Successful embryological development is the first stage of natural selection.

Who Lies Sleeping?

Deuteronomy 2

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

Returners as Deported Colonists
Prophets
Eretz—Land and Earth
Centralized Sanctuary

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.

Returners as Deported Colonists

The Deuteronomists wrote the books immediately following Deuteronomy in our bibles up until 2 Kings, so they included most of the history of Israel until the conquests. Among the aims of the Deuteronomic History is to give the impression that the laws in Deuteronomy had already been introduced in the seventh century, a few decades before Judah was conquered by Nebuchadrezzer. In fact, these laws were imposed by Persian deportees being transported into Palestine to further Persian foreign policy. So, the time was at least 100 years after the time presumed in 2 Kings, perhaps when Zerubabel and Joshua returned, or when a later phase of deportees arrived a few decades later. Israel is always described a “few” or a “small nation”, yet millions are supposed to have left Egypt just a few decades before. The “few” were the deportees being transported into Abarnahara.

No one either in the Land or in among the deportees could dispute the facts. The deportees were presented as “returners” who somehow “remembered” what their great grandparents knew, indeed who preserved an Israelite tradition though they were transported elsewhere and undoubtedly given equally onerous duties by the Babylonians. The Babylonians would not have allowed them any records, and would have destroyed any that they tried to take with them as subversive. The Persians equally would not have allowed any records, even supposing there were any, to be taken back to Israel. And what could these records have been? In Mesopotamia, they were written in cuneiform on clay tablets. Inasmuch as any permanent records were taken into Israel by the deportees, they were on tables (tablets) of stone (Dt 4:13; Ex 32:15)!

The “returners” were given their “records” by the Persian administrators to suit Persian policy. Jewish “history” became whatever their conquerors wanted it to be, to suit their pacification policies. These were the introduction of a new universal religion and laws acceptable to the new god and his earthly agent, the Persian king. Deuteronomy 21:23 is purely Persian in forbidding a crucified man from being allowed to defile the sacred land. The “returning” deportees could claim that king Josiah had already introduced these laws before the Babylonian conquest, and the Deuteronomic Historians backed up this claim with the “authentic” records they brought back with them. The people would have had to have accepted what they said. They could not read!

The chief incentive for the colonists was the promise of land forever (Dt 1:8;21,25; 2:12,19,29; 3:20; 4:1,14,26,40; 5:16,31,33; 6:1,3,10,23; 7:1,13,19; 8:1; 9:23; 10:11; 11:8,9,11,21,29,31; 12:1,10; 15:4; 16:20; 17:14; 18:9; 19:8,14; 21:1,23; 23:20; 24;4; 25:15,19; 26:1,3,15; 27:2,3; 28:8,11,21,63; 30:5,16,18,20; 31:7,13,20,21,23; 32:47,49; 34:4). Any reader has to admit that this emphasis on the prize looks like overegging the pudding, but shows how important the incentice was! Nor is the assurances of land given to a people who are resuming their place in a land which is rightly theirs, who know the land and long to be back on it. It tells them how good the land is because they knew nothing about it (Dt 8:7-10). They are being given a land which rightly belongs to the Canaanites. The true situation is stated as clear as daylight in Deuteronomy 12:1-7, where the people being addressed were to dispossess the the native inhabitants of their land. Their native religions were to be destroyed.

Deuteronomy lays down that God is one, Yehouah is the one, the people are his holy people who must worship Him ultimately at one place according to one law. The people were being offered a new faith in a new country. Why does it say in Exodus 6:7, “I will adopt you as my people, and I will become your God”? They were supposed to have been the people of God from the time of Abraham. It is a sentence appropriate to the colonization of Yehud by the Persians and will have been originally in Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy 8:19-20 has threats for those turning to the idolatry of the native Canaanites or reverting to their own. They are not receiving the land because they deserve it, but because the Canaanites did not (Dt 9:4-5)! Their good fortune in receiving the gift of the land is entirely due to the grace of God (Dt 8:17-18).

All of this posed a problem when the bible was being recast by the later editors convinced the return really had to be a “return” from “exile” into familiar territory they had never forgotten. The God-like figure of Moses also had to be explained. And so the myth of the Exodus from Egypt was invented around 300 BC, initially. It is cast back in history to the thirteenth century BC, but historians now know that no such conquest happened then. The true circumstances are more recent, the enforced deportation of people from Mesopotamia to Canaan (Abarnahara—Beyond the River), misnamed “The Return from Exile”, because the deportees were falsely told they had previously been deported out of this land. Deuteronomy 7:8 refers to God redeeming the people “from the House of Bondage, from the hand of Pharaoh, king of Egypt” but with no mention of an Exodus. So Egypt had been cast as the villain, but the myth of the Exodus was still to be written.

