By Daniel Abraham and Shmuli Phillips
As discussed a few weeks ago on this group, the origin of the book of Deuteronomy has long been a matter of intense speculation and debate. This post will tackle a popular approach from academic bible critics, which attempts to trace Deuteronomy’s provenance to the religious revolution instituted by King Josiah towards the end of the First Temple era.
The young Judean king is raised in a religious void following the efforts of his predecessors to erase knowledge of Torah and Jewish beliefs from the nation. II Kings 22-23 describes how Josiah courtiers discover a Torah scroll (II Chronicles 34:14: “written by the hand of Moshe”) which had been concealed within the Temple. Josiah proceeds to read this “scroll of the covenant” publicly to his subjects before enthusiastically instituting its requirements.
Scholars point to the biblical passage describing Josiah’s reaction to reading the scroll, identifying a number of “Deuteronomic” words, phrases and themes. Various theories evolved from this identification, which proposed distinguishing between the book of Deuteronomy and the previous books of the Torah in terms of their functions, authorship and era. Some even went so far as to suggest that Deuteronomy – with its strong insistence on centralized worship and power – was a forgery, perpetrated by Josiah’s courtiers as part of a ruse to enhance the authority of the young king.
We will first address the claim that Josiah’s revolution reflects an exclusively Deuteronomic influence, before examining some of the broader theories of a fraudulent power-grab which sprouted up around it.
Josiah’s Scroll: From All Four Corners of the Bible
In Who Really Wrote the Bible?, Clayton Ford responds to the claim that Josiah’s revolution reflects a solely Deuteronomic theme by arguing that terms and ideas from all four supposed biblical sources can be found in the crucial passage of II Kings. While scholars draw upon common linguistic and legal themes in order to connect Josiah to “D”, he explains, the same kinds of arguments, however, prove that the book of the Torah must also have contained the other proposed J, E, and P sources too.
The discovered scroll is referred to in II Kings as "the Book of the Covenant." Near the end of his reform, Josiah commanded the people to "Keep the Passover to YHWH your Elohim, as it is written in this Book of the Covenant" (II Kings 23:21). At the beginning of his reform, when Josiah gathered the people to the temple, "he read in their ears all the words of the Book of the Covenant, which was found in the house of YHWH" (2 Kings 23:2). Aside from this episode, “the Book of the Covenant" appears in only one other place: “Then he [Moshe] took the Book of the Covenant and read it in the ears of the people” (Exodus 24:7). Scholars are in agreement that this verse originates from “E” – containing all of the laws of Exodus 21-23. Based on the methodology of the critics, therefore, the book which Hilkiah found must have contained E as well.
Furthermore, the description of Josiah’s reforms recounts how he "smashed the sacred monuments and cut down the Asherim [a type of idol]" (23:14). This directly replicates and fulfils a law found only in Exodus 34:13, a passage attributed by scholars to the “J” source: "You shall smash their sacred monuments and cut down their Asherim" (Deuteronomy 7:5 contains a similar though differently worded law). The alleged “P” source is also reflected in Josiah’s reaction to discovering the scroll, which describes how he prevented the priests who had sacrificed at the prohibited bamot (private altars) from officiating at the Temple in Jerusalem. Nevertheless, they still “ate unleavened bread among their brethren” (II Kings 23:8-9).
In The Exodus and Biblical Narrative, Richard Elliot Friedman himself notes how Josiah's treatment of these priests was similar to the treatment of the physically blemished priests proscribed by a law in “P”: "He may eat the bread of his God...only he shall not go near the curtain nor approach the altar, because he has a defect" (Lev. 21:22-23). The “P” source, he continues, may also have prevented Josiah from prohibiting priestly consumption of bread to those who had sinned since it commands “all the males among the children of Aaron may eat it. It shall be a statute forever in your generations" (Lev. 6:16, 18). Finally, the description of Josiah defiling Topheth so that “no man might make his son or his daughter pass through the fire to Molech" (2 Kings 23:10) closely reflects the language of Lev. 18:21).
Thus all four of the critics’ claimed biblical sources are reflected and well represented in the passage describing Josiah’s revolution.
Was Josiah Attempting to Centralize Sacrificial Worship?
Further academic theories have proposed more radical implications of the alleged special relationship between Deuteronomy and scroll of Josiah. One claim put forward in a variety of forms by bible critics over the last 150 years is that Josiah’s attempt to eradicate idolatry and bamot, was driven by the desire to consolidate power and assert control over the nation’s religious worship. His advisors, it is alleged, fraudulently composed the scroll and claimed to have found it hidden in the Temple.
The unique structure and content of the book of Deuteronomy — which we examined a few weeks ago— together with its injunctions not to offer sacrifices on private bamot, are taken by these critics to be evidence in support of this theory. While this idea has enjoyed widespread popularity among some bible scholars, Amnon Bazak, (To This Very Day) demonstrates that powerful questions against its credibility tend to be overlooked.
