In the begining there was nothing, and God said, ’Let there be light…’ and there was still nothing, but now you could see it.

Deuteronomy 3

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

God’s Purpose
Keeping a Pure Religion
Second Law
Feasts
Officials
Cities of Refuge
Periodic Readings
Summary

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.

God’s Purpose

In Deuteronomy 4:44-49, the introduction of Deuteronomy 1:1-5 is repeated with variations showing that the work is not uniform. The priests, the Persian administrators accompanying the deportees into Abarnahara, constantly remind the people who they are and their covenant obligations to the God of Heaven. It shows that Deuteronomy was written as an example of the procedure of reading the suzerain-vassal covenant that was placed in appropriate shrines to be read out periodically to the subject people to remind them of their obligations to their ruler. They are constantly reminded that they have crossed over into this land from the east.

The speaker is given the name, Moses, but was really a Persian administrator or appointed priest speaking for the Persian shah and so for the Persian god, Ahuramazda. The audience are the Israel of Horeb, even though they were not supposed to have been allowed to see the promised land. Though Moses is depicted often as speaking as if the Israelites and therefore he himself were already in the Promised Land, his generation were later forbidden to enter it. The implication is that the earlier generation failed, and Ezra suggests that some of the earlier deportees did fail to fulfil their obligations and had to be replaced by more committed people.

Deuteronomy calls upon the people to love Yehouah (Dt 6:4; 7:9), and remember what he had done for them. In some of the vassalage treaties, the vassal was obliged to “love” the suzerain! W Schottroff noted that 12 of 16 occurances of the verb “to remember” in Deuteronomy referred to past events like the deliverence from slavery in Egypt. The fact of slavery in Egypt is repeated several times (eg Dt 15:15; 16:12; 24:18,22), and the ancient harvest feast of Unleavened Bread was given a new interpretation as a celebration of a deliverance from Egyptian rule (Dt 16:2-3). The obvious purpose of this was to maintain the antipathy of the Jews for the Egyptians, and the people to benefit from this were the Persians. It is another feature of the vassalage treaties. The sense of urgency, in Deuteronomy, suggests a sense of crisis and impending destruction. This places it in the context of a recent rebellion against the Persians, and the threat of a once-and-for-all punitive expedition agaisnt the rebels in which Yehud would suffer. It happens that serious rebellions against Persian overlordship occurred in the mid-fifth century BC, in which Egypt might have been supported by the Canaanites who were traditionally in the Egyptian sphere of influence—their colonials or slaves, if you wish. Thus, the danger to the Jews of maintaining any such alliance against the Persians was highly topical when Deuteronomy was being read out to the assemblies in the sanctuaries of Yehud.

The choice given to the deportees is to love God and be obedient, when God will reward them, or do not and be punished. The purpose of the histories that went with the commandments was to show how God punished or rewarded His people in real life. So the people had to love God (Dt 6:5), but fear Him (6:13) lest He anger and destroy them (6:15). The agent of God’s anger would have been quite clear to those being moved into Palestine as colonists for the Persians—the Persian king! In Deuteronomy 6:20, the Persian priests tell the deportees that they have to indoctrinate their own children with the anti-Egyptian propaganda that was the real reason why the Persians wanted a tame puppet state on Egypt’s borders.

God is shown as personally declaring the Ten Commandments from the midst of fire, plainly a Persian allusion, showing its origins. The Persian kings could have no truck with rebellion as Darius proved. The empire was too large and loosely administered at first, and rebels took advantage of it, but Darius ruthlessly suppressed a whole series of rebellions and imposed stronger Persian rule.

