Transcript 12 - The Deuteronomistic History: Life in the Land...

Israel as the chosen one, which occurs for the first time in the Book of Deuteronomy.

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God's election of Israel means or entails the idea that Israel is a holy people, holy in the sense of separated to God--that root meaning of holiness which means to be separated from the common or the ordinary. So that separation entails separation from alien peoples and practices that are inconsistent with the worship of God. So for this reason, intermarriage with the Canaanites is prohibited in Deuteronomy. And, in fact, they are to be utterly destroyed. All alien practices are to be removed from the covenant community.

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Now, given that there were probably no Canaanites at the time of Deuteronomy's composition, according to some scholars, these texts may be understood as a kind of internal polemic against those elements of Israelite society whose practices didn't conform to Deuteronomy's Yahweh-only policy, or Yahweh-only ideals. This is an idea we will come back to in a minute. I just want to throw it out here.

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he emphasizes, it is only because the wickedness of the Canaanites is so great that the Lord has to drive them from his land, and now he is giving you a chance. But it is conditional for you, just as it was for them. Don't fail him or he will drive you out just as he drove out the Canaanites. That's a theme in Deuteronomy. We are going to see in a moment how important that is

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Another theme in the Book of Deuteronomy is the theme of providential concern, and that appears in Deuteronomy 8.

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the prophet Hosea will develop further this image of parent and child that occurs in Deuteronomy 8

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So Deuteronomy's content, which are these farewell speeches and the death and the burial of Moses, are a fitting capstone to the Pentateuchal narrative. But at the same time, Deuteronomy really does not bring closure to this narrative, because at the end of Deuteronomy, the promises still are not fulfilled. The people are still outside the land. Some have suggested that this is quite purposeful. It points to an exilic date for the work's final composition: that is to say when it was finally redacted, the redactors were in exile, writing for a people living in exile. And the Deuteronomist wants to make it clear that it is fidelity to the Torah, rather than residence in the land that is critically important.

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But in any event, Deuteronomy is not simply the concluding book of the Pentateuch, or the story that began in Genesis; it's also the first part of a much larger, longer literary work, as I mentioned last time, a work that runs from Deuteronomy through to the end of 2 Kings. And we are going to consider today the program and the work of this so-called Deuteronomistic school.

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I hope that the little bit of time that we have spent on the Priestly materials gave you some appreciation of its transformation of older Israelite rituals and traditions into symbolic practices that would communicate basic convictions about morality, convictions about holiness. I hope it gave you a sense of its communal ethic as opposed to an individual morality, the idea that the actions of every individual have an impact on society as a whole.

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So each of these complex, multi-layered sources--in each one of them you can find different layers--each one possesses its own emphases, its own agenda, its own perspectives. Sometimes they complement one another. Sometimes they challenge and contradict one another, but they are not best seen as linear, as telling a neat, linear story about Israelite religion flowering and fading. Their diversity has not been flattened or homogenized by the final editor of the text. It has been preserved in a manner that stimulates reflection and debate.

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we are going to move on now to the second major section of the Bible. We have been discussing the Torah, or Pentateuch, and now we are moving on to the section of the Bible that is referred to as the Prophets. This section of the Bible is divided into two parts we refer to as the "Former Prophets" and then the "Latter Prophets." The Former Prophets will concern us for the next few lectures. And the Former Prophets include the books of Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings. They read as a historical narrative.

This material is a theologically oriented account of Israel's history from the conquest of Canaan, or what is represented as the conquest of Canaan, to the destruction of the state by the Babylonians in 587-586 BCE. This material is therefore crucial background to reading the Latter Prophets. Now the Latter Prophets is a collection of books, each of which bears the name of the individual whose prophecies it purports to contain. These prophets delivered their oracles at critical junctures in Israel's history, in the nation's history, so their words are only going to make sense to us if we first understand the particular historical crises that they are addressing. And that historical narrative that runs from Joshua through 2 Kings provides that information. It tells us of the critical junctures in the nation's history, and that will help us then slot the different prophets in.

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So the Former Prophets, or the historical books, like the books of the Bible that we have already studied, contain various older sources that have been put together by a later hand. We have an editor or a group of editors who reworked these older sources. They were oral traditions. Some of them were probably from royal archives and so on. And they wove them together into the form that we have now, and that is a process that is referred to as redaction or editing. The anonymous person or group or school that's responsible for the final composition, the final redaction of these books, would put the materials together by inserting verses and speeches that would frame the older sources and link them together, give them some sort of common uniting thread. The redactors' linking and framing passages and their revisions of the older sources exhibit certain common features. They harp on the same themes over and over again; they use some of the same language over and over again; they share certain assumptions. And those features and assumptions have a lot in common with the book of Deuteronomy, a lot in common with the book of Deuteronomy; and that is what led the German scholar, Martin Noth, to surmise that Deuteronomy and these historical books really form a unit, so that Deuteronomy not only looks back and finishes off the Pentateuchal narrative, it looks forward as the beginning of really the historical account that is to follow.

