Deuteronomy

← Encyclopedia

Deuteronomy is the fifth and final book of the Torah, framed as a sequence of speeches delivered by Moses to Israel on the plains of Moab, in sight of a land he has been told he will not enter. The whole book occupies a single suspended moment. The wilderness is behind, the Jordan ahead, and Moses — old, denied the crossing — speaks for the last time to a generation born after the exodus, the children of those who left Egypt. Almost nothing happens. There is no narrative action to speak of until the closing chapters, only a voice rehearsing the past and binding the future, until at the end Moses climbs Mount Nebo, sees the land from a distance, and dies. The book is a deathbed in the form of a law code.

Its Greek name means second law — Deuteronomion, the title the Septuagint translators gave it from a rendering of the Hebrew phrase mishneh ha-torah ha-zot at Deuteronomy 17:18, a phrase meaning a copy of this law that was read instead as though it meant a repetition. The slip was productive: much of the book does restate, and quietly revises, legislation given earlier in the Pentateuch, so the mistranslation caught something real. The Hebrew tradition calls it Devarim, words, after its opening line — Eleh ha-devarim, rendered these are the words — and the difference of titles marks a difference of emphasis. One tradition names the book for what it repeats; the other names it for the act of speaking.

The shape of the farewell

The book reads as a long valediction built from set-piece orations. Moses opens by recounting the wilderness years — the spies, the rebellions, the wandering, the defeats and the conquests east of the Jordan — turning four decades of failure into a single sustained argument about obedience and consequence. He restates the Ten Commandments in a version that differs at points from the one in Exodus, most famously in the reason given for the Sabbath: not the rest of God after creation but the memory of slavery in Egypt. He then sets out an extended body of law — the Deuteronomic Code, chapters 12 through 26 — covering worship, justice, kingship, warfare, the treatment of the poor, the slave, the widow, and the stranger. The code is suffused with a rhetoric absent from the drier priestly legislation of Leviticus: the law is to be loved, taught to children, bound to the body, repeated on the road and at home, because the memory of having been a slave is meant to soften every transaction. The book closes by laying out blessings and curses — life and prosperity against ruin and exile — and pressing a people to choose between them. One of its most quoted lines sets life and death, blessing and curse, before the hearer and tells him to choose life.

The Shema

At the center stands the passage Jewish tradition came to call the Shema, from its first Hebrew word, meaning hear: Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad, conventionally rendered Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one (Deuteronomy 6:4). The exact sense of the four-word Hebrew clause is famously uncertain, and translators have read it as a claim of God’s oneness, of God’s uniqueness, or of God’s being Israel’s alone; the ambiguity has fed centuries of commentary rather than exhausting it. What follows is unambiguous: to love the LORD their God with all their heart, all their soul, and all their strength, to keep these words in the heart, teach them to the children, speak them at home and abroad, at lying down and at rising up, bind them on the hand and between the eyes, and write them on the doorposts of the house.

Those instructions became practice. The Shema is the daily confession of Judaism, recited morning and evening and traditionally on the lips of the dying; it is among the most repeated lines in the religion. The command to bind the words is the textual root of the tefillin, the small leather cases of scripture worn on arm and head at weekday prayer, and the command to write them on the doorpost is the root of the mezuzah affixed to the doorframe. The book does not describe a symbol; it issues an instruction, and the object follows from the verse. Few passages in any scripture have so directly generated a material culture — leather, parchment, ink, and the scribal craft of writing the words exactly — out of a single command to keep them close.

The verb at the heart of the Shema is itself part of the book’s argument. Where older legislation commands obedience, Deuteronomy commands love — the whole-hearted attachment of the people to one God — and this is no soft sentiment but the precise vocabulary of covenant loyalty. In the political treaties of the period a vassal was required to love his overlord; the word named not affection but exclusive, demonstrable fidelity, the refusal of any rival allegiance. Deuteronomy takes that charged term and makes it the inner posture of the covenant, fusing the legal demand for sole worship with the language of the heart. To love God in this book is to keep his commandments, cling to him, and serve no other — and the fusion of duty and devotion that results has run through Jewish and Christian piety ever since. The companion demand is on God’s side a kind of jealousy and on the people’s side a constant danger of forgetting; the book returns again and again to memory and its failure, urging Israel to remember the slavery and the wilderness lest, settled and prosperous in the land, it forget the God who brought it there.

Covenant and the treaty form

What distinguishes Deuteronomy structurally is its insistence on a single sanctuary and a single covenant, written as a binding agreement between God and the nation. Worship is to be conducted not at the many local altars of older Israelite religion — the hilltop shrines and sacred trees inherited from the religious world of Canaan — but only at the place the LORD will choose, a formula repeated through the legal code, never naming the site, though later readers heard Jerusalem in it. The demand for one sanctuary is the legislative engine of the whole book: it gathers what had been scattered shrines into one cult, one priesthood, one festival calendar, one God worshipped in one way.

Centralization forced a chain of revisions, and tracing them is part of what makes the book legible. Once sacrifice could be offered only at the chosen place, meat could no longer be eaten only as an act of worship at a local altar, so Deuteronomy permits secular slaughter for the first time, draining the blood onto the ground. Once the rural shrines were gone, the country Levites who had served them lost their living, so the book repeatedly commissions the people to provide for the Levite alongside the widow, the orphan, and the resident stranger. This humane strain is one of Deuteronomy’s signatures. It commands the release of debts every seven years and the freeing of slaves with provision, forbids returning a runaway slