[This was first posted July 28, 2013. And so we reach the last book of the Torah. . . this is from The Literary Guide to the Bible, eds. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode our MUST READ/MUST OWN. We have recently added Robert Alter’s THE FIVE BOOKS OF MOSES to Everett Fox’s THE FIVE BOOKS OF MOSES, both translators have chosen the same title for their work. Both are excellent translations with commentary; we urge all who are serious in studying Torah in English to acquire both scholarly works.
Related posts:
- A Literary Approach to the book of Genesis/Bereshith
- A Literary Approach to the book of Exodus/Shemoth
- A Literary Approach to the book of Leviticus/Wayyiqrah
- The Literary Approach to the book of Numbers/Bamidbar
Reformatting and highlights added.–Admin1.]
Deuteronomy
Robert Polzin
Deuteronomy offers a bird’s-eye view of the entire history of Israel, shortly to be recounted in detail in Joshua through 2 Kings. It is that history’s opening frame and panoramic synthesis.
The spatial perspectives of Moses’ audience and of the narrator’s implied audience are similar:
- Moses and his audience are in Moab, that is, outside the Promised Land, hoping to possess it with the help of God’s power and mercy; the narrator and his audience are apparently in exile, that is, also outside the Land, hoping to get in once more through God’s mercy and power.
- The one audience is told under what conditions they will retain the Land; the other audience, under what conditions they will regain it.
- The temporal perspectives of both audiences merge in the book through the phrases “that day” and “this day.”
- Moses’ “that (future) day” becomes “this (present) day” of the narrator.
- The separate voices of Moses and the narrator gradually fuse as the book progresses toward its conclusion.
Moses and the Deuteronomist
Deuteronomy may be described as a story told by an anonymous narrator who directly quotes only two persons, for the most part Moses, and occasionally God.
- When Moses is quoted, he speaks alone, except in 27:1-8 and 27:9-10,Only about fifty-six verses of the book represent direct utterances of the Deuteronomic narrator.
- where his voice is joined with those of the elders of Israel and the Levitical priests, respectively.
- Finally, since both Moses and the narrator many times quote God and others, the book is a complex arrangement of quotations within quotations.
Temporally,
- Moses’ first address (1:6-4:40) looks mostly to past events and statements,
- his second (5:1b-28:68) to the future; and in the rest of the book that future, both immediate and distant, is his main concern. Thus, for example, in his third address (29:2-31:6), whenever Moses quotes others directly, it is their future utterances he reports, coinciding with the almost complete orientation of this address toward the distant future. An even more important temporal aspect of the book’s composition is Moses’ and the narrator’s practice of shuttling back and forth between “that day” of the speaker’s past and “this day” of his here-and-now. Just as the narrator can alternate, for example, between that day in Moab when Moses set forth the law (1:3) and this day of narration (2:22, 3:14), so too Moses, the human “hero” of the book, moves back and forth in his speeches between that day when “thou stoodest before the Lord thy God in Horeb” (4:10) and this day in Moab when “I set before you [all this law]” (4:8). Both Moses and the narrator use “that day” to help them put into context this day’s recitation of the law.
Psychologically, none of the words of God which Moses quotes, except the Decalogue (5:6-21), is described as also having been heard by the people. In fact in chapter 5 Moses makes the point that only when God spoke the Decalogue was he heard by the people: all the other words of God were deliberately avoided by the people as directly heard words. Rather, they were to be transmitted to the Israelites indirectly, through Moses. The only other voice in the book which quotes God directly is the narrator’s: five times toward the end of the book (31:14b, 16b-21, 23b; 32:49-52; and 34:4b). That is, the narrator is a privileged observer and reporter of God’s words, just as he describes Moses describing himself to be in chapter 5.
These temporal and psychological details are sometimes complicated by a more complex layering of quotations within quotations.
In 2:4-7 and 32:26, 40-42, for example, the narrator quotes Moses quoting YHWH quoting himself;
- thus there is an utterance within an utterance within an utterance within an utterance, all in direct discourse.
- In fact the book deliberately presents a vast number of intersecting statements, sometimes in agreement and sometimes in conflict with one another.
- The result is a plurality of viewpoints, all working together to achieve a truly multidimensional effect.
- We are dealing with an unusually sophisticated and artfully constructed work of the first millennium B.C.E.
- Within its pages there exists habitual infiltration of the narrator’s speech within Moses’ speech, and vice versa, at many levels of the composition.