Keeping a Pure Religion

There was only one God (Dt 6:4-5, where both “our” and “your” are used of God, suggesting at least two authors, one of whom did not identify strongly with the Jews). The gods of other nations were not allowed to influence the god of the Jews, even if the foreign nations had to be exterminated to prevent it (Dt 7:1ff; 12:29ff). This is the attitude of the Persians to the Devas, the wicked gods, opposed to the Ahuras and Yazatas, the good gods. The Devas and their worshippers were to be exterminated. The Persians, of course, were a mighty enough nation to do it, but Yehud was not. Clements tries to justify this as conditioned by earlier times, but even then Judah, and even Israel, were in no position to eliminate their neighbours. It is not merely a clear out of the remnants of Canaanite religion, as the orthodox explanation has it. It is more strongly worded than that, and assures the reader that the Persians would exterminate those opposed to the universal God. God is the God of heaven and earth, and God of the heaven of heavens (Dt 10:14), as well as the God of gods and the Lord of lords, a god “who is not partial and takes no bribes”. All of this is Persian, the titles reflecting the Persian title, Shahanshah, king of kings, the qualities highlighted being the archetypal qualities of Mithras, the god of covenants and therefore uncorruptible, the Yazata who served as the visible face of the hidden God, Ahuramazda. That other gods exist was not denied, and they are legitimately worshipped by their own people (Dt 4:19), but they are not gods of this people. In fact, there was the idea of a heavenly court attended by the god of each nation, each a son of the High God, so that there were as many sons of God in heaven as there were separate nations on earth. Yehouah was the son of God who represented the Jews, but later became the High God Himself, in the eyes of His worshippers, and so has remained since for Christians.

In Deuteronomy 7:3, marriages with the women of the seven peoples of Abarnahara were forbidden, matching the practices of the Zoroastrians who were not allowed to marry outside their own religion, and Deuteronomy 7:5 makes it absolutely clear that the aim of the ban was religious not ethnic. The law of mixing in Deuteronomy 22:5 is another reminder that Jews must marry only within their own religion.

Deuteronomy 22:13-30 are laws concerned with maintaining a pure bloodline, a concern of the Persians, who were not a vastly numerous people when they first built the empire, and wanted to avoid dilution as well as keeping their religious line pure. Mary Boyce confirms that for Persians their ethnic and religious identities were the same, and so they were known to foreigners. Exactly the same has happened to “Jews”, great confusion existing about whether it is a religious or ethnic term. It is, of course, religious, Jews always having been thoroughly mixed racially.

The relationship of this with the cultic disqualifications in Deuteronomy chapter 23 is plain. Foreigners were not to be admitted, nor bastards, nor eunuchs, who presumably were not well regarded because they could not procreate, and perhaps because the Persians wanted to avoid anything like the Galloi of Rhea and Cybele ever arising. Deuteronomy 23:17, adds to this by refusing to allow cultic sex, including the “dog” priests who dressed as females for the purpose of religious sodomy. The provision for the children of the third generation will have been added by Herod and his Egyptian priests, known as Boethusians.

Second Law

Chapters 12 to 26 of Deuteronomy are a list of apodictic laws that are largely original but with some changes. “Apodictic” means they are commands—instructions that cannot be gainsaid. There is no need to believe that all the laws imposed reflected Zoroastrian practice. The Persian administrators were not so crude. They seem to have included old laws that seemed to the priests innocuous, or capable of being given a new moral justification. The practice of leaving a corner of a field unreaped or of leaving a sheaf behind (Dt 24:19) was an old animistic superstition based on the belief in a corn god or spirit who should not be left destitute lest he be angered. The Persians allowed it to continue with the justification that the corn was to be left for the poor to glean.

Deuteronomy 12:31 refers to people in Abarnahara burning their sons and daughters in the fire, to their gods, a known practice of the Phœnicians, the Greek name for the Canaanites, in the Tophet, a most venerated repository of the burnt bones of sacrificed children. Plainly, it was the Persians who put a stop to human sacrifice in Abarnahara. This has a bearing on the interpretation of the myth of Abraham and Isaac, which seems to have been created at that time to denote that human sacrifice was to end in favour of sacrificing sheep and doves. If the myth were true, there should have been no human sacrifice among the Jews and Israelites from a very early time, but history declares otherwise. The myth was invented to give the ban on child sacrifice an ancient provenance.