In Deuteronomy 26:3, when the gifts of the first fruits of the land were brought as payment to God for the use of the land, the offerer has to say to the officiating priest:

I declare this day to Yehouah Elohim that I have come into the land which Yehouah swore to our fathers to give us.

It shows that the people making the offerings were not the natives of the temple state of Yehud—the priests and functionaries—the nation of priests. The temple state acted as the focal point for tax collection. It collected the taxes of all of the people of Abarnahara, not simply the local Jews. The giver then had to say a creed beginning:

A wandering Aramæan was my father—

to remind him of his ancestor’s previous unsettled state, and their oppression by the Egyptians. This short creed, combined with others (compare, for example, the creed of Deuteronomy 6:21-25) and expanded by degrees, was the basis of the Exodus myth, composed later.

What was the purpose of the law? The answer given by Deuteronomy is “that it may go well with you” (Dt 4:40; 5:16,33; 6:3,18; 12:25,28). The implication is that disobedience of the law meant things would not go well! In what sense? Again, Deuteronomy is plain enough that obedience of the law meant “that you may live, and that good may be to you, and you may prolong your days in the land which you will possess” (Dt 5:33, etc). So, failure to obey the law might mean various misfortunes or punishments, a curtailment of life, or even mass deportation. Since the reward for righteousness is the land, the punishment for disobedience, dissent and rebellion was to lose it (Dt 4:25-26; 8:19-20; 28:21,24,33,36,42,51,64). A breach of the covenant—the suzerain-vassalage treaty—is that the vassals are expelled from the land. They are deported to a less favourable situation, to start again.

Deuteronomy is followed by the historical books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, which justify the principles of Deuteronomy by highlighting the effects of apostasy throughout the history of the Israelites. Deuteronomy 13 explains what must be done when people tempt the Hebrews into apostasy. False prophesy—the category into which Jesus falls—the punishment of stoning so that the avengers will not be polluted by contact with the sinner, and the “ban” or total destruction of apostate cities are mentioned. The “ban” is an older law—or rather a vow for vengeance or justice—being used against the native Canaanites here.

More warnings of destruction for disobedience appear in Deuteronomy 7:10-11, and the idols and shrines of the native Canaanites were also ordered to be utterly destroyed. The purpose was plainly not humanitarian as modern commentators try to pretend, but to impose the foreign religion and laws of the Persians in pursuit of their forign policy. It is impossible for anyone rational to read Deuteronomy without seeing coercion and propaganda in every word.

In Deuteronomy 10:12-22, the god being imposed to replace the pantheon of the Canaanites was a god of heaven, like Ahuramazda. In Deuteronomy 10:17, appear the expressions “god of gods”, and “Lord of lords”, reminescent of the Persian title for their emperor—king of kings. The people were obliged to love and obey the new god when he issued his commandments and laws. Deuteronomy 4:19 is the Jewish Shema, the confession of faith in one god. It was necessary to assert it because the deportees are formerly believed in more than one, and the Canaanites whom they were being sent to rule were also polytheistic. Deuteronomy frequently speaks of “your god”. Who is saying “your” as if the speaker were not included? Moses? Moses says “our God”. It is always assumed to be an impersonal way of saying “I”, when God is speaking but it strongly suggests that someone is imposing a god. Someone is ordering someone else to obey “their” god. Fortunately for the Jewish and Christian leeches who live off widows’ mites, the scriptural story is extremely mixed up. The various stages of “returning”, each with an improved approach to their imposed task, gave us several layers of false tradition possibly added to a previous layer from Assyrian times. Later, changes were made under Greek influence and then by the Maccabees.

The Royalty law of Deuteronomy (Dt 17:14-17) has been altered or inserted by a later redacter because the shah would not have allowed Yehud an independent king, and nor would the later rulers, the Ptolemies and the Seleucids. The bible was thoroughly edited when the Hasmoneans won the civil war, allowing Judah to have a native king. It was specifically intended to count out the Greek kings of the previous 150 years in favour of a Jewish king, preceding the idea of a Davidic covenant. The author of Deuteronomy seems to know nothing about the covenant with David, or ignores it. The so-called divine election, whereby God chose the Jews before all other nations on earth to be His holy people, is entirely dependent on the Horeb covenant and the law which Deuteronomy consituted. The original work cannot have made indirect references to Solomon, and his excesses, and, if that is what they are, the words must have been added when the myth of the united monarchy was invented by the Hasmoneans to give their own rule a historical legitimacy.

