Introduction to the Bible: some notes III: Deuteronomy

At the Space Centre in Leicester.

1. 1. In his Antiquities of the Jews written at the end of the first century, Josephus treated his enlightened Gentile audience to an apologetically motivated re-reading of Deuteronomy. In his opinion, the book preserved the politeia not just the nomos of Israel; in other words, torah had not merely a legal or moral sense in Deuteronomy but a constitutional, genuinely political sense.

Josephus intended to prove to his Hellenic audience that Jewish political thought preceded the thought of the Greeks, Plato and Aristotle. And he thought that in Deuteronomy he had found his proof: “a social charter of extraordinary literary coherence and political sophistication”, as McBride puts it. Arguably, Deuteronomy had a direct influence on the development of modern western constitutionalism, especially in the United States.

2. Like a modern novel, Deuteronomy is narrative: it has a character, setting and plot. However, the narrative really only acts as a frame in which the great speeches of Moses are embedded. The frame helps us to remember that we are listening in on Moses’ speech which is directed to a certain group of people in history. The readers of the written text read it over the shoulders of that first audience; clearly, these readers are to take to heart what they read but in the light of their different circumstances. Noticeably, Moses is able to collapse one generation of Israelites into another by addressing them as “you”. He narrates in the second person, so that the effect is immediate. It is not too much to suppose that the readers are meant to, in the same way, see themselves as the people of God likewise addressed by the text. Deuteronomy calls its readers for decision and action: to trust and obey.

3. Moses death also makes necessary the writing down of the law. We read here about the enscripturation of the words of Moses: the beginnings of the idea of Holy Scripture, which will ensure that the voice of Moses teaching and expounding the law of Yhwh himself will continue to ring out in Israel long after his death. Any doctrine of Scripture ought to begin here, with Scripture's emerging self-awareness of - and unembarassment about - the idea of the Word of God taking a written form...