- Such artful contaminations are the basis for the deep-seated, as well as superficial, “double-voiced” nature of Deuteronomy.
The reader’s first impression is that the book’s superficial distinction of voices serves an underlying ideological unity, that of an overt monologue in which the narrator clearly states, “As far as our basic stance is concerned, Moses and I are one.” However, there are clear indications that this apparent unity in duplicity is indeed only skin-deep, and that the book as a whole consists of an extended dialogue on a number of key ideological issues.
The sparse utterances of the narrator exert a powerful pull in opposite directions.
- On the one hand, the narrator situates the words of Moses in time and space and defines Moses’ preeminent position as leader and legislator of his people (for example, 1:1-5, 34:10-12). This perspective provides an unostentatious frame that rarely distracts us from the powerful words of the book’s hero.
- On the other hand, the narrator’s infrequent words occasionally serve to “break frame,” either by diverting us from Moses’ main message through the insertion of a number of apparently pedantic explanatory remarks (as at 2:10-12, 20-23 and 3:9, 11, 13b-14), or by simply interrupting Moses’ words without apparent reason (31:1).
- Moses shifts back and forth between that day at Horeb and this day in Moab; so too the Deuteronomy, by breaking frame throughout the book, subtly—almost subliminally—forces us to shuttle back and forth between the narrated past and the narrator’s present.
- Both Moses and the narrator shift temporal gears in the process of teaching.
By such frame-breaks the narrator forces his contemporary audience, intent upon Moses’ discourse, occasionally to focus upon their own temporal distance from Moses’ words. In combination with a number of other compositional devices (discussed later), these frame-breaks are part of a subtle but effective strategy on the part of the Deuteronomist gradually to blur or soften the unique status of Moses at the very same time that most of the retrospective elements in the book explicitly enhance it.
The narrator’s utterances are spoken in two ideological voices which interfere with one another:
- an overt, obvious voice that exalts Moses as it plays down its own role,
- and a still, soft voice that nevertheless succeeds in drawing attention to itself at the expense of Moses’ uniqueness.
In relation to the words of Moses that form the bulk of the book these two ideological voices broaden the dialogue to include positions on the very nature of Israel’s God and on the privileged status of his people, Israel, even as they continue to be at apparent odds with one another on the question of Moses’ unique status.
The Voice of Moses
The emphasis in Deuteronomy is on the legislative and judicial word of God, and the conveyers of this word are predominantly Moses and, rarely, the narrator. The manner in which Moses conveys God’s word helps to illumine the complex relationships between Moses and the Deuteronomist.
Moses’ first address (1:6-4:40) is an introduction to various ways in which Moses speaks for God.
- More than half of this address entails his reporting of what he, YHWH, or Israel had said in the past.
- More significantly, chapter 4 stands apart from the first three chapters not only because its references are to future rather than past events and utterances, but also because its reported speech is predominantly in indirect discourse, whereas the reported speech in chapters 1-3 is overwhelmingly in direct discourse.
- Thus whereas in chapters 1 and 3 we read, for example, “the Lord was angry … saying, Thou also shalt not go in thither” (1:37) and “the Lord said unto me, Let if suffice thee… for thou shalt not go over this Jordan” (3:26-27), in chapter 4 we read: “Furthermore, the Lord… sware that I should not go over Jordan, and that I should not go in unto that good land, which the Lord thy God giveth thee for an inheritance” (4:21).
- Since analysis of words is at the heart of indirect discourse, and their exact repetition the rule for direct discourse, these passages illustrate how, in chapters 1-3, Moses mainly reports the past, whereas in chapter 4 he analyzes it in relation to the present and the future.
- It is because Moses is busy commenting on, and responding to, the past in chapter 4 that his third mention of God’s refusal to allow him to enter the land (4:21) switches naturally, and not accidentally, to indirect discourse.
Moses’ variable practice in his first address casts light on the structure of the history introduced by Deuteronomy. This address presents
(1) a “factual” look at the past, expressed predominantly by reported speech in direct discourse (chaps. 1-3); and
(2) an analytical, evaluative response to the past as a means of indicating its full significance for his audience’s subsequent history in the Land and in eventual exile (4:1-40).
