Deuteronomic History and the Prophets 1
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, October 24, 2001
Abstract
Deuteronomic History
The Former Prophets equate with the Deuteronomic History. The Deuteronomic History was noted first by Martin Noth. It stands for the work of a school of authors who wrote what Noth saw was a coherent history from Deuteronomy (except chapters 32-34) to 2 Kings—Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings—books that follow the criteria of Deuteronomy and are likely therefore to spring from the same source.
The Deuteronomic History introduces David, Saul and Solomon but depicts the monarchy as corrupt, blasphemous and always bringing misfortune to the people. Needless to say, biblical scholars have had many views and formulated many theories about it, most, if not all of which accept it at its own value. However, most of these scholars will accept that these books have one main theme that they will not dispute—that they express the central view of Deuteronomy, that disobedience of the law will bring punishment by God, and particularly the withdrawal of the gift of the land.
The chronology is coherent, the language, style and sentence structure is characteristic, the text is periodically broken by speeches by the leading participants summarising the story so far, and looking ahead, and the author’s purpose is clear and consistent—to condemn apostasy and warn about its dire consequences for the people.
Under the influence of Noth, the books of Kings were considered coherent enough to have been written complete, by a single author. No one today imagines that the Deuternomic History was written down once and for all by a single author. Almost every authority has thought otherwise—it has several layers of redaction. What happened, the experts agree, is that an author compiled an initial Deuteronomic History using the sources he had, then a series of editors made changes over succeeding centuries. Biblicists think the original composition was pre-exilic. This historian could have taught Herodotus and Thucidydes their jobs, yet it went un-noticed until the third century BC.
Unbiased historians would date the original history to after the Persian period when cultural activities blossomed everywhere in response to Persian influence. The Persians provided Ezra with a law, a purpose, a theme, and an outline history explaining it all. The theme was that the Jews had had countless chances in history but had remained backsliding apostates before their God, the self-same God that had saved them through the founder of the Persian empire, Cyrus. Only a remnant ever remained righteous, the rest being punished. This outline history was expanded in later times by several editors, those of the Ptolemies particularly, and the Maccabees. Biblicists reject this sensible hypothesis.
Ziony Zevit ( The Religions of Ancient Israel ) confirms that the Deuteronomic Historian was a contemporary of the initial author of Deuteronomy. There is agreement on that, but Zevit wants both works to be seventh century in the time of Josiah, not the fifth century in the time of Darius II. It is quite impossible to build any sound conclusions on “history” that is partly, if not largely, fiction. So the perpetual harking back of the biblicists to Josiah is unwarranted. Once, believers were sure that the bible was true because God—who does not lie—inspired it. No one serious can any longer hold that it is true. So, no one is certain that the biblical story of the finding of a book in the reign of Josiah is true. If it is not, then no book in the present bible can be it. Even if the story is true, no one knows for sure which book in the bible it is.
It is assumed that a book really was found and it is assumed that the book was Deuteronomy. Any history based on unfounded assumptions is built on quicksands. The real history of the Jews must emerge from the true history of the region, not from a book that is often wrong or uncorroborated. Having found a proper basis for Jewish history, the Deuteronomic History can be critically checked against it. A supposed history can be tested within itself for consistency, but it cannot be used to illuminate external history until it has been tested against it, and found to be valid. The Jewish scriptures too often do not tally with history known from elsewhere, so building up fantastic theories built on the scriptures being true is absurd.
To attempt to explain Josiah’s reforms, when there is nothing that unequivocally suggests that Josiah, or anyone else, reformed anything to do with the religion of the region, or even that Josiah existed, is to be a fantasist. That is what many biblical historians are. It is a curious thing that the reforms of Josiah, described in the bible a century before the supposed return from exile, had already made all the fundamental changes that the returning Jews undertook under the Persians. There is little possibility that such a tiny impoverished country as Judah could have written a history like the bible, even as fiction, until the time of the Persians. With the ethically based religion the Persians already had, and the objectives they had in setting up a loyal state in Yehud as a buffer against the Egyptians, the Deuteronomic History becomes logical and even necessary.
