One unerring mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built on will warrant.

John Locke

Deuteronomy 1

It is certainly more effective propaganda to say that a certain thing must be done because our ancestors used to do it than to invite people to do something new…
G Garbini

Moses and The Pentateuch
Exodus—History or Just-so-Story
Babylonian Links
Deuteronomy
Josiah and Deuteronomy

Abstract

The Deuteronomic historian says Hezekiah centralized religion in Jerusalem, so how did Solomon? Writing about the time of Nehemiah and before Ezra, in about 450 BC, Herodotus knew no great temple of the Jews in Palestine! He knew no Jews in Palestine! The Jerusalem temple was not set up until the late fifth century. The author of Deuteronomy did not know where the new religion would be centralized. The Persians, after initial failures with several shrines, centralized worship of Yehouah in Jerusalem. The decision was given the authority of Moses who had been speaking as God in Deuteronomy before he was reclassified as a prophet. He was God—Ahuramazda! Deuteronomy says nothing about a priesthood of Aaron or Zadok. Its priests are “all the tribe of Levi”. Herodotus calls the Magi a Persian “tribe”. A “tribe” in this usage is a caste.

Moses and The Pentateuch

Distinguished scholars have been obliged to recognize that Deuteronomy is neither as old as it pretends to be nor written by Moses, but since getting Christian scholars to accept any alternatives to their preferred supernatural beliefs is like getting them to extract their own teeth, they will attenuate all such truths as best they can. While conceding that Moses did not write the Pentateuch, Christians feel it necessary to say “but fragments are from his time or even earlier”. Perhaps so, but these early elements show no signs of being of Israelite or even Egyptian provenance. They are Mesopotamian!

If the early history of Israel was written by a man from Egypt, or even simply relates events that had their origins in Egypt, as Moses and the Israelites were supposed to have had, then it is hard to see why their main mythological traditions are from another civilization. It is even harder to understand in view of the constant theme in the Israelite tradition of lack of respect or interest in their own traditions shown by most of the Israelite and Jewish people throughout history. “Oral transmission”, is the permanent cry to explain difficulties of continuity. The slaves of the Egyptians told each other the stories of Abraham for hundreds of years in slavery, but as soon as they left Egypt with Moses they lost interest in their own traditions and began to worship Egyptian bulls in only a few years. Such excuses are only believed by believers, because they do not hold the water of reason. The story of Moses is fraudulent, and excuses are invariably needed by Jewish and Christian believers in these tall tales.

Exodus—History or Just-so-Story

Often it is hard to understand what believers actually do believe. H H Rowley, a well known scholar of a few years ago, tells us it is unlikely that the Israelite tribes entered the land as a united group. They had spent 400 years in slavery in Egypt and emerged under the leadership of one man, Moses, who remained their leader for forty years of wandering. Yet they finished up separated into a diversity of different tribes. What made them split up into tribes in only a few decades despite their charismatic leader? Since there were supposedly around two million people, they might have needed leaders below the level of Moses, but it is a poor reflexion on Moses that these subordinates had allowed the tribes to become disunited. Not all of the tribes were even enslaved in Egypt, including the tribe of Judah, according to some scholars who see Judah joining the federation through the success of David!

Rowley assures us that the tribes must have had laws before Moses. Yet how do slaves have laws? Slaves are deprived of all the rights of citizenship. How can they have laws? Some of the slave owning countries of antiquity had laws concerning slaves, but they were not the slaves’ laws. In the myth, Moses was a senior Egyptian administrator, so knew something about law, but the average Israelite slave could not have. So, ignorant former slaves were given laws by an Egyptian administrator, accepted them in unity, yet still entered Canaan as different tribes and at different times—as nomads! A mass of ex-slaves wandering around aimlessly for a few decades do not just become nomads!

To believe these Christian ploys is to disbelieve the myth of Moses, but it becomes somewhat more believable, historically, that Palestine was infiltrated by a variety of different people over a long time. Christians will see no discrepancy in the two versions, such is the wonder of faith. Christian commentators and scholars will propagate such incompatible views, though they know better, because their sheepish readers are desperate to accept anything to bolster their faith. The truth is that no Israelite tribes were enslaved in Egypt, and anything was possible in the story of Moses and the Exodus, because it was only a story—not a history!

