Parshat D’varim 5767: Who Wrote Deuteronomy?

Deuteronomy 1:1-3:22

This week we begin the book of Deuteronomy, the last and most intriguing book of the Torah. Also known as the Mishnah Torah, it repeats and summarizes everything that came before it from the time of Sinai until the people reach the east bank of the Jordan. Deuteronomy ends with the death of Moses.

This week instead of commenting on the text I’m going to look at the entire book. Actually there is a rather odd question that I’m going to ask: Who wrote this book? It’s writing style and grammar is different that any other book of the Torah. Nowhere before Deuteronomy do we hear certain phrases, which will be reflected in later texts but never here. “All your heart and all your soul” is only here in Torah. Oddities about the text abound. It gets so odd, the documentary hypothesis of Torah which assigns authors like J and E to parts of the other four books doesn’t work here. They had to make up a new author “D.” But who is D?

The rabbis of the Talmud do believe they know who D is.

Who wrote the Scriptures? — Moses wrote his own book, the portions of Balaam and Job. Joshua wrote the book which bears his name and [the last] eight verses of the Pentateuch. [Baba Batra 14b]

Moses, except for the recounting of his death, wrote Deuteronomy according to the Sages. This, however, is not conclusive. Some object to this statement thinking that Moses wrote the whole thing, He prophesized his own death thus writing those last lines in tears. [Baba Batra15a] Among those lines, we read

10. And there has not arisen since in Israel a prophet like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face,[Deut 34]

Interestingly someone else had an obituary similar to this:

25. And like him was there no king before him, that turned to the Lord with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his might, according to all the Torah of Moses; neither after him arose there any like him.[II K 34]

This is only the second time in the entire Tanach that the phrase “all his heart, all his soul and all his might” shows up. The first of courses is in the Shema:

And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. [Deut 6:4]

This may not be a coincidence. The obituary in II Kings is for King Josiah. Josiah was a righteous king of Judah, a few decades before the destruction of the first temple. In the later part of his life he became one of the most righteous kings of all time by destroying all the idolatrous sites in Judah, centralizing Jewish observance in Jerusalem and even making incursions in the former northern kingdom. His zeal started around the eighteenth year of his reign with a payroll audit. After several years of idolatrous kings, the Temple needed some renovation, and Josiah had workers begin the renovation effort. He sends Shapan the scribe to deal with the payroll issues, who’s met at the Temple by the High priest Hilkiah:

8. And Hilkiah the high priest said to Shaphan the scribe, I have found a book of Torah in the house of the Lord. And Hilkiah gave the book to Shaphan, and he read it. 9. And Shaphan the scribe came to the king, and brought the king word again, and said, Your servants have gathered the money that was found in the house, and have delivered it to the hand of the workmen, who supervise the house of the Lord. 10. And Shaphan the scribe told the king, saying, Hilkiah the priest has delivered me a book. And Shaphan read it before the king. 11. And it came to pass, when the king had heard the words of the book of the Torah, that he tore his clothes. [II Kings 22]

What could have caused such a commotion? Was this the whole Torah, or a part of it? The repetition of this story in II Chronicles adds one more detail:

14. And when they brought out the money that was brought to the house of the Lord, Hilkiah the priest found a Book of Torah of the Lord by the hand of Moses. [II Chron 34:14]

Moses wrote this. While Torah mentions Moses transmitted individual things from god by his hand, no where is there something that would upset a king. However,

1. These are the words which Moses spoke to all Israel on this side of the Jordan in the wilderness…3. And it came to pass in the fortieth year, in the eleventh month, on the first day of the month, that Moses spoke to the people of Israel, according to all that the Lord had given him in commandment to them;[Deuteronomy1 ]

At the end of Deuteronomy we read:

24. And it came to pass, when Moses had finished writing the words of this Torah in a book, until they were finished, 25. That Moses commanded the Levites, who carried the ark of the covenant of the Lord, saying, 26. Take this book of the Torah, and put it in the side of the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God, that it may be there for a witness against you. [Deut 33]

Like the rabbis said, it looks very much like Moses wrote Deuteronomy with his own hand. The book of Torah which is specifically Moses’ is Deuteronomy. There are other places in Torah where we are told do good and you get good, and do bad and things are going to go very bad, including exile. It is only in Deuteronomy that we see one particular wrinkle which would get a king upset enough to tear his garments:

36. The Lord shall bring you, and your king which you shall set over you, to a nation which neither you nor your fathers have known; and there shall you serve other gods, of wood and stone. 37. And you shall become astonishment, a proverb, and a byword, among all nations where the Lord shall lead you. [Deuteronomy 28]

Here we see a mention of a king which could of course make a king upset. Josiah sends the text to a prophet to verify the prophecy. Since apparently Jeremiah is out of town, Josiah sends the scroll with a delegation to the prophetess Hulda, who’s also interestingly enough Hilkiah’s cousin. She tells his envoys is that since Josiah’s been a good boy, this prophecy is true but will not happen during his reign.[22:19] Given this and several other mentions of kings in Deuteronomy, very likely the book Hilkiah and Shapan find is Deuteronomy.

Josiah’s reaction is to destroy every idolatrous thing in the entire kingdom, and brings a massive scorched earth policy of removing Idolatry. Among the things he destroys is the Bamot, the high places which served as local sacrificial altars. Prior to Josiah, there altars served both idolatrous and non idolatrous purposes. Elijah uses one at Mt. Carmel is his contest with the Priests of Baal. Joshua sets one up at Mt. Ebal in accordance to directives from Moses. Several times in the book of Judges including Samson’s parents and Gideon people perform sacrifices to God at bamot.

