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Composition history Mosaic authorship of the Torah, the belief that the five books of the Torah – including the Book of Deuteronomy – were dictated by God to Moses on Mount Sinai, is an ancient Jewish tradition that was codified by
Maimonides (1135–1204 CE) as the 8th of the
13 Jewish principles of faith. Virtually all modern secular scholars, and most Christian and Jewish scholars, reject the Mosaic authorship of the Book of Deuteronomy and date the book much later, between the 7th and 5th centuries BCE. Its authors were probably the
Levite caste, collectively referred to as the
Deuteronomist, whose economic needs and social status the book reflects. The historical background to the book's composition is currently viewed in the following general terms: • In the late 8th century BCE both
Judah and
Israel were
vassals of
Assyria. Israel rebelled and
was destroyed circa 722 BCE. Refugees fleeing from Israel to Judah brought with them a number of traditions that were new to Judah. One of these was that the god Yahweh, already known and worshiped in Judah, was not merely the most important of the gods, but the only god who should be served. This outlook influenced the Judahite landowning
ruling class, which became extremely powerful in court circles after placing the eight-year-old
Josiah on the throne following the murder of his father,
Amon of Judah. • By the eighteenth year of Josiah's reign, Assyrian power was in rapid decline, and a pro-independence movement was gathering strength in the
Kingdom of Judah. One manifestation of this movement was a state theology of loyalty to Yahweh as the sole god of the Kingdom of Judah. According to
2 Kings 22:1–23:30, at this time
Hilkiah (the
High Priest and father of the prophet
Jeremiah) discovered the "book of the law" – which many scholars believe to be the Deuteronomic Code (the set of laws at chapters 12–26 which form the original core of the Book of Deuteronomy) – in the
temple. Josiah subsequently launched a full-scale reform of worship based on this "book of the law", which takes the form of a
covenant between Judah and Yahweh to replace the decades-old vassal treaty between King
Esarhaddon of Assyria and King
Manasseh of Judah. • The next stage took place during the
Babylonian captivity. The
destruction of the Kingdom of Judah by Babylon in 586 BCE and the end of kingship was the occasion of much reflection and theological speculation among the Deuteronomistic elite, now in exile in the city of
Babylon. The disaster was supposedly Yahweh's punishment of their failure to follow the law, and so they created a history of Israel (the books of Joshua through Kings) to illustrate this. • At the end of the Exile, when the
Persians agreed that the Jews could return and rebuild the
Temple in Jerusalem, chapters 1–4 and 29–30 were added and Deuteronomy was made the introductory book to this history, so that a story about a people about to enter the Promised Land became a story about a people about to return to the land. The legal sections of chapters 19–25 were expanded to meet new situations that had arisen, and chapters 31–34 were added as a new conclusion. Chapters 12–26, containing the Deuteronomic Code, are the earliest section. Since the idea was first put forward by
W. M. L. de Wette in 1805, most scholars have accepted that this portion of the book was composed in Jerusalem in the 7th century BCE in the context of religious reforms advanced by King
Hezekiah (reigned c. 716–687 BCE), although some have argued for other dates, such as during the reign of his successor
Manasseh (687–643 BCE) or even much later, such as during the
exilic or
postexilic periods (597–332 BCE). There is a suggestion in
Moshe Weinfeld's translation and commentary on Deuteronomy, based on substantive affinities between the blessings and curses that appear in the book and the vassal treaties of
Esarhaddon (pledging allegiance to the God of Israel and
the Law in one version and to
Esarhaddon in the documents exhumed from the archaeological record), that an important phase in the compilation of Deuteronomic law occurs at the same time as (and may be partly identical to) the Josianic reform. Weinfeld stringently rejects and dismantles the notion that the main body of the work might be post-exilic, without dismissing the obvious and unremarkable truth that textual changes accruing over generations of copying that extend for centuries are likely to have occurred and may be evident in the text. Apart from the main body of the law of Moses in Deuteronomy, the second prologue (Ch. 5–11), and the first prologue (Ch. 1–4) appear as distinct units of the text; the chapters following 26 are similarly layered.
Israel–Judah division The prophet
Isaiah, active in Jerusalem about a century before Josiah, makes no mention of
the Exodus, covenants with God, or disobedience to God's laws. In contrast, Isaiah's contemporary
Hosea, active in the northern
kingdom of Israel, makes frequent references to the Exodus, the wilderness wanderings, a covenant, the danger of foreign gods and the need to worship Yahweh alone. This discrepancy has led scholars to conclude that these traditions behind Deuteronomy have a northern origin. Whether the Deuteronomic Code was written in Josiah's time (late 7th century BCE) or earlier is subject to debate, but many of the individual laws are older than the collection itself. The two poems at chapters 32–33 – the
Song of Moses and the
Blessing of Moses were probably originally independent.
Position in the Hebrew Bible Deuteronomy occupies a puzzling position in the Bible, linking the story of the Israelites' wanderings in the wilderness to the story of their history in Canaan without quite belonging totally to either. The wilderness story could end quite easily with Numbers, and the story of Joshua's conquests could exist without it, at least at the level of the plot. But in both cases there would be a thematic (theological) element missing. Scholars have given various answers to the problem. The Deuteronomistic history theory is currently the most popular. Deuteronomy was originally just the law code and covenant, written to cement the religious reforms of Josiah, and later expanded to stand as the introduction to the full history. But there is an older theory, which sees Deuteronomy as belonging to Numbers, and Joshua as a sort of supplement to it. This idea still has supporters, but the mainstream understanding is that Deuteronomy, after becoming the introduction to the history, was later detached from it and included with Genesis–Exodus–Leviticus–Numbers because it already had Moses as its central character. According to this hypothesis, the death of Moses was originally the ending of Numbers, and was simply moved from there to the end of Deuteronomy. ==Themes==