Deuteronomy 14:3-21 give the laws on the prohibitions on foods, directly introduced from Zoroastrianism but with some variations to suit local idolatrous practices and some later changes. Deuteronomy 14:22-29 provide for collections of first fruit for a sanctuary feast. This suggests that Deuteronomy precedes Leviticus and other priestly writings where the collections are for the priests not for communal use. It is the way all religions go!

In Deuteronomy 15, the release from debts every seven years has a Babylonian or Persian ring (compare the seven days of creation, and the sabbath rest on the seventh day). Release of slaves and firstlings follow, the latter requiring unblemished firstlings to be dedicated to God, but consumed by the family not the priests, again sounding to be pre-Leviticus. Blemished firstlings can be eaten but not dedicated to God.

Feasts

Deuteronomy 16:1-8 is the prescription for the Passover, previously a vegetative feast related to the spring equinox when the sun “passes over” the celestial equator. The Persians re-cast it as a memorial of the Israelites’ hypothetical captivity in Egypt, with the aim of annually reminding the Jews of who was their traditional enemy. Deuteronomy 16:7 says the Passover sacrifice had to be boiled, a Persian sacrificial custom. Persians revered the sacred flame and would not risk its pollution by touching an improper sacrifice directly as it would in burning and roasting. Boiling used the element of water to keep the element of fire from directly contacting the meat.

An idea appears in the Jewish scriptures that sacrifices at the altar were meant to be God’s food (Ezek 44:7,16; Mal 1:7,12; Num 28:2; Lev 21:6,8; 22:25). Scholars, mostly accepting the bible’s own chronology, take these references as ancient, and so reflecting the primitive stage of the religion (thus admitting the idea of Yehouah evolving!). Father De Vaux thought it was not so, but it was a late intrusion into Judaism. Both are correct, because Judaism is a late invention of the Persian imperial ministries. The intrusion was later by about a century, but the religion was still not so advanced. It came from the belief of the Egyptian priests who wrote much of the Exodus saga around 300 BC. The concept of a God in such anthropomorphic terms was quite alien to the Persian idea, which was essentially that held by believers still—that of a transcendent God who did not need to be fed by human beings. The real beneficiaries were the Levites, the caste of priests.

Deuteronomy has nothing at all to say about any priesthood of the line of Aaron or Zadok, all of the many mentions being to the Levitical priests (Dt 12:12,18,19; 14:27,29; 16:11,14; 17:9,18; 18:1,6,7; 24:8; 26:11,12.13; 27:9,14; 31:9,25). In the conventional chronology of the bible, Zadok appeared later, so could not have been allowed to appear in Deuteronomy, but Aaron, who was a Levite, was the founder of the hereditary role of High Priest, yet is not featured in this respect. In Deuteronomy 18:1, the Levitical priests are called “all the tribe of Levi”. Not until Aaron was dead, does Deuteronomy relate the appointment of the tribe of Levi to the privileged role of priests (Dt 10:8-9). Herodotus calls the Magi a “tribe” of the Persians, where he is using “tribe” to mean a class or a caste. It seems that the Levites were the Jewish title of the Persian “tribe” called the Magi, and the inventers of the myth of the Exodus, following Herodotus as they did, made the Levites into an actual tribe of the Jews. The Levites were the priestly caste of Yehud. They seem to have existed as priests of regional sanctuaries before the centralization of worship. Deuteronomy recognized that centralization would leave the village Levites destitute, yet they had a duty to teach the law (Dt 17:18;31:9, 24)) and so had to be supported. So it classed them with widows and orphans as meriting charity, and recognized (Dt 18:6-7) that Levites from towns away from the central sanctuary should be allowed to officiate in the sanctuary on set occasions. After the Persian period, in Hellenistic and Hasmonaean times, the Levites were relegated to lesser roles, and the rights of a new class of priests, the Zadokites was established by writing their founder into the mythical history.