Babylonian Links

And what of the plain enough Babylonian links that are undoubtedly present in Genesis? Rowley dismissed them as unimportant because the Jewish scriptures are “permeated with a religious quality which is quite different”. He thinks they are quite different because he has to believe somehow that God revealed these things to Jews first, then to Christians, even though some of the stories are traceable to ancient Akkadian mythology. In God’s revelation of them they were transformed and so were different! A historian would want to know what is different and why it is, but a believer does not ask such questions. They know the answer—it is faith—and no amount of scientific evidence will persuade them otherwise.

For more enquiring Christians, there is now too much evidence against the historical truth of most of the scriptures, so they are now retreating to the blatant acceptance of it as mythology, though they admit this only when pressed by skeptics and not to their flocks—it is “religious literature” not “literal truth!”

Still, what are the ancient fragments, they hang on to to keep the bible ancient? The Song of Deborah is “probably” contemporary, the Balaam oracles in Numbers “may” be even older, though some scholars disagree and do not consider them ancient! The Song of Lamech and the blessings of Rebekah and Jacob “may well” be of great antiquity. The quizical marks simply highlight the degree of scholarship involved in biblical scholarship. Students who turn newly to this “scholarship” find “probablies”, “mays” and “mights” everywhere—far more than anything positive. These scholars want to use the scriptures as historical proof of their belief that they demonstrate God’s plan for human salvation, but they then find little historical in them. So, they use these weaselly qualifiers to fool unwary readers into thinking that scholarship upholds their irrational beliefs by verifying the truth of the biblical texts. Instead of the scriptures being a book of history, for Christians it is a book of “probablies”. The truth is that it is a book of “improbabilities”.

Christian teachers will blandly assure us that the laws in the Pentateuch have their parallels in Babylonia and Northern Mesopotamia, and the sheep are duly satisfied, but others do a double-take and remind them that these slaves were escaping from Egypt not Mesopotamia. How did slaves, or tribes as they became in no time at all, get to know the laws of Hamurabi. Well, of course, they remembered them from the time of Abraham who would have known them, and they remembered them for several hundred years even though they were illiterate brick-makers! Then again, perhaps God just handed them down on tablets of stone, but based on the models he had tried out in Babylonia where he had pretended to be a Pagan god, just to see if the laws he was working out, would work in practice. Apparently they were all right, so he handed down a version of them to His pal, and outstretched right hand, Moses. The historical truths of the bible have to be justified somehow!

The laws had a great deal in common with Babylonian laws because they came from Babylonia, but at a time much later than Moses is supposed to have lived—when Babylonian and Assyrian, then Persian, people conquered the hill country of Palestine. The laws of Moses are much later laws imposed on the Israelites from outside but projected into the past to allow the local people to believe they were their own! The way the laws are set forth is said to be peculiarly Israelite, but it is essentially because the laws are commands rather than examples. Someone must be doing the commanding. “God”, is the reply, but no god has yet been able to enforce his commands. The commands of gods are enforced by humans—here the suzerain to whom the Israelites were vassals—the Assyrians initially, accounting for the myths of Abraham and perhaps the earliest forms of covenant, but then the Persians. Other people about that time had covenants with their gods, it seems. N Lohfink has published an Assyrian one, and Ziony Zevit a Phœnician one.

Deuteronomy

E T Mullen (Ethnic Myths and Pentateuchal Foundations, 1997) showed that Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic history were composed in the Persian period, and the preceding books were composed to give Deuteronomy a context. Ronald Clements, a Cambridge Old Testament scholar and Baptist minister, says Deuteronomy is “the textbook of a programme of religious education” which “was theological comment and interpretation as means for renewing and reforming faith” (God’s Chosen People, 1968). It notes the variety of religious practices current in the land when it was introduced, causing social unrest and moral decline. A central aim of it was to give the people a clearer understanding of God, and the meaning and purpose of religion. Vitally, the novel teaching of Deuteronomy was directed at the whole nation. Deuteronomy was meant to be heard by everyone! It was meant to be read out, and was meant to be spoken about continually from childhood onwards. G von Rad notes that “Deuteronomy is motivated by the desire to instruct…” calling it “preached law”. It calls itself, “Torah ” (Dt 4:44; 17:19f), explained (Dt 4:45) as “testimonies, statutes and ordinances”. It was propaganda meant to indoctrinate. Clements tells us it was “directed at moving the minds and wills of men”, and its vehicle was the sermon. It is the very origin of the sermon!

