate, and even authorize, his message. Historiography in the ancient world largely entailed crafting speeches and placing them in the mouths of great personalities and ancestors of the past. This literary technique was used to lend authority to the particular ideology and aims of an author by placing that ideology on the lips of a heroic ancestor, even a deity. The speech form thus allowed the Deuteronomist to express his own ideology and beliefs by making Moses the mouthpiece for them. Indeed, the Deuteronomist presents Moses as authoring the very text he is writing. We will see that the Priestly writer does the same thing when he sets out to … Read more

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History and Structure of Deuteronomy

Posted on July 27, 2012 by Steven DiMattei

The book of Deuteronomy, like many of the Bible’s books, was composed in stages and by different authors living in different historical eras. Despite this fact, Deuteronomy displays a remarkable unity in its style, theology, and message. This is largely because the various revisions, additions, and rewritings that the book of Deuteronomy underwent were done by a specific scribal school, which we shall label as the Deuteronomic school, and its authors the Deuteronomists. This scribal guild and its redactional activity spanned a lengthy period of time, from the late monarchal period of the 7th century BC, through the exilic period of the first half of the 6th century BC, to the Persian period of the 5th and 4th centuries BC. Thus the making of the book of Deuteronomy was an accumulative process of ever increasing redactional activity that transpired over three centuries. Because these three centuries witnessed radically different historical … Read more

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The Documentary Hypothesis: How Scholars Discovered J, E, D, and P (3)

Posted on June 23, 2012 by Steven DiMattei

This posts is part 3 of the ‘Did Moses Write the Torah?’ series. It too has been excerpted from my writing.

Nineteenth century scholarship: post-Mosaic by centuries

The observable textual data collected over the centuries leading up to and including the nineteenth century no longer supported the long-standing traditional and pre-critical claim that the Pentateuch was written by Moses—a traditional view, moreover, that the text never claimed to begin with and which only came into existence through culturally conditioned theological and ideological interpretive agendas of late antiquity and the Middle Ages. By the nineteenth century the large majority of biblical scholars realized that the Pentateuch was composed out of a variety of sources, all of which postdate Moses by centuries. It was the work of Wilhelm de Wette (1780-1849) that ushered in this new paradigm.

Previously commentators had claimed that the textual data suggested that much of the Pentateuch’s narrative … Read more

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