This description corresponds nicely to the overt structure of the Deuteronomic History:
(1) the Deuteronomist’s “factual” look at the past, formed predominantly in the reported speech of Moses expressed in direct discourse (Deuteronomy); and
(2) the Deuteronomist’s analytical, evaluative response to that past in order to indicate its full significance for his audience’s subsequent history in the Land and in eventual exile (Joshua-2 Kings).
Moses’ second address (5:1b-28:68) involves a compositional build-up of Moses’ status as a mouthpiece of God.
- Whereas in the first address Moses is depicted as reporting God’s word by respecting the clear-cut boundaries of that speech through the predominant use of direct discourse,
- in the second address this mode of reporting almost completely disappears, despite the fact that the legislative word of God predominates in quantity as well as in emphasis throughout the address.
- God is quoted in direct discourse only nine times in twenty-four chapters (5:6-21, 28-31;9:12, 13-14, 23; 10:1-2, 11; 17:16; and 18:17-20). The compositional importance of this difference between the first two addresses is great.
Since the Deuteronomic law code, the core of the book, is phrased as a direct address of Moses to the people, it is much more difficult to determine within the code which utterances are meant to represent the very words of God, which the commenting and responding reactions of Moses, and which a combination of both.
- In Moses’ first address it is relatively easy to distinguish between Moses’ declaring of God’s word and his teaching or interpretation of that word; in the law code we can no longer tell the difference.
- This contrast between the subordinate style of Moses’ first address and the supreme authoritative promulgation of the law code in the second address is the main compositional means by which the Deuteronomist exalts Moses’ teaching authority.
- Whereas Moses quotes the Ten Commandments of the Lord in direct discourse (5:6-21)—that is, God is allowed to speak to the Israelites directly—in the law code of chapters12-28 it is Moses who speaks directly to the Israelites concerning “the statutes and judgments, which ye shall observe to do in the land, which the Lord God of thy fathers giveth thee to possess it, all the days that ye live upon the earth” (12:1).
- The effect of the law code’s composition, therefore, is to show us that the authoritative status of the Mosaic voice is almost indistinguishable from that of the voice of God, whatever else that narrator—or Moses, for that matter—may tell us about the fundamental distinction between the two.
- If the theoretical distinction between God’s word and Moses’ is still clearly maintained, the practical importance of this distinction, that is, our very ability to so distinguish them, is obliterated by the law code’s internal composition.
If both Moses and the narrator can quote God directly;
if both of them teach by using “that day” to shed light on “this day”;
if the very structure of Moses’ first address mirrors, in key compositional ways, that of the Deuteronomic History itself;
if, in short, as Moses speaks for God, so the narrator speaks for Moses,
then, with the preeminence of Moses’ word established in the law code, the very authority of the narrator is more clearly defined and enhanced.
What the Deuteronomist is gradually blurring, as his narrator’s long report of Moses’ various addresses advances, is the distinction between the teaching authority of his hero and that of his narrator. The composition of the law code is a crucial stage in the book’s overall ideological plan.
It appears, therefore, that Deuteronomy, as a panoramic preview of the subsequent history, vibrates with the following hermeneutic ration:
- as the word of God is to the word of Moses,
- so the word of Moses is to the word of his narrator.
The leveling of the words of God and of Moses in the law serves the same purpose as the other devices that overtly exalt the status of Moses; they all contribute toward a powerful legitimation of the narrator’s authority in relation to Moses. As a result, when the narrator is ready to speak at length in his own voice in Joshua through 2 Kings, the distinction between his words and Moses’ is practically irrelevant.
The reader has been prepared for this effect by the compositional fusion of the divine-Mosaic word in the law code.
When we move from composition to content, what precisely is Moses reported as saying about his own unique role as declarer and teacher of God’s word? The answer once again involves us in an unavoidable dialogue. On the second hand, what Moses says in chapter 5 about his commissioning by God is surely his most pointed reference in the book to his own unique status. Here Moses reports in direct discourse what God told him, “Go say to them, ‘Get you into your tents again.’ But as for thee stand thou here by me, and I will speak unto thee all the commandments, and the statutes, and the judgments, which thou shalt teach them, that they may do them in the land which I give them to possess it” (5:30-31).
The point is clear:
- after hearing the voice of God speak the Decalogue, the people fear that they cannot hear more and live.
- Moses tells them that God sees the justice of this fear and so has commanded him to teach them his further words.
- The law code, then, is precisely a report of Moses teaching the people, at God’s command, what God has told him.
- And Moses, having heard God directly, does not die.