The ascription of the same words to different prophets is one of the clues that the claim in 2 Maccabees that Nehemiah’s library—the official scriptures—were destroyed in the Maccabæan War and had to be put together from the remnants with a good deal of imagination is true. This was effectively a major redaction in the middle of the second century BC and accounts for whole chunks of a book allegedly written over a period of two millennia being so uniform. Most of it was written only a century before the birth of Christ!

Scholars recognize a uniformity of style and phraseology across several books from which they deduce the hand of one editor or a school with a house view and style. The original scriptures were damaged in the Maccabaean wars and the Maccabaean scribes re-wrote them, to reflect, glorify and justify the actions of the Hasmonaeans. They will have used the older stories of the Deuteronomists but re-written them into a continuous narrative. Doublets and triplets show that the older sources were not uniform and the Deuteronomistic school used all the fragments they had rather than omit any. The sources of the monarchic history in 1 and 2 Kings must have been the Assyrian and Babylonian archives. The Deuteronomists actually name some of their sources (The Book of the Acts of Solomon, 1 Kings 11:41, The Book of the Annals of the Kings of Israel, 1 Kings 14:19, and The Book of the Annals of the Kings of Judah, 1 Kings 14:29). The Annals of the Kings might have been the original books written from the Assyrian archives by the Persian administrators, lost in the war. David and Solomon, conceivably based on some earlier myths, were converted into an allegorical history of the Maccabees.

Prophets

Deuteronomy, though fairly uniform, has not been written by a single author. Deuteronomy is the only scriptural law code to mention the prophets. No prophet could be allowed to prophesy against Yehouah, and those who did were false prophets and had to die (Dt 13:1-5). Prophets were therefore contemporaries of those who wrote out this law.

Christians will accept that Deuteronomy reflects the work of the prophets who warned about apostasy in the eighth and seventh centuries—according to the scriptures—and was supposedly written in the sixth century. Linguistic and conceptual details are common with the so-called eighth century prophets, and so Deuteronomy is dated from them, but the only evidence of these prophets in the eighth century is the bible! Once the scriptures are ignored, the cause and effect relationship between the prophets and Deuteronomy has no basis. There is a little circularity here, but no Christian commentator cares to point it out. If Deuteronomy and the books in the scriptures attributed to some prophets have certain stylistic points in common, then there is justification for saying they were written in the same period or by the same school, but if any of this could be pseudepigraphy, then the date cannot be deduced internally, as these “scholars” like to do. Perhaps Deuteronomy preceded the writings of prophets, or perhaps they were written at the same time, or almost so.

This law recognizes that “prophets” were propagandists arguing for one or another party active in the politics of the country. Prophets obviously had been able to take a position opposed to the imposed God and His supposed law, but the law put an end to such liberalism. Those opposed to the new religion and regime were not to be tolerated and would be punished by death! Elsewhere (Dt 18:20-22), prophets could be false even when they were in favour of God and His law, and still suffered the fate of death. The criterion was whether the prophecy was fulfilled or not. The Persians were legislating against prophets, seemingly supporting the regime and religion, but promising impossible things to the people and thus creating dissent. This could have been as intolerable as outright opposition, and so was neatly nipped in the bud with this law. Whatever the Persian king was willing to allow happened, and all other promises were false, with deadly consequences for the prophet.

As propagandists, the prophets, could not accept any authority except their own, and so claimed they were speaking directly from God. No priests or princes could gainsay them. Deuteronomy claims the same authority, and many “scholars” have thought it was the work of prophets or expressed the view of a prophetic school. In fact, both the prophets and Deuteronomy expressed the views of the Persian shahs, who wanted to control their subjects by getting them to accept the law as being directly from God. The prophets spread a similar message of what God wanted in a peripatetic revivalist way. The authors of Deuteronomy did not pretend to be prophets as such, but were nevertheless writing the law with God’s authority. They could only have been the servants of the shah. The shah was the only man able to claim the authority of God, and that is plain in the Jewish scriptures where Cyrus is the messiah, and the prophets commonly have names relating to salvation. Covenants were agreed between rulers under the authority of their gods. That people in the 21st century still think old propaganda is the work of God is an indictment of religious liars, and an exposure of many people’s lack of discernment.