Other feasts are also prescribed. In Deuteronomy 16:9-12 a Canaanite harvest festival is converted into the feast of weeks, a celebration of the giving of the law at Horeb. In Deuteronomy 16:13-15, is the prescription for the feast of booths or tabernacles, originally the Canaanite wine harvest festival, re-cast as a memorial of the time spent in the desert with God in tents. Deuteronomy 16:16 is a deliberate mistranslation. It is not “appear before the Lord” but “see the face of the Lord”, implying a thrice yearly revelation of an otherwise hidden image of Yehouah, probably the double Ahuramazda-like image in the original mobile Ark, used before the sanctuary was settled at Jerusalem, and later placed in the Jerusalem temple.

Officials

Deuteronomy 16:18 to 18:22 lists the officers to be appointed in the new colony. Here there have been subsequent changes to suit the changing situation of the Jews. No one considers the unlikelihood of slaves or wandering shepherds having much idea of the institutions and offices necessary for running a sophisticated state. Like much of the bible testaments, old and new, it is just blindly accepted without question by the faithful. Should anyone have the temerity to ask they will be told that “God knows” and told Moses! The reasonable answer is that these officers and offices were prescribed by the conqueror, the Persians, and their priestly administrators.

Ranks of judges, priests and prophets are mentioned, with some of their duties. The reference to a king was probably added at the time of the Maccabees. Nowhere in the Pentateuch, except here, are kings mentioned and nor would they be expected in a law being set up for a colony! Indeed the distribution of power among officers of equal status but representing different functions is the way power in a colony is diffused so that the emperor would not be challenged. Besides the king, we see here power being distributed. The implications of Deuteronomy 17:14-20 are of a king like Solomon with many wives and chariots, so the passage was inserted after the myth of Solomon was invented by the Maccabees. The mention of a “foreigner who is not your brother” will refer to the Greek kings who succeeded Alexander, like Antiochus IV Epiphanes who was hated by many Jews.

In Deuteronomy chapter 20, further Maccabaean additions are found, it being impossible to imagine the Persians allowing the colonists of Yehud to raise armies against other Persian colonies. Doubtless what was here was more about the “ban” on idolatrous cities. Destruction of Canaanite cities that refused to convert from their old religion evidently was required, whence the need for cities of refuge, but armies and kings would not have been allowed. That something is odd about these passages is the provision for taking a wife from among captured women, and the law about later releasing her. Marrying foreign wives had already been forbidden and it does not match Zoroastrian practice. The additions are therefore post-Persian, most likely from the time of the Maccabees.

The symbols of worship mentioned in Deuteronomy 16:21-22 imply several sanctuaries, again suggesting this is a set of laws preceding the Jerusalem sanctuary. The priests, identified with the Levites and the tribe of Levi, were not to have any territory of their own.

The institution of prophet was the chief way the Persian would combat the Canaanite religions which seem to have been quite shamanistic, the shaman perhaps being considered a prophet. Thus prophets were needed to advocate the worship of the universal god in opposition to the native prophets of the Baals. Thus prophets were the first propagandists, reminding the people of their duty to obey the new god and the law being introduced by the Persians.

Cities of Refuge

The beginning of Deuteronomy chapter 19 is strange. It provides for cities of refuge, an utterly mysterious concept until it is realized that the colonists, the people being transported in, were extremely unpopular. This is clear from Ezra and Nehemiah, but the degree of unpopularity is made clear here by the need for cities of refuge. They were places where people could flee to when pursued by those wishing to avenge a murder.

The deportees were given the authority of a ruling class but they were necessarily weak at first when they were in small numbers and their novelties were seen as particularly intrusive. They had to destroy Canaanite shrines, and that could only create hatred. They would have had to protect and defend themselves and would have needed to retreat from time to time into secure refuges when Canaanite mobs got out of hand. A clumsy attempt has been made to justify the cities as being places where people could flee after “accidentally” killing someone else! Of course, there was no refuge for a murderous act upon a deportee, a neighbour. The requirement of two or three witnesses to bring a charge, mentioned in the trial of Jesus, appears in a context where multiple sanctuaries are assumed.