You have to ask how a scribe of a small nation like Judah with only a short history of its own and therefore no time to develop a literary tradition could have access to the annals of major nations like Assyria and Babylon. Yet the Deuteronomic Historian had access to them, as differences in spelling of some proper names shows, the reason being different spellings in different sources at a time when writing was not regular. These annals told of military campaigns, important state building work, and agricultural initiatives. They also explained that populations and their incomes were estimated for effective taxation and tribute demands. Movements of people were also noted. No small nation could have had the state resources to keep such data, and Judah was a wasteland, to judge by archaeology, and—in this instance—the bible, for over 100 years before the Persians colonized it.
Information was available on inscribed monuments, the sort of find that archaeologists value, but in those days, many will still have been in situ. But are biblcists seriously suggesting that some amateur historian will have travelled the ancient east carefully noting what had been left to be read on monumental inscriptions, to write a peculiar history? It is as absurd as imagining Moses keeping a diary for 40 years. Nor is it necessary. The Deuteronomic Historian admits he had sources. The question is did he have genuine ones, and, if so, how did he have access to them. It could only have been done with the co-operation of the ruling empire, whichever it was, and for Judaism to have the characteristics it has, only the Persian empire will do. Ancient Israel before the fifth century BC had religions, but after then it had a religion.
If the biblicist idea can be flattered with the name “hypothesis”, then it is a hypothesis of picking and choosing random nuggets of information here and there to uphold a generally untenable history, and ignoring much more. No historical hypothesis will ever be complete because data have always been lost, but the hypothesis of the Persian foundation of Judaism is remarkably complete and is coherent. Cherry picking the data is not a theory. Obviously, the Jewish scriptures no more came from Mars than they were revealed by an almighty God. They are products of their time and culture, and must reflect it, and the main difficulty is that they were multiply edited after the Persian era, and the history of the editing needs to be worked out properly. There is more chance of doing it than of finding Moses’s original texts!
The chronicles the Deuteronomic Historian claimed he used “were based on information similar to what was available to Mesopotamian chroniclers and to those composing historical types of inscriptions in NW Semitic dialects”, according to Z Zevit. And, when supposed sources are no longer extant and unattested anywhere else, how can anyone be sure they ever existed? Anyone clever enough to invent a tendentious history to intimidate a subject people must be clever enough to write into it that it depended on certain sources that sound convincing. Since these would have been of the type of sources that only leading people could ever have had access to, no one would have been in a position to challenge them—especially as they were fictional!
The Record of the Matters of the Days of the Kings of Israel, and the parallel one of Judah, might have been genuine sources, but they might have been a trick to give a false history a bogus authenticity. The aim of the Persians was to give Yehud a history that it did not have. How then could it cite genuine sources? For Ziony Zevit, this is “passing from skepticism to ‘know-it-all’ cynicism”. Needless to say, it is believers who “know-it-all” because they have God on their side, and He helps them out when they are not sure about biblical matters, and God is necessarily omniscient for believers, despite not being in Genesis. Nor is it cynical to point out the permanent feeble-minded gullibility of biblicists, not that a man who can write 80 pages on proper method before starting a book should need to be taught it. A detailed account of method which is discarded as “know-it-all cynicism” when it no longer suits the investigator is not worth the ink it is printed with. Indeed, it begins to look like yet another cynical biblicist ploy to fool the credulous.
To doubt the sources of a supposed history that is all too often unsupported anywhere else, is anything but cynical. Zevit might not like it, but it is simply being skeptical, as the scientist must be! To claim that there is some limit of skepticism which is unacceptible is no different from special pleading, and that is what biblicists cannot stop doing.