At Deuteronomy 18:15, Moses becomes a prophet, though previously his had been the voice of God speaking. Moses was downgraded from being God to being God’s prophet, and, in the Persian fashion of Zoroaster, a prophet like him would return. So, Deuteronomy and the prophets were giving the same message, but the books of the words of the prophets that appeared later in the scriptural canon were written as pseudepigraphs, making their message seem much older than its true age, and coming from a different, though comparable situation, where the Persians became their predecessors, the Assyrians. Deuteronomy came with the authority of the Persian minister of religion—apparently Ezra—and so was an official document of the ministry, a law imposed on the colonists, and for them to impose on the native people. The colonists were to be a nation of priests, so Deuteronomy appears as a Levitical book. It is depicted as the law given by Moses (Ahuramazda/Torahmazda) on the plains of Moab to the colonists about to enter the land.

The books of the prophets are pseudepigraphs, a type of forgery. If the purpose of the writings was to set up a false history, then all of it was written much later than it purports to have been, having been compiled and written after 538 BC in the Persian period, centuries after the putative prophets. Once the scriptures are seen as Persian propaganda, nothing prevents the core of them having been produced in the fifth century BC to enforce Persian rule over an important buffer state. Most of the Jewish scriptures are forged.

Eretz—Land and Earth

Deuteronomy 1:7 describes the land the colonists were being given. It was the Persian and former Assyrian province of Abarnahara which yielded the word “Hebrews” for the people who lived there. In Deuteronomy 32:49, “Abarim” means “Hebrews”. Commentators, accepting the biblical sequence as true history, tell us that the Israelites were being given the land which later became the empire of David and Solomon. In fact, this mythical empire appeared in the human imagination later on and its fictitious dimensions based on this passage. The Euphrates is the north eastern boundary, whence the name of the land for the Assyrians and the Persians as “Beyond the River”, and the name of the people therein as the “Beyonders!”

The court history of David of 2 Samuel and 1 Kings is always presented as having been written by someone close to the events, as if the events ever happened. Many modern historians cannot accept that such a notable empire, though short-lived, could pass by without leaving any external impression. The “events” that the writer of the court history of David were so close to seem never to have happened, certainly in the way and on the scale they were depicted as happening. A Christian scholar can write a statement like “we know that court records were kept during the monarchy”, giving the impression that there is some additional evidence, when the statement is a deduction from the biblical mythology of David itself. It is more circular reasoning. We know nothing about David and his monarchy except what the Jewish scriptures tell us. Christians typically invite us to believe the scriptures because of the scriptures! Christian scholars are clever men who would be scientists or philosophers if they had chosen a useful career, so they tell us these things knowing it is wrong or falsely reasoned. They aim to deceive.

The theses of the Deteronomistic historian are that kings should be faithful to god’s commandments and they never are, and kings should see to it that the pure cult is maintained centralized in Jerusalem, and they never do. The Persians could never have contemplated the idea of a king in its satrapies, and plainly this history began its life intended to deter the people from any ideas they might have that local kings would be any good. Margaret Gelinas sums it up as:

All the kings of Israel except Shallum, for whom there is no evaluation given, and Hoshea, the last king of Israel are condemned by the Deuteronomist with a standard formula: “He walked in the way of Jeroboam and in his sin which he made Israel to sin”.

Later writers have diluted the message slightly but obviously felt unable to completely change what had become to be well known as a sentiment and a history, so the best they could do was to make some kings seem better, particularly the great kings invented as having started both states. Even though these were shown as noble kings, doubtless by the Maccabees, they had to be shown as being flawed, since otherwise the whole of the familiar history of God’s struggles against good and bad kings would have been retrograde. The Judaean kings were not so fully condemned, although many were shown as wicked. A few were shown to have transcended the fate of kings, but this might have been ameliorative writing in Judah, none being possible in Samaria.

Centralized Sanctuary

Deuteronomy 12 and Leviticus 17 initially presumed many cult centers not just the one in Jerusalem. Since most of Leviticus does not, Chapter 17 looks like an ancient fossil of the original Deuteronomic law taken out of context to be the basis of the priestly legal expansion which became Leviticus, adding to their power and wealth. Deuteronomy 12-28 has not been left untouched even in its original place, far from it, but it still yells out that it was the original law of Moses. K L Sparks (1998), having analysed Mosaic laws in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, concluded that Deuteronomy was earlier than Leviticus.