Deuteronomy is presented as a long speech uttered by Moses with some additional material enclosing it. In the speech, Moses refers to the making of a “copy” of “this law” for the use of the king (Dt 17:18), an expression rendered in the Greek of the Septuagint as “deuteronomy”. A simpler translation is “second law”, a rendering that the Hebrew will also bear!

In Deuteronomy, the Deuteronomic code itself is introduced by:

For you are to cross over the Jordan to go in to possess the land which Yehouah your God is giving to you, and you shall possess it and live in it. And take heed to do all the statutes and the judgments which I am giving before you today. These are the statutes and the ordinances which you shall take heed to do in the land which Yehouah the God of your fathers has given to you, to possess it, all the days that you live on the earth…
Deuteronomy 11:31-12:1

The formula is emphasized by repetition, and is repeated again at Deuteronomy 12:10, and at Deuteronomy 18:9. This is supposed to have been addressed to Israelites in deepest antiquity, but it is more suited to an address to the colonists brought in by the Persians by Ezra 800 years later, as the bible itself explains. How can anyone, even a biblicist, be sure that the speech was not Ezra’s later one serving for the mythical earlier one? Anyone coming into Palestine from Egypt ought not to have to cross the Jordan, it having to be explained by an absurd detour from Egypt to the east across Sinai, a risky path to take when the Sinai was occupied by the Egyptian army and border guards, then north past the Dead Sea. On the other hand, it is natural for people coming from the east to have to cross the Jordan, and even for people coming from the north east by Damascus. The Deuteronomic Code—the law!—ends at Deuteronomy 27:10 and the narrative that it has been wrapped in resumes. Plainly the code preceded the narrative composition, which was invented as a myth to explain the code as having been founded ridiculously early in history. The crossing and land formulae are repeated in Numbers 33:51-52; 34:2; 35:10, all earlier in the biblical chronology, but composed later in fact.

Deuteronomy is the fifth book of the Pentateuch, the Jewish Torah, supposedly written by Moses himself, yet this ends with Moses’s death on Mount Nebo, and Moses refers to himself continuously in the third person rather than the first, as he does elsewhere, showing that he is written as a character in a story by an anonymous author. Furthermore, the first verse of the book shows that the account was written in Canaan itself, and not on the east bank which is as far as Moses got to before he died, and the concluding verses add that the account was written a long time after Moses had died—long enough to make the comment that no one since had equalled him meaningful. So, the account was written by people already settled in Palestine not by Moses himself as Jews and Christians persist in believing contrary to the evidence, and at a much later date.

Curiously, the speeches of Moses are sometimes addressed to a singular audience and sometimes to a plural one. It suggests that two texts have been clumsily merged or that a change from the singular to the plural, since the singular version is thought to be the oldest, has been clumsily effected. It seems that the Persians initially issued a code of law to the person who had to administer them—presumably the Chief Priest—so the instructions were singular. The Chief Priest will have used this to read out the law to the people on ceremonial occasions, thus addressing the people plurally while sometimes reading from his singular text, and an amanuensis captured it as it was read.

Martin Noth, in 1943, placed the author of Deuteronomy and the succeeding history books in the mid-500s BC. He thought it was a man left behind when the rest of his class were exiled by the Babylonians. Not all the population were exiled but only a small proportion—but they were the educated classes, the intellectuals and the artisans, and so those left behind were only poor peasants and farmers. It seems unlikely that anyone left behind would have been able to write such a book or had reason to—the country was occupied by a foreign army. Nor could he have had access to the records he needed.

