DEUTERONOMY
Deuteronomy purports to contain the laws under which Israel is to live
in the land of Canaan. It deals with the conditions of an agricultural
people, settled in towns and villages, in the presence of a native
population to the contamination of whose religion and morals the
Israelites are exposed. This legislation was revealed to Moses at
Horeb (Deut. v. 28-33), but, inasmuch as it was not to go into effect
until Israel was established in the possession of Canaan, being in
fact wholly inapplicable to nomadic conditions--a consideration of
which P, in its code of worship, is oblivious--it was not promulgated
till the moment when the people, encamped opposite Jericho, was on the
point of invading Palestine. Then the aged Moses, about to lay down
his office and his life, delivers to the people, in national assembly,
the law by which they are in future to be governed, and adds his most
urgent injunctions and solemn warnings to be faithful to their
religion and the law of their God.
The book is thus almost wholly in the form of address, and the
hortatory note is insistent. As an introduction, Moses briefly recalls
the history of the wanderings, from Horeb on, impressing at every turn
the lessons of their experience (Deut. 1-3); the material is taken
chiefly from E's narrative, which it was intended to supersede in an
independent Book of Deuteronomy. There follows a hortatory discourse
(iv. 1-40), closely akin to cc. 29-30. The last acts and the death of
Moses are narrated in confused fashion in c. 31; xxxii. 48-52; 34. The
Song of Moses (c. 32), and the Blessing of Moses (c. 33), are
apparently independent compositions which have been given an
appropriate place at the end of the book. The core of Deuteronomy is
cc. 5-11; 12-26; 28. Speaking generally, the first part (cc. 5-11)
expounds the fundamental principles of religion, while the second (cc.
12-26) contains special laws, and, as a fitting and effective
conclusion of the whole, c. 28 sets forth the blessings which God will
bestow on Israel if it keeps his commandments, and the curses it will
incur by unfaithfulness and disobedience. The special laws,
particularly in Deut. 22 ff., are similar in character to those in
Exod. 21-23 and in Lev. 17-25, and doubtless embody in the main
ancient custom; but beside them are provisions of a singularly Utopian
kind, such as those on the conduct of war in c. 20 and the septennial
cancelling of all debts (xv. 1-11).
The conception of religion which dominates the whole book, but is most
conspicuous in cc. 5-11, is the highest in the Old Testament. There is
but one God, supreme in might and majesty, constant in purpose,
faithful to his word, just but compassionate; he is not to be imaged
or imagined in the likeness of anything in heaven or on earth;
idolatry, divination, and sorcery are strictly forbidden. The essence
of religion is love (Deut. vi. 4), the love of God to his people and
their responsive love to him is the ruling motive in worship and
conduct. In the relations of men to their fellows, whether countrymen
or strangers and to the brute creation, humanity and charity are the
prime virtues; the Utopian features of the laws are such only because
they push the ideal of humanity too hard for unideal human nature.
What is most characteristic in the Deuteronomic legislation, the thing
on which it dwells with insistent iteration, is that Jehovah will be
worshipped only at one place, to be chosen by himself in the territory
of one of the tribes. There all sacrifices must be offered, all
festivals celebrated. At the head of the special laws this fundamental
article is repeatedly laid down (Deut. xii. 13-19--seemingly the
oldest formulation--xii. 2-7, 8-12, 20-27), and it recurs in
connection with the laws concerning the disposition of God's share in
man's increase (tithes, firstlings, etc.) and the annual festivals
(Passover, Tabernacles).
This was an innovation which dislocated the whole system of religious
observances, and the Deuteronomic legislation had to provide for the
direct and indirect consequences of so radical a change. By ancient
custom the religious dues were rendered and sacrifices offered at the
village altars ("high places"), and there also the festivals were kept
which marked the seasons of the husbandman's year; beside the altar,
with a simple religious rite, domestic animals were slaughtered
whenever hospitality or a family festival gave occasion. If a man
visited a more renowned sanctuary at a distance from his home, he did
it of his own accord and in his own time and way. The feasts at the
village altars, at which custom prescribed open hospitality, were a
godsend to the poor of the community, many of whom would else seldom
have tasted flesh or eaten their fill. The Deuteronomic law licenses
the slaughter of animals at home without any religious rite, and
introduces a plan of charity tithes to replace the hospitality of the
altar. Its concern for the levites (that is, the priests of the local
sanctuaries), who by the new arrangement were left without a
livelihood, is also to be noted.