Yet Gideon’s case shows part of the problem. Around this altar is Ashera, idolatrous wood posts or trees. Gideon uses them for kindling. Functionally however, the Bamot allowed local communities to makes sacrifices as a community and not schlep all the way to Jerusalem every time a sacrifice was needed. Such communal sacrifice was so needed no other king before Josiah was ever as successful as he was with destroying the Bamot.

Josiah did something else as well. He mandated all Levitical and priestly activity to be in Jerusalem at the temple. Sacrifices outside of the temple were completely banned. Economically, the results are obvious. All offerings were coming to the Temple now, not the high places. Jerusalem benefited at the cost of the local priests.

So who wrote Deuteronomy? For some, looking at the evidence of Josiah’s story, there are the streaks of conspiracy in the air. The temple needs money for rennovation, the priests need power and Josiah needs to consolidate his power as well. It is rather convenient at that exact moment such a document from Moses shows up. The document dictates that everything needs to be centralized in Jerusalem, and if it doesn’t happen, everyone’s going to die or be exiled. For much of the nineteenth and early 20^th century everyone thought D was a member of Josiah’s court. Shapan could have written it, or edited and expanded an earlier document Joshua used to set up the bamot at Mt. Ebal. So too could the prophetess Hulda, whose husband had access to many hidden nooks and crannies in the temple. Mid 20^th century scholars thought the conspiracy went back further to the time of King Hezekiah, who like Josiah, also tried a reformation, though not as successfully. It was the priesthood of the family of Zadok, Hilkiah’s and Hulda’s family, grabbing the power of the priesthood during the time of Hezekiah was the theory.

However, I need to look at the events that happened after the discovery of Deuteronomy. Something odd happened. When people were told to stop making sacrifices anywhere but the Temple, they did. But they still couldn’t go up to the temple for every little mandated sacrifice. So they did something else. Josiah was obviously affected by this Torah of Moses, so instead of making offerings, the people began to read communally this document. They found a few items in Deuteronomy that appeared to make good reading for a daily service and a Shabbat service. The Shema [6:4-9, 11:13-21] and the Ten Commandments [Deut 5:6-19] became more than readings. They became communal liturgy.

This new idea, praying instead of killing animals or burning incense had a lot of pragmatic merit. It was cheap, since no animals were necessary, and maintenance of the high places wasn’t needed either. All you needed was to gather a bunch of people and start chanting or reading. In the next couple of decades it stuck with many people. Unlike the time after Hezekiah when the High places are rebuilt, the high places disappear at this point and never exist again. Assemblies of people begin to replace them.

The idea stuck in the next several decades. By the time of the destruction of the Temple it was already habit. One of the exiled, Daniel, would pray towards Jerusalem three times a day.[Daniel 6:10] Prayer, unlike the Temple or even a High place, was very portable. A liturgy coordinated everyone to pray together and made an organized language of prayer. All of this made Judaism a portable religion, one of the few that has survived millennia. When the exiles return to the Second Temple to celebrate the first Rosh Hashanah there, we do not hear in Nehemiah of new sacrifices, but of a Torah reading not very different from todays, including translation and possibly a D’var Torah as well:

5. And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people; for he was above all the people; and when he opened it, all the people stood up; 6. And Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God. And all the people answered, Amen, Amen, lifting up their hands; and they bowed their heads, and worshipped the Lord with their faces to the ground. 7. Also Jeshua, and Bani, and Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai, Hodijah, Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jozabad, Hanan, Pelaiah, and the Levites, helped the people to understand the Torah; while the people stood in their places. 8. So they read in the book in the Torah of God clearly, and gave the interpretation, so that they understood the reading.

By the time of these readings, not only was prayer and Torah readings a substitute for a folk religion of bamot, it was the ritual of the elite.

So who wrote Deuteronomy? Who was D? Moses? Joshua? Shapan? Hilkiah? Huldah? Was it a conspiracy to find it in the Temple in Josiah’s time, or just an accident? I believe it was a conspiracy, but the culprit is a suspect not in the list so far. A Talmudic sage, a man who saw the world both as a warrior and as a rabbi, Resh Lakish once said:

The Holy One, blessed be He, does not smite Israel unless He has created for them a healing beforehand, as it says . When I have healed Israel, then is the iniquity of Ephraim uncovered. [B. Megilah 13b]

Resh Lakish notes the reversal in Hoshea 7:1. The Northern kingdom is described by two common terms: Israel, and its dominant tribe Ephraim. But the healing is before the affliction here. Resh Lakish concludes that God makes sure there is a way to survive any affliction before he brings down that affliction. No nation who made sacrifice the critical element of their religion ever survived exile. Decades before the Exile and destruction of the temple, the discovery of Deuteronomy by Josiah’s court caused a crisis. The result of that crisis was the replacement of the Bamot with the Beit Knesset, the Synagogue. It was the right time for the right idea. Had Deuteronomy not been found exactly then, it’s likely there would not have been a Jewish people after that first exile.

For me it’s not the issue of who was D, but instead who put D and everyone else at the right place at the right time to get exactly the results that came about, which has saved the Jewish people until the present day. So the true culprit is of course…

God.