The first challenge questions the assumption that Judaism before the time of Josiah lacked any notion of centralised worship, and that no religious laws restricted private sacrifice. Support for this assumption is often premised on a verse shortly after the first recording of the Ten Commandments, which is taken to approve sacrifices in any place of the worshipper’s preference. A more careful reading of the verse however shows that this approval of sacrifices is limited to a place “asher azkir et Shemi — where I [God] allow My name to be mentioned”, which clearly implies a limitation. Furthermore, the Hebrew text contains a subtlety which does not translate easily and is therefore often overlooked. In the phrase “bechol hamakom asher azkir et shemi” the word makom (“place”) is prefixed by the heh hayediah (the Hebrew equivalent of the definite article, i.e. “the place”) which means, in effect, “any specific place in which I allow My name to be mentioned”.
In fact, many biblical sources point strongly to an earlier prohibition against the performance of sacrifices in private non-centralised locations. The details of the construction of the Mishkan in the desert are related at length by the Torah, as are the details of Shlomo’s construction of the first Mikdash – an indication of the importance placed on a place of centralised sacrifice. This is underlined by the prohibition (Lev. 17. 1-9) of the performance of any sacrifice (and at times even regular slaughter) outside the Mishkan’s perimeters Furthermore, in an episode towards the end of the book of Joshua (chap. 22), a misunderstanding brought the nation to the brink of civil war when the tribes of mainland Israel thought that their Transjordanian brethren were setting up their own altar to rival the centralized one.
Dating Deuteronomy
A closely-related question which arises from the suggestion that Deuteronomy was forged for political reasons by the courtiers of Josiah (or Hezekiah as others suggest) is the broader antiquity of the book. But is the content of Deuteronomy consistent with such a claim that it was authored in the late First Temple period?
Many scholars maintain that the book was the work of power-grabbing leadership who sought to centralize worship in Jerusalem. But were this to be true, it would be surprising that within the entire book of Deuteronomy there is not even a single instance of any mention by name of the capital.
If anything, the text appears delicately and deliberately to step around the word “Jerusalem”, substituting in its place the verbose and vague phrase “in the place in which God shall choose that His name shall dwell there” – a phrase which appears approximately 20 times throughout the book. While this phenomenon can be seen to support Jewish tradition that the Temple was just the latest and most impressive of the places of centralised worship, it deals a blow to the claim that a primary aim of the book of Deuteronomy was to focus on the central importance of this specific place.
Additionally, despite the existence of several mentions of the prohibition to sacrifice outside the permitted place(s), it is far-fetched to imagine that it constitutes the primary or even a central theme of the book of Deuteronomy. Instead, Deuteronomy places far greater emphasis on avoiding the temptations of idolatry, the establishment of effective institutions in the Land and appropriate preparations for upcoming battle with the Canaanite nations.
A broader look at the book of Deuteronomy reveals that, if its composition was dated to the era of the later kings, this would render much of its content both anachronistic and absurd. The entire context and tone of Deuteronomy is fundamentally suited to a nation being addressed by Moshe on the cusp of its entry into the Land of Israel. Politically, Deuteronomy (23:8) regards the nation of Edom favourably, as a ‘brotherly’ nation not to be “rejected”. The reality in the era of Josiah, however, was that Edom had become a bitter enemy of the Jewish people, with whom it had fought several severe battles. It is indeed hard to imagine a book composed in Josiah’s times viewing the nation of Edom in such a positive light; however, this position is entirely consonant with the more peaceful attitude towards Edom displayed by Moshe in Numbers (20:14-21), where God instructed him to detour rather than trespass and provoke the Edomites.
The wars of conquest which are envisaged and legislated for in the book of Deuteronomy are well suited to a nation posed to embark on an invasion. Such descriptions, however, are profoundly incongruous with the political reality of Josiah’s era in which, it is alleged, they were composed — an era in which the tiny Judaean state was struggling to exist alongside the regional Assyrian and Babylonian superpowers. Furthermore, there is no hint in the entire book of Deuteronomy of the serious rupture which had taken place among the Jewish people, splitting it into two separate kingdoms, one of which had recently been defeated and exiled. The fundamental incompatibility of the content of much of the book of Deuteronomy with Josiah’s era was conceded by Richard Elliot Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? p 120, who considered that: “The laws of war in the book of Deuteronomy, therefore…suggest an early, nonmonarchic point of view”. Friedman also argues that the type of conscripted armies described in Deuteronomy had been entirely replaced by professional armies by the time of the later kings such as Josiah.
Finally, if the primary agenda motivating the composition of the book of Deuteronomy was truly to expand the authority of the monarch by centralising religious worship in Jerusalem, it is extraordinary that this scroll in fact limited monarchy in a way which was unique among ancient cultures. The concept of a limited monarchy was a contradiction in terms in ancient Eastern cultures. It is an unfathomable proposition that a king, setting out to compose a fraudulent document in order to broaden his power, would include such a passage – which sets limits to his glory and places him within rather than above the law as was the norm in Josiah’s era.
First posted on Facebook 8 August 2021, here.