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J, E and P really seem to come to an end here; there is some debate about this, but because the interpretive history that runs from Joshua to 2 Kings is based on ideals that are set out in the book of Deuteronomy, we refer to the person or the persons who redacted this whole unit as the Deuteronomistic historian, or the Deuteronomistic School. The whole unit, as a whole, was redacted after 622: that's clear. It assumes and insists upon the centralization of the cult. The last dated event that is mentioned in 2 Kings is something that occurred in 562. That was when King Jehoiachin was released from prison in Babylon, in 562. So the work was probably concluded shortly after that date: so in exile or towards the end of the exilic period. Martin Noth assumed that there was one editor. Other scholars have assumed that there were two, or even more, successive editions of this history because there are multiple perspectives that seem to be represented. But the last seems to be an exilic perspective, the perspective of someone sitting in exile and we will be returning to that in a future lecture.

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I encourage you to read the excellent introduction to the Prophets, the section of the Bible "The Prophets" which was written by Marc Brettler in your Jewish Study Bible. I think it is an excellent introduction to the complexity of this material.

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the other four books of the Pentateuch never mention a king. In Genesis through Numbers none of the legal materials say: when you have a king this is what he shall do. It is only the book of Deuteronomy that assumes or prepares for a monarchy and contains legislation for a king, and the things that he should do. So this, again, underscores the connection between Deuteronomy and the following books. Deuteronomy assumes a king. It is being written and redacted at a time when there is a king in Israel, there have been kings in Israel, and it is providing laws for the construction of an ideal monarchy. So David, the theme of David as the elected king of God, David also as the ideal king, is something else that is a theme of these books.

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emphasis on what we call the Yahwist prophets -- prophets like Elijah and Elisha. These prophets are held up as heroes and champions of religious purity. They are completely against any kind of mixture of Yahweh worship with other elements, any kind of syncretism

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The other thing we see in the Deuteronomistic material is a preference for Judah, the Southern Kingdom, as compared with a very negative presentation of the Northern Kingdom, Israel. The Northern Kingdom Israel is going to come in for very, very bad press at the hands of the Deuteronomistic writers, which shows that they probably favor or come from Judah. So the northern kings are going to be uniformly denigrated. They are going to be denigrated because they maintain cults that rival the central sanctuary of Jerusalem. And this is going to be what does them in.

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The other theme that we see throughout the Deuteronomistic material is the negative presentation of the Canaanites. But we will talk more about who these Canaanites were and how complicated, in fact, that presentation is.

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This is a very neat picture of the rapid conquest of Canaan, but it's at odds with statements elsewhere in Joshua and in the book of Judges. For example, the victories in Chapters 2 through 10 are confined to a very small area, what would actually be the tribe of Benjamin basically, so just one small area. In Joshua 13:1: Joshua 13 opens with the statement that Joshua was old, advanced in years, and there was much of the land remaining to be possessed. In Joshua 10 (which is in the first part of Joshua--Joshua 10) verses 36-39 report the conquest of several cities in the south, including Hebron and Debir. But in Judges, we read that they had not been captured: they were captured later, after Joshua's death. Joshua 12:10 reports the defeat of the king of Jerusalem. In Judges 1:8 and 21, we read that the people of Judah did this (conquered the king of Jerusalem) and that despite that victory they failed to actually drive out the inhabitants, the Jebusites, who lived there. And it is not until King David, 200 years later that, in fact, we will read about the capture of Jerusalem. Judges 1 gives a long list of the places from which the Canaanites were not expelled.

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Also archaeological evidence contradicts the picture in Joshua.

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he important question here is why a biblical writer or editor would want to insist that the Canaanites were to be completely destroyed. I think assertions of national identity and independence are often predicated on differentiation from others. If the Israelites were, in fact, basically Canaanites, who had withdrawn from the larger collective, who insisted on the overlordship of Yahweh, then Canaanites who did not join them in this were a special threat to the new Yahwism. This same dynamic of intense sibling rivalry appears again in the first few centuries of the Common Era, when some Jews separated from others and in differentiating themselves and creating their own identity as Christians, felt it necessary to engage in devastatingly vituperative and violent rhetoric against their fellow Jews.

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In 24, the Israelites are assembled at Shechem to renew the covenant, and Joshua recounts God's mighty deeds on behalf of Israel and exhorts them to choose whom they will serve: Yahweh, who has done all of this for them so undeservedly, or the gods of those whose lands they are settling in. And the people are warned of God's jealousy. He demands exclusive loyalty. He will not tolerate any deviation in the service of alien gods. The ban on intermarriage here is quite specific. It is directed against Canaanites only, not all non-Israelites, for a very specific reason: religious purity. Marriage with Canaanites, the people closest to you, specifically, will lead to the worship of that spouse's god, and Israel is to show undivided loyalty to God, or God will take the gift of the land from her as he did the Canaanites.

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One last remark for you to think about. Consider the position of the Israelites in the sixth century, the time of the final editing of the Deuteronomistic history. The Israelites are sitting in exile in Babylon. They are trying to make sense of the tragedy that has befallen them, the loss of their land. Consider how a text like Joshua 23 and Joshua 24 would go a long way towards explaining their fate while retaining faith in Yahweh.

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