Instead of a manifesto for Josiahâs reform, I propose that we view Deuteronomy as the product of a process of reasserting and redefining the identity of Israel within Samaria after 722 BCE. As such, Deuteronomy grew from an enterprise that was both Israelite-Samarian and post-monarchic, an enculturating project among recent immigrants into Samaria. Much in the same way that Israelites entered the land from elsewhere, the immigrants settled by the Assyrians (2 Kgs 17) find themselves in a land which they must come to regard as their own and as a divine gift.
I begin with an issue of method. Traditionally, literary-historical criticism aims to reconstruct the growth of the document by literary means. The procedure was fully developed in the nineteenth century as the only means of extracting historical data about Israelite history. 1 Since the introduction of archaeological data, including inscriptions, into the reconstruction of ancient Judahite and Israelite history and society, and in the light of recent research on empirical models 2 along with continuing differences of opinion on the dating of biblical literature, we should be more sceptical as to the extent to which we can retrieve the history of biblical texts through literary-critical analysis. My preferred approach, where it can be applied, is to begin with what we can know and infer from non-biblical sources of history, culture, and politics and consider where the possibilities for the creation of a particular text may lie. This approach primarily addresses the existence of such a text, particularly its ideology. The evolution of the text is the second topic, and, in my view, is discovered mainly through attention to major ideological disruptions rather than textual variations. How does this approach fit the book of Deuteronomy?
From the nineteenth to the twentieth century and still ongoing in the twenty-first century, Deuteronomyâs origin has most commonly been assigned to the reign of Josiah, purely on the basis of the biblical narrative. 3 There is no non-biblical evidence of Josiah himself, let alone his policies, but scholarly proposals about a political, literary, and religious renaissance have been advanced on the basis of the account of his reign in 2 Kings 22â23. 4 The purpose of a law-code that defined an âIsraelâ and predicated its religion on a treaty between deity and the people, without the mediation of a king, whose role as lawgiver is removed, has been to a large degree explained by implausible speculation. The last two decades have seen a growing dissatisfaction with the Josianic hypothesis 5 and an inclination to consider a post-monarchic date, 6 but the search for an equally precise origin has yet to bear fruit.
One of the more useful suggestions of earlier Deuteronomic scholarship, originating with Adam Welch in 1924, 7 was that its content betrays an Israelite rather than Judahite origin. His proposal would mean a date of origin before the demise of the Judahite monarchy, which would still render Deuteronomy post-monarchic from the perspective of the kingdom of Israel. The possibility of a largely Israelite-Samarian content of the Pentateuch itself, it seems to me, has still not been fully absorbed into biblical scholarship. My preferred approach to Deuteronomy is first to ask why such a document â let us address the law-code without committing ourselves yet to the framework â might have come into existence in the first place. How it might have become associated with the reign of Josiah is probably one of the last questions to be raised.
Two major options present themselves: Deuteronomy may be understood either as a manifesto or as the literary end-product of an enterprise that was actually undertaken. The former option is more generally favored, 8 and certainly the Josianic explanation requires it, but explanations as to why and from where such a radical proposal should be written strike me as all completely implausible. Alongside the emasculation of the monarchy, the most problematic issue here seems to me the use of the term âIsrael,â assuming that this word has not be introduced at a later stage in the literary growth. I have argued that the adoption in Judah of âIsraelâ as a national identity does not predate the end of the Judahite monarchy itself, and I remain unconvinced by any alternative explanation. 9 The ethnic definition of âIsraelâ and its sharp separation from the ânations of Canaan,â the latter not constituting neighboring populations but consisting of subjects of the monarch ruling the territory, seems a very strange kind of proposal under an independent or semi-independent monarch who would hardly have wished to exploit such ethnic opposition among his subjects. It may be that the distinction is rhetorical and seeks only to reinforce a ban on what were seen as âforeignâ religious customs. But where the monarchy is ultimately in control of the cult, manifestos of this kind seem pointless.
Deuteronomy is more easily explicable as a literary work, with all the implications of temple and/or palace patronage in its production, if the work itself is not a manifesto seeking to change national self-definition but the âwriting-upâ of something that was already coming into existence. This âsomethingâ does not have to be conjectured, either: the story in 2 Kings 17:24â29 describes something that would fit this explanation of Deuteronomy quite well.
The king of Assyria brought people from Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath, and Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria in place of the people of Israel; they took possession of Samaria, and settled in its cities. When they first settled there, they did not worship Yhwh; therefore, Yhwh sent lions among them, which killed some of them. So the king of Assyria was told, âThe nations that you have carried away and placed in the cities of Samaria do not know the law of the god of the land; therefore he has sent lions among them; they are killing them, because they do not know the law of the god of the land.â Then the king of Assyria commanded, âSend there one of the priests whom you carried away from there; let him go and live there, and teach them the law (×׊×פ×) of the god of the land.â So one of the priests whom they had carried away from Samaria went and lived in Bethel; he taught them how they should worship (×ר×) Yhwh. But every nation still made gods of its own and put them in the shrines of the high places that the people of Samaria had made âŚ
The story, which contains contradictions, is not, of course, to be taken as reporting a historical fact. But it may indirectly point to one, for it is explaining something that is a fact: the people of Samaria â or some, or many of them â continued to worship Yhwh, whether or not alongside other gods. This does not need arguing. The mention of Bethel is especially interesting: it is possibly intended to characterize Samarian Yahwism as a continuation of the idolatrous Yahwism with which the authors of Kings portray the royal cult of Israel. But no explicit accusation of an idol...