The date of Deuteronomy has to be brought forward another hundred years or so to the fifth century BC. The Persian administrators wrote the book to back up the deportees being taken from Babylonia to Palestine, in the Persian province of Abarnahara. Accepting that Noth and Rupert Smend had good reason for accepting the internal evidence that the place of composition was Palestine, then it must have been written in the Persian period because it was the only time after the Babylonian conquest when authors would have had the education and resources to write it and its accompanying history. Writing about the same time as Noth, I Engnell put its composition in the Persian period.

To imagine that Moses in the thirteenth century BC was legislating for accurate weights and measures among ex-slaves and shepherds is so absurd as to be laughable. Deuteronomy 25:13-16, where this is done, is proof of the Persian origins of these laws, these being measures taken by Darius to stabilize his vast empire and to stimulate trade. Persian kings were keen to promote private enterprise rather than having all important transactions and merchanting done by the state.

Akkadian “shekalu” meant to “weigh”, and thence came to mean to “pay”. What was weighed out for payment became known as a “shekel”. Darius provided for fair payment to hired hands, and Persians introduced coinage, from the Lydians who were among the earliest of Cyrus’s conquests, but it did not prove as popular in the east—where people preferred to be payed in produce like grain—as it did in Greece and Anatolia, so the Persians also legislated for fair exchange by regulating and standardising weights and measures. With these and coinage, everyone could be confident they were being payed properly.

After grain, silver was the customary valuable weighed out for payment, but no one had the idea of minting the irregular shaped weights used until the Lydians did it. It left opportunities for crooks to cut or file off bits of the precious metal, leaving a short weight. A minted weight could not be ill-treated or filed without it looking obvious. The Persians and Greeks took up the idea from their neighbour, the Lydians, and Darius the Great introduced the Persian Daric. Every scholar must know that to place such legislation 800 years earlier is wrong, and its presence here points to the true date of composition in the fifth century BC.

Though standardised measures were not enforced until the Persians did, biblicists like to find standard measures in Israel to agree with the traditional Moses. Not a single measuring rod has been found, and only three volume measures have been.

Our data are very incomplete.
B S J Isserlin, The Israelites

The jars are unlikely to have been standard measures at all, but just jars with a measure marked on them, the “bath”, indicated by “b” or “bt”. One is a royal bath, as if it were different. More common are weights in the form of stones or less often metal. The standard unit is the shekel, and various sub units are also found, including the pym. The value of the weight is uniformly written in Egyptian hieratic. No one seems to have tried to check these weights to see to what extent they were standardised.

Josiah and Deuteronomy

Scholars accept that the core of Deuteronomy is the list of laws in Deuteronomy 12-26. The bible has, within its Deuteronomic History (2 Kg 22:3f), a description of the discovery of an unknown scroll of the law in the Jerusalem temple that motivated Josiah, the reforming king, to reform the cult of Judah. The book was found by Hilkiah, the High Priest, in the reign of Josia (c 640-609 BC)h, when the temple was being renovated. Christians since the time of Jerome have understood that this book was Deuteronomy. The first scholar to consider Deuteronomy, De Wette, branded it a forgery, written shortly before it was “found” and not by Moses. Few people disagree.

The identification of Deuteronomy with the book of law found in the reign of Josiah is central to the dating of the biblical books. It is considered a known date in the assembly of the Jewish scriptures. Yet, the association of Deuteronomy with the book of law (2 Kgs 22-23) assumes that 2 Kings is true history. Many biblicists are outraged that this idea should be challenged. Thus, Ziony Zevit calls it “know-it-all cynicism” not to believe the Deuteronomic Historian, the scholar’s name for the author of 1 and 2 Kings. It amounts to the older and more honest, if mistaken, view that the bible is God’s Word and must be true. No one argues that any more, except fundamentalists, something that few scholars are happy to be, so now it is a matter of name-calling churlishness on the part of biblicists towards those who want a more objective, scientific and, yes, honest, approach to appraising the bible.