The motives for this radical change in immemorial religious custom are
characteristic. In the first place, the "high places" had been seats
of Canaanite worship before they were taken possession of by the
Israelites, and not only did the stigma of aboriginal heathenism cling
to them, but, in fact, many heathenish doings were perpetuated at
them--drunken debauches and consecrated prostitution. But, further,
their existence seemed to be incompatible with strict monotheism: the
many gods were worshipped in many places; the _one_ God seemed to have
as corollary _one_ place of worship. As a matter of experience, the
localizing of Jehovah at numerous sanctuaries--Dan, Bethel, Gilgal,
Beersheba--with their distinctive traditions and local peculiarities
of ritual, doubtless did result, for the apprehension of the common
man, in making a local Jehovah, as happens to the Virgin and the
Saints in Catholic countries. For the Deuteronomist this was only
another kind of polytheism: "Hear, O Israel, Jehovah, our God, is
_one_ Jehovah!"
Deuteronomy is, therefore, the programme of a reform. Fortunately, we
know how this programme was put in execution; the history of it is
written in 2 Kings 22-23. In the course of some repairs in the temple
in Jerusalem, a law book turned up, the reading of which threw King
Josiah and his advisers into consternation. After taking counsel of a
prophetess, an assembly was convoked, and the book publicly ratified
by the notables and the people as the law of the realm. Thereupon the
king proceeded to put the code in force. He not only cleaned house in
the temple in Jerusalem, where a miscellany of foreign gods and cults
was installed, but he destroyed and desecrated all the "high places,"
that is, the immemorial seats of the worship of Jehovah in the towns
and villages of his kingdom, pulling the altars to pieces, smashing
the stone pillars, hewing down the sacred poles, and forcibly carrying
off the priests (levites) to Jerusalem, where he assigned them a
living from the income of the temple, but--in his zeal going beyond
the law of Deut. xviii. 6-8--excluded them from sacrificial functions.
It was seen long ago by some of the Church Fathers that the law book
which Hilkiah found and Josiah enforced can have been no other than
Deuteronomy. The historian of the kingdoms, writing after the reforms
of Josiah and the following reaction and believing that the
prohibition of worship at the high places had been binding since the
building of Solomon's temple, is at pains to say that none of the
kings from Solomon to Josiah, not even those to whom otherwise he
gives the best mark for piety, had paid any attention to this law,
with the sole exception of a brief attempt by Hezekiah. We can go
further, and say that none of the older historians and none of the
prophets of the ninth and eighth centuries show any acquaintance with
such a prohibition. If the prophets assail the worship at the high
places, as Hosea does, it is on the ground that it is heathenish and
immoral, not that it is illegitimate; if Hosea condemns the
pilgrimages to Gilgal and Beersheba, it is not implied that it would
be better to go to Jerusalem; nor, indeed, is any condemnation of the
worship at the high places more drastic than Isaiah's of the cultus
in Jerusalem. Before the latter part of the seventh century there is
no thought that Jehovah has such an exclusive preference for Solomon's
temple.
All the other evidence in Deuteronomy points to the same age. Its
conception of God and of religion is derived from the prophets of the
eighth century. The influence of Hosea is particularly plain: that the
essence of religion is love is Hosea's idea, if there is such a thing
as originality in religion. The language and style of Deuteronomy are
of the seventh century, in its excellences and in its defects;
Jeremiah and the author of Kings have the closest resemblance to it in
its rhetorical manner and in its peculiar pathos.
On these grounds, since the latter part of the eighteenth century, an
increasing number of scholars have held that the book was written in
the second half of the seventh century for the purpose of bringing
about a revolution such as actually followed its well-timed discovery;
and this is now the opinion of almost all who admit that the common
principles of historical criticism are applicable to Biblical
literature.
Deuteronomy is not all of one piece, as has already been pointed out.
Many older laws were taken up into it at the beginning or introduced
subsequently; considerable additions were made to it after Josiah's
time, and even after the fall of Judah, for in several passages that
catastrophe and the dispersion of the people are an accomplished fact,
an existing situation. It is only the reform programme and what hangs
together with it that can be definitely dated.