It is plainly enough false method to assume something that you are supposed to be trying to prove. You cannot prove the bible is true by assuming it is. The proper method is to assume it is not—to be skeptical about it. If that is so, why does it suddenly become “know-it-all cynicism” to question dubious sources in the dubious history? To question the history but believe the unknown sources it cites is ridiculous. Is it “know-it-all” to question the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? No, indeed! It is only ever “know-it-all cynicism” to question the bible, and these cynics have been responsible for all progress that has been made in biblical study. The Deuteronomic Historian has no a priori or a posteriori reasons to fabricate sources, Zevit says. What he means is that he will not contemplate any. These pages explain them in detail.
Zevit has an argument akin to the Christian’s claim that eyewitnesses could corroborate the writings of the evangelists. The reader of the Deuteronomic History could turn to the sources to check them! Presumably, he would just go along to the local library and borrow the books or ask the librarian to get them for him. The idea is ridiculous. The person who read the history could only have been one of the priestly conspirators, and whatever anyone else knew of it all was read out to them as exhortations in the temple. It is risable for a scholar to pretend otherwise. Most people were illiterate, and the ones who were not were the rulers and their servants the scribes.
These biblicist “scholars” supposedly steeped in the age can only be dishonest, knowing the reality. They must know that their argument is pitiable, but that believers will think otherwise in their ignorance. Deuteronomic law was not available to all in law libraries, and nor was history. Ezra read out the law, he did not publish it for ignorant and illiterate people to wonder about. We know this because the bible says so. No one in the audience could have had the chance of checking a source. They took it on the authority of the priests that it existed. The Christian excuse is the same. Who in Rome when the gospels were published over 40 years after the events, would have been able to find any of the named people in the gospels a thousand miles away by sea, even if they had existed? It is absurd to imagine it, yet it is a major plank in the Christian argument for the authenticity of the gospels. The argumemt for the Deueteronomic Historian’s sources is no better.
Zevit cannot bring himself to see these biblical works as Persian even though he agrees that the Deuteronomic History was written after 560 BC, the date of the last events it records. Cyrus of Persia became king of Babylon in 539 BC. It does not leave much time for it to be pre-Persian. In the years that the Babylonians ruled Judah, after its rulers had been deported, it seems to have been neglected and impoverished, so it seems impossible that anyone could have written such a work in Judah, dependent as it was on the state archives of the empires of the ANE. Biblicists therefore have to attribute the authors to exiled Jews in Babylon. That seems equally unlikely because the exiled Jews were quite well off where they were, better off than they had been in an arid little backwater, and they can have had no idea or desire of returning. The Deuteronomic Historian had an agenda. He presumes a “return”, otherwise its lessons and polemics were directed at no one. It was no “return”, but it was presented as one. That was typical of deportations.
The author of Isaiah saw the victory of Cyrus over Babylonia as punishment of the Babylonians by Yehouah for abducting the leading Israelites. But Cyrus himself had a different view. He declared to the Babylonians that their own god, Marduk, had punished them for their own sins. This is interesting in several ways. It shows that the worshipper of any god thinks historical events are interventions of their own deity. A crucial distinction of the Jewish God, Yehouah, used to be that He had an historic plan for the Jews. It is now an abandoned idea because archaeologists and historians have found that most kings of the ANE justified their actions as having been planned by the country’s god or gods. It is attested “among the Hittites, Phoenicians, Moabites and in Mesopotamia”, as Zevit says in his own words. So, Cyrus said to the Babylonians exactly what he said to the Jews—their own god would punish them if they resisted the policies of the king of kings. It shows him using religion for his own purposes, just as he did with Judaism. Cyrus equated Marduk with Yehouah, in that the God of Heaven favoured the Persian king, the agent through which He acted on earth. The objective of the historians the Persian king despatched to various places was to get over this message.
For long, despite Cyrus being in the bible as the messiah of the Jews, biblicists never spoke of the Persians as being important. Babylon was important because of the exile, not Persia, except that it allowed the “exiles” to “return”. Babylon was where many of the biblical books were supposed to have been written, and traces of Babylonian culture in the bible, such as the names of the months confirm it. What the biblicists overlook or exclude, is that by the time the Jewish state was colonized by the Persians, the shahs lived in Babylon! The Babylonian tradition seen in the bible is actually Persian. It comes from the Persian occupation of Babylon. Persia was beginning to adapt to the Babylonian culture, as conquerors often did to more advance civilizations. So, the biblicists have the wrong Babylon!