At the end of Deuteronomy chapter 21 is the law not to allow an executed man to hang after sunset. The Persian method of execution was crucifixion—hanging—so the reference here is to not letting a crucified man hang after sunset

Periodic Readings

“This day”, in Deuteronomy 26:16, means the day when the law was read out to the public, as the covenant treaties require—at each of the main festivals.

Much of the style of Deuteronomy is that of material read out, or orated, and it might be that the Deuteronomist took this from the purpose of the original which was to be read out as a covenant treaty with the Persian kings. The reader would have used all his oratorical powers to get acceptance for these policies and laws by his audience. We read frequent appeals, perhaps colloquial expressions and repetitive emphasis directed at exhorting the people to pursue the rquired course of action.

August Klosterman in 1907 realized that Deuteronomy was originally meant to be read out. Thus the addition of the plural was the adptation of a set of instructions to the Jewish leader to a recital of the laws of the land to the congregations at the Jewish shrines. Characteristic phrases allow Deuteronomistic material to be distinguished form other writing. They are even found in Jeremy. These Deuteronomic editors assume a single sanctuary in Jerusalem while the earlier work implies several local shrines, though sometimes with an anticipation of their eventually being just one.

Summary

Douglas Knight says that, without the Deuteronomic History, the history of Israel “would be as thin as the histories of many of the surrounding countries during this period”. The Deuteronomic history is the source of our knowledge of Jewish history. Without it we know little about it, with it we know too much—it is novelistic in its detail of distant events like the kingdoms of Solomon and David. It should give believers pause for reflexion.

Is it mythical? Not all of it is, because some of the characters appear in external records and monuments, but many of the central characters, Moses, David, Solomon, are! It is myth, but some of the myth is built on a partially historical core provided by Mesopotamian historical records.

Knight also says it is a product of the end of monarchy, “at the very earliest”. Biblicists will try to put it in the period of the Exile, but the only reasonable period after the monarchy when it could have been written is the Persian period. Later amendations occurred under the Greeks and the Maccabees. Only the Persians could have access to the Assyrian and Babylonian records needed for much of Kings to have been written.

If scholars are right that the central part of Deuteronomy is associated with Israel, then it shows it is early. The earliest colonists seem to have been ready to set up the god, El, as the local equivalent of the God of Heaven.

Knight also recognizes that the work was “self-seeking and tendentious”. The authors “sought to write a history that would cause their contemporaries to understand better their current situation”. What biblicists will not accept is that these people had been deported into Israel against their will, but were being given a privileged position as rulers of their adopted country as long as they imposed laws acceptable to the Persians and devotion to a universal Persian-like god. They were told they were being “returned” not “deported” from their previous homeland. And so the myth of the Babylonian Exile was created.

To oblige them to be obedient, and eventually the natives they would rule, they were told the Exile was a punishment for disobedience. Thus the need for a history arose—to show how God punished their “ancestors” for apostasy, and rewarded them for being obedient and faithful. The colonisation of Palestine by the Assyrians, the Babylonians and the Persians were judgements by God and His punishment, but the Persians claimed to be God’s saviours, sent to redeem His wayward people. It was a brilliant policy, so successfully executed after some initial trouble that its consequences are bigger 2500 years later than Cyrus could ever have anticipated.

“The Deuteronomic historiographical principle can be depicted as a theology of the two ways: do good and be blessed—do evil and be cursed”. It is a “moralistic, controlling and opportunistic interpretation, that favours groups in power or in search of power over people”. This was happening in the Persian period, the dualistic Persian being clear in Douglas Knight’s words, and who but the Persian kings were the people that wanted power over the inhabitants of the Levant at that time? They did it by placing in power a foreign ruling class, whose own security depended upon absolute fealty to their Persian protectors, but otherwise whose future depended on their controlling the native inhabitants of the land they had been granted—the Canaanites.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.