The Ark of the Covenant was built to hold the tablets of the law, this very law itself, and, if this was a mobile ark to transfer the holy words from sanctuary to sanctuary in the decades before worship was centralized at Jerusalem, it implies the draft borne about was a draft which did not specify the central place, whence the repeated circumlocution, “the place which Yehouah Elohim will chose” (Dt 12:5,11,14,18,21,26; 14:25; 15:20; 16:7,11,15,16; 17:8; 18:6; 26:2), showing that no place had been selected, and thus that the foundation of the temple in Jerusalem by David and Solomon is mythical.

In the legislation in Deuteronomy, on the place where God’s name shall dwell, the word translated as “dwelling” (skn) is actually used in Assyrian meaning “to be” not “to dwell”, and it is used in that sense in the Amarna letters from Urusalem. More to the point is that the people sent as colonists by the Persians were from Syria, so called by abbreviation of “Assyria”, and Syria was indeed part of greater Assyria for many centuries of Assyrian imperila power, Haran being the last Assyrian city to fall. So, Syrian colonists will have used the word to mean “to be”. The repeated phrase “God’s name” looks like an avoidance of the actual name of God, so the place where God’s name shall dwell means the place here God shall dwell. Except that the original was the place where God will be!

The Ark was a mobile container for the words of the covenant of Horeb. Deuteronomy 31:24-26 says the law should be placed “beside” the Ark. “Inside” is the preposition intended. R Clements recognizes that Deuteronomy is stark confirmation there was no unity of religion before it. Yet, even supposing that Hilkiah found Deuteronomy in the temple, Moses was supposed to have done his legislating 800 years before! It is yet more evidence the early biblical history is myth. Deuteronomy does not suggest that God’s chosen place would be the sanctuary “for ever”. It could not have been so because the threat of punishment for disobedience of the law was the loss of the land, and with it the loss of the sanctuary. God could choose some other people, a circumstance that Christians claim happened, yet they still treat Jerusalem as particularly holy!

The Deuteronomic historian tells us that Hezekiah centralized religion in Jerusalem, so how did Solomon? The author of Deuteronomy does not know where the new religion would be centralized. The truth is that the Persians, after initial failures with several shrines, centralized worship of Yehouah in Jerusalem. Writing about the time of Nehemiah and before Ezra, in about 450 BC, Herodotus has nothing to say about a great temple to Yehouah in Palestine! It seems that the late fifth century was when the temple of Yehud in Jerusalem was actually set up by the Persian administrators led by Nehemiah. The scriptures are notoriously indistinct except when they are telling stories, when they become remarkably precise, but they suggest that the deportees at first did not try to set up a central sanctuary, but set up several local ones, including one at Gerizim. Later, it was imposed, perhaps in the time of Xerxes, but little progress was made until Nehemiah and Ezra, later in the fifth century. The decision was retro-written into the scriptures, and was assumed by the immense revision of Ezra and his Priestly School. Thus the decision was given the implied authority of the mythical Moses. H H Rowley can admit that the Deuteronomic Historians wrote with a “religious and didactic purpose”, but they imagine it to be a purpose sent down to His prophets by God. It was the purpose of the Persian conquerors.

Deuteronomy chapter 26 describing the rites and rituals associated with the first fruits ceremonies again shows these laws pertained to a time before the sole sanctuary at Jerusalem had been set up. This does not show that the work was composed before Solomon, but that it was a composition of an earlier group of deportees from Babylonia, before the decision was taken to have a central temple rather than regional ones.

In Deuteronomy 11:29, the “blessing” is placed on mount Gerizim, where the Samaritans had their temple, suggesting that this was the originally chosen centre for the worship of the new Persian god. It was a Persian habit to put their temples on hills. The eventual choice of Jerusalem is on the top of a hill. The word used for “habitation” in Deuteronomy 12:5 is “shakhan”, a word used nowhere else in the Old Testament and one that has a remarkably Persian look.

Page Tags: Deuteronomy, History of the Bible, Jewish Scriptures, Judaism, Israel, Jerusalem, Pious Lies, Egypt, God, Jews, King, Kings, Land, Law, Laws, Moses, Persian, Persians, Priests, Prophets, Religion, Scriptures

Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.