Since the story about the discovery of the book (2 Kg 22-23) was written by the same school as the authors of Deuteronomy, it is doubtless part of their scheme of deception. Josiah is supposed to have initiated religious reforms on the basis of the book, though some scholars think that this too is false. The reformations mentioned in 2 Kings 23 as undertaken by Josiah as a result of finding the book are the reformations mentioned in Deuteronomy, and some of them occur nowhere else. Plainly the history was meant to accompany the book.

The nature of the “reforms” disprove their claim to be reforms. They utterly suppressed all freedom of religion under pain of death:

Canaanite altars had to be put away, so that the people would be obliged to turn to the new universal god (Dt 4:16-18,23;7:5,25;12:3).
High places where the former gods were worshipped had to be destroyed (Dt 12:2).
Abominations to the new god must cease (Dt 12:29-31;18:9).
Sorcery must cease and instead only the new god’s prophets obeyed (Dt 18:10-22).
Religious prostitution and dog priests were banned (Dt 23:17).
Heavenly objects, nor any of the host of heaven may be worshipped (Dt 4:19;17:2-7).
The god replacing the Canaanite pantheon is a god of heaven like Ahuramazda (Dt 10:14,17) who has given the Land to the people (Dt 4:38,40; 6:18f,23).

The specific reference to kingship, in Deuteronomy (Dt 17:18-20), tells us that the king had to be approved by God as an administrator of the law which he had to study diligently all his days, but otherwise was an ordinary man.

Josiah allegedly centralized the cult on the temple of Jerusalem, but as Clements observes, “Deuteronomy grew up on the basis of traditions which did not originate from Jerusalem, at least not from its priesthood.” The distinct traditions of the Jerusalem priesthood are clear in the Holiness Code of Leviticus, the restoration programme of Hezekiah, and the priestly documents in general. C F Burney, supported by A C Walsh and G von Rad, associated Deuteronomy with cult centers to the north of Jerusalem, at Shechem and Bethel, but Clements remained more non-commital:

Josiah’s reforms witnessed the adoption and enforcement in Jerusalem of traditions which derived from outside…

These are not internal reforms of a corrupted religion, but the imposition of a completely new one, and historically that happens through conquest rather than internally. Josiah’s reforms are dated to 621 BC, a mere 25 years before Judah was initially wasted by the Babylonians, and only 35 years before it was finally destroyed by them.

Scriptural scholars, like R H Pfeiffer and G von Rad, consider that Deuteronomy was the written document that began the collection and compilation of the Jewish scriptural canon. Beginning with this as the core of the Jewish scriptures, the other books were added to form the complete corpus. This is quite a different story from the one presented in the bible itself. The words of 2 Kings 23:2 rendered as Book of the Covenant may be better translated as the “covenant document”. The ancient Hittite and Assyrian treaty documents were written as covenants between the suzerain and the vassel. They closely follow the form of the covenants mentioned in the Jewish scriptures. G E Mendenhall noticed this and there is now no argument about it, although some biblicists futilely still try to deny it. If it is denied, believers have to ask why God should have chosen to represent His own covenant with His Chosen people as a covenant on the lines of ancient vassalage treaties. If it is accepted that it is indeed a vassalage treaty, and the Jews were the vassals, then who could the suserain have been? It could only have been Persia.

The central, older part of Deuteronomy betrays no knowledge of any other biblical covenants, except a brief identification with the Sinai covenant (Ex 19-34), though the author of Deuteronomy mysteriously calls Sinai Horeb. The covenant of Deuteronomy is made directly with the people addressed and not with their fathers (Dt 5:1-2). It is a new covenant, not a renewed one, but reference is repatedly made in the introductory chapters and the concluding ones, though only a few times between, to the covenant made with the three patriarchs, described as “your fathers”. The speaker, Moses, has the authority of God, and will have been God originally—Ahuramazda (Lord Mosha)! He refers to promises made to earlier colonists, represented by the patriarchs, men who were sent to the colony only a generation or two before the main settlement. The later false history made Abraham anachronistically travel from Ur of the Chaldees before it ever existed, a millennium before. Abraham is a symbolic “returner” from “exile”, given a promise of land by the Persian shah. The ill discipline of these earlier colonists led to the sterner rule imposed by Ezra on a new band of settlers. Deuteronomy is pervaded with a sense of urgency.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.