On the other hand, Moses is depicted as raising a direct challenge to his own unique status. In the midst of the law code, Moses returns to the event of his original commissioning by God, the authenticating utterance of God first mentioned in 5:28-31. However, this second recounting of the divine commissioning uses Moses’ words against himself, as it were, by revealing that another “Moses” is part of the package. And his commission is also to report God’s word to the people: “And the Lord said unto me … I will raise them up a Prophet from among their brethren, like unto thee, and will put my words in his mouth; and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him” (18:17-18).
In 5:23-31 and 18:15-19, therefore, Moses is represented as twice relating the same incident, and presumably the same utterance of God, in response to the people’s request for an intermediary to convey God’s word to them. That is, Moses is described as appealing to the same occasion and to the same divine utterance to authenticate both his own prophetic role and that of a “prophet like unto him.”
If we ask what specific laws, commandments, and statutes Moses is empowered by the commission of 5:31 to set forth, we are led, by the clear-cut construction of the book, to answer: the laws and ordinances introduced by the words “These are the statutes and judgments” (12:1) and concluding with “This day the Lord thy God hath commanded thee to do these statutes and judgments” (26:16).
When we then ask what words precisely are referred to when God says, in 18:18, “I … will put my words in his mouth; and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him,” these “words” are twofold:
- Deuteronomy on the one hand
- and Joshua-2 Kings on the other.
Just as Moses first relates the commandments of God in direct discourse (most often in the first address, and most pointedly in the second address with the reporting of the Decalogue) and then abruptly shifts to a much more authoritative manner of reporting that tends to blur the distinction between divine and Mosaic speech, so also the prophet “like unto” Moses first relates the words of God/Moses in direct discourse (Deuteronomy) and then abruptly shifts to a much more authoritative manner of reporting, which blurs the distinction between the words of God/Moses and his own (Joshua-2 Kings).
In effect, then, the prophet “like unto” Moses is the narrator of the Deuteronomic History, or, more precisely, that authorial presence in the text which scholars have personified as “the Deuteronomist.” It is he who uses Moses’ direct words to explain by a hortatory law code the wide-ranging implications of Decalogue; in a widening circle, this same “author” will soon be using his narrator’s direct words to explain in an exemplary history the wide-ranging implications of that law code.
Dialogue in Deuteronomy
So far we have seen examples from Deuteronomy which reveal through composition and content a double-voiced accent in regard to Moses’ preeminent place as declarer and teacher of God’s word. This “dialogue”—to use Bakhtin’s term for such phenomena—was found first in the narrator’s own voice, which overtly promotes Moses’ eminence to the highest degree, both by explicit statement and by implicit composition, yet at the same time subtly draws attention to itself through a series of pedantic and apparently haphazard frame-breaks. Second, we found that even Moses’ own words draw us in two directions in regard to his self-awareness as preeminent teacher of God’s word.
The dialogue, however, turns out to be much more wide-ranging than a simple and singular disagreement over Moses’ place in the scheme of things. Whether we listen to Moses’ abundant utterances or the narrator’s parsimonious few, composition and content combine to reveal within each voice a juxtaposition of opposing viewpoints on key ideological issues such as the nature of God and the privileged role of his people Israel.
Moses’ rhetorical questions in 4:7-8, 32-34 emphasize Israel’s special status in God’s eyes.
In 7:6 Moses again stresses Israel’s unique relationship: “For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God; the Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people who are upon the face of the earth.”
Israel is unique among the nations precisely because of God’s special treatment. But elsewhere Moses provides disquieting evidence that casts doubt on Israel’s privileged status. In chapter 2, for example, he quotes God to the effect that Mount Seir, Moab, and Ammon have been providentially allotted to the sons of Esau and the sons of Lot for their inheritance.
Apparently the Lord reserves various forms of special treatment for other nations as well—and special punishment also: “As the nations which the Lord destroyeth before your face, so shall ye perish; because ye would not be obedient unto the voice of the Lord your God” (8:20). With this statement Moses introduces us to another disquieting perspective on Israel’s relation to God: “Not for thy righteousness, or for the uprightness of thine heart, dost thou go to possess their land: but for the wickedness of these nations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee, and that he may perform the word which the Lord sware unto thy fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (9:5).
The special relationship between Israel and YHWH, described by Moses elsewhere, apparently exists within a larger context. God seems to have a twofold motive for giving the Promised Land to Israel:
- retribution, to punish for their wickedness the nations dispossessed by Israel,
- and gracious fulfillment of his solemn promise to the fathers.