It is only because the Deuteronomic History was written out of Persian state policy that the Deuteronomic Historian could have had access to state archives. But some of the archives archaeologists compare with the Jewish scriptures might have been “scriptures” themselves. From the example of Marduk in Babylon, the Persians used the same or similar techniques of persuasion on other subjects besides the Jews. The Babylonian Weidner Chronicle blamed the fortunes of the Babylonian kings on how closely they had followed the ordinances of the Babylonian god, Marduk, and the practices of the temple at Esagil. No one considers that it might have been written by the same Persian chancellery division as the Jewish scriptures.
Did Darius do the same in Egypt, when the Persians had control of, and spent a lot of time revising, Egyptian law and the texts of the Houses of Life attached to the temples? Some Egyptian papyri are critical of the Pharaohs. The question is when were they written and by whom. Darius was known in Egypt as a law-giver. Biblicists can see as well as anyone else how modern governments manipulate history, but think the ancients did not have the brains for it. The Persians could have been doing the same in Egypt as they did to the Jews. They were aiming to control them through their history and religion. No one has noticed it in Egypt ot Babylon, but then most Egyptian and Babylonian texts were not known until recently, and no one even noticed it in the far more open case of the Jewish scriptures. Many still refuse to consider it!
The Purpose of the Deuteronomists
The Persian kings did not want to restore local kings but hoped to control people by religious authority—the God of Heaven had his reign on earth in the person of the king of kings—the Persian king. The present recension of the Jewish scriptures is even later—from the time of the Maccabees. Indeed the findings at Qumran show that they were still being written in the first century BC.
So, Noth is correct that there is a clear cohesion about the Deuteronomic History but wrong to conclude that it implies a single author. The cohesion is conditioned by the unity of purpose of the books, which cannot be lost provided that each editor had the same central purposes. Editors might have intended to add, or clarify or repair when the original was damaged or lost, but even if they had different minor themes, so long as the central themes remained those of the Deuteronomist, the books would remain coherent. After a few generations, say 100 years, the Deuteronomic History was accepted by all as God’s word, and future editors would have been unwilling to alter it.
The messages conveyed in the books were those of the Deuteronomic Historian. He objected to calves being set up by the Israelites in Dan and Bethel, Zevit explaining that the Hebrew word “egel” refers not to maturity but to size, so the “calves” were really small bulls. What evidence there is from the archaeology suggest that Yehouah was represented as a bull. Or he stood on one! The Deuteronomic Historian also objected to Israel having high places with its own priesthood who were not Levites. He objected to the Samarians having a different calendar for festivals, and to the king officiating as a priest at Bethel. All is explained by the Persian hypothesis, if the Samarians from the outset refused to co-operate with the plan to set up Jerusalem as the cult center. The bible itself is evidence that they did not. Zevit recognizes that the Samarians were not deviating from any Yehouhistic norm because there was none, and these practices seem to have been standard in Canaanite religions. It was the norm that did not exist. What became the norm after the fifth century the Deuteronomic Historian retrojected into the past so that the people could be blamed as perpetually apostatizing—all except a remnant, and these stood for the Persian colonists or “returners” as biblicists call them.
The sins of each king is the reason why the people sin—over and over again, the people are blamed for the deeds of their rulers:
And he did that which was evil in the eyes of Yehouah, and walked in the way of Jeroboam, and in his sin that he caused Israel to sin.1 Kg 15:34; 16:19, 25-26, 31; 22:53; 2 Kg 13:2
And he did that which was evil in the eyes of Jehovah… he clung to the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin.2 Kg 3:2-3; 10:29-31; 13:2, 11; 14:24; 15:9,18,24,28
The northern kingdom, Israel, disappeared from history because its kings, from Jeroboam I on, were sinners. Sin is, of course, not any particular moral wrongdoing but simply disobedience to Yehouah and apostasy. The name “Israel” signifies those who worhipped El. The southern kingdom of Judah was treated slightly more favourably by the redactors because its kings were considered of the line of David and mostly aspired not to sin. Those who did sin eventually brought “the exile” to the people of Judah as a punishment. The name “Judah” signifies those who worshipped Yehouah.