And what happened to those nations will happen to the Israelites also,Moses warns in 8:20. It seems, after all, that Israel is little different, at least in this regard, from the other nations that in the past have enjoyed God’s blessings.
Israel is now benefitting from the wickedness (could it even be the disobedience?) of some of those nations, just as other nations will eventually benefit from Israel’s disobedience.
The subject matter of the narrator’s frame-breaks at 2:10-12, 20-23 is a good example of how composition reinforces content in promoting this ideological dialogue on Israel’s status in relation to the other nations. For example, when the narrator interrupts Moses’ words with his own:
But the Lord destroyed [the giants/Zamzummim] before [the children of Ammon]; and they succeeded them, and dwelt in their stead: As he did to the children of Esau, which dwelt in Seir, when he destroyed the Horims from before them; and they succeeded them, and dwelt in their stead even unto this day; (2:21-22)
the content of this interruption echoes that of God’s words, quoted by Moses throughout chapters 2 and 3, concerning his gift of land to the sons of Esau and of Lot.
The question, then, never answered but raised several times in the book by God, Moses, and the narrator himself, is this:
If all these nations inside and outside the Promised Land have been dispossessed in the past, and are now being dispossessed, through the retributive hand of God, was their land also given to them through a divine promise similar to that made to Israel’s fathers?
Also unanswered is the question about the nature of the punishment meted out to the nations dispossessed by Israel:
If God is just, then does not his treatment of the nations imply some sort of previous covenant with them similar to that made with Israel at Horeb, and which, like Israel, they have violated?
Whereas Moses’ rhetorical questions seem to imply absolute confidence in Israel’s uniqueness as a special nation unto God, his words elsewhere, as in 8:20 and 9:4-5 and throughout chapters 2 and 3, cast doubt on the absoluteness of that confidence. In these hints of a living dialogue a limited, religiously based nationalism is being cautiously expanded on an international and political scale. The succeeding chapters of the Deuteronomist’s history spell out the details of this political theology.
A second major ideological dialogue fills the pages of Deuteronomy, concerning the relation between God’s justice and his mercy with respect to Israel. Warning statements about the retribution nature of God’s acts are so widespread and seem to be so definitive in the book that an opposing view about his fundamental mercy and abiding partiality would seem to be difficult to maintain.
The key vehicle in Deuteronomy for describing God’s unconditional mercy is “the covenant which God swore to the fathers,” and the unconditionality of this promise is often neutralized by reference to the necessary condition of obedience.
Texts such as 6:3, 10-15, 23-24; 7:6-11, 12-13; 8:1, 18-19; 10:11-13, 15-17; 11:8-9, 20-23; 12:1; 13:17b-18; and 26:14-15 reveal recurrent attempts to achieve a synthesis of the covenant with the fathers and the covenant at Horeb by making the latter a precondition for the enactment of the former. Obedience thereby becomes a condition for the fulfillment of God’s apparently unconditional oath to the fathers, and God thereby becomes fundamentally a God of justice, not of mercy, who, as Moses says, is “God of gods, and Lord of lords, a great God, a mighty, and an awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe”(10:17 [AR]).
In Deuteronomy the telling of God’s mercy is almost always neutralized by an immediately preceding or subsequent telling of his terrible vengeance or of the need for obedience.
On the other hand, whatever God, Moses, and the narrator predominantly say in Deuteronomy, nothing is more clearly shown in the book than the fact that Israel, already destined for disobedience, is going to receive a land it does not deserve. God’s central decision, recounted in chapters 9 and 10, to give Israel the Land despite the people’s initial and immediate disobedience, is a prelude to the entire Deuteronomic History, in which Israel exists in the Land in almost unceasing disobedience to the Mosaic covenant. Through the entire period in Judges, and up to the end of 2 Kings, God is nothing if not partial to Israel.
What Deuteronomy shows, therefore, as a prelude to the entire Deuteronomic History, is a God continually mindful of the promise he made to the fathers—so much so that, by the end of the history, the fall of Jerusalem becomes a climax that is the story’s greatest paradox:
- why, after all the centuries of Israel’s disobedience and God’s partiality, does God at last forget the promise he made to the fathers and finally do what Moses had told them he would do?
A convincing account of how brilliantly the Deuteronomist works up to his climactic mystery in 2 Kings has yet to be written.