There is no need to believe it is true. It is propaganda, and Zevit admits the Deuteronomic Historian was a propagandist. Yehouah was the judge of the evil done and it was the same in each case, namely what Jeroboam had done. It was all the fault of the kings, but the outcome was that the people sinned, and they were to be punished. The propaganda appeals to the people on behalf of God and their own self-interest. They are to obey the law, that is, be righteous, and avoid any desire to have their own kings. The beneficiary of this is the Persian shah, not any native ruler.
In these myths, Israel is the embodiment of Canaanite apostasy from Yehouah and His laws, laws that were only introduced in the Persian period as Ezra admits. These new and largely alien laws were justified by re-writing Canaanite history. Eventually, even the people of Yehud had been wicked enough to attract the wrath of Yehouah in the sack of Jerusalem and the exile, but the reward of a righteous “remnant” was to be returned by the Persians as colonists. Apparently, Israel had been too wicked to be returned, because they stood for all the people who worshipped the traditional gods of Canaan and not the instrument of Persian foreign policy, Yehouah. Kings pretends that Yehouah struggled throughout history against a wilful and unworthy people and failed, so He had to destroy them! Nearly the same happened to the Jews, but they were not so unworthy and were saved by a remnant, those sent as colonists from Syria to start up the temple state of Yehud. Nevertheless, these myths signified that their position was precarious indeed, so they had better be exemplary people. Attached to this theme of God’s punishment for disobedience is the eulogising of the “prophets.”
Prophets
The supposed act of reading the future was common in the Fertile Crescent in the first millennium BC and even before. Seers advised kings and lesser ones gave oracles to anyone willing to pay, like fortune tellers today. They were astrologers, Chaldaeans, Magi, oracles and prophets. In texts from Phoenicia, Aram (Syria), Ammon, Anatolia, Emar, Mari, Assyria and Babylon, prophets appear of either sex. Only Egypt seems to lack the equivalent position, but they had their schools of life which might have included such a function.
The ancient astrologers of Mesopotamia were a profession of advisors to the king and the country, looking to the skies for omens, studying not just the rising and setting of stars and the motions of the planets, notably the moon, but also meteorological phenomena like clouds and and thunder.
The Dead Sea Scrolls show that, at the turn of the era, some Jews were immensely interested in such matters, and their absence in the scriptures looks odd. The Maccabees fought the northern Greeks of Babylon, and, it seems rejected their astrological magic when they repaired the damage of the sacred books in the war. The Essenes however, remained loyal to the original Persian forms of Judaism, including astrology. They called themselves prophets!
Prophets claimed skills like these and more mundane ones like interpreting dreams and examining entrails. Biblicists find it difficult to call astrologers and augurers prophets, so they call them just oracles, or even “oracular speakers,” so that the faithful will not get them mixed up, but they all had essentially the same job. The scriptures note ecstatic prophets (1 Sam 10:5), and ordinary people could be prophets, if Amos is to be believed.
The scriptural Huldah is a female prophet (2 Kg 22:14), supposedly called “Weasel,” when her name probably signifies “Beautiful Disc.” Her husband is Shallum, looking like a variant of Solomon (Shalim), the evening sun, and therefore perhaps Huldah meant the moon. She had to be visited to elicit her prophecy, making her sound like Python at Delphi. Otherwise female prophets seem to have been expurgated from the scriptures, if others were originally present, by later biblical editors determined to take patriarchy to its limit. Ezekiel, a late work, condemns female prophets (Ezek 13:17-23), so the direction was clear.
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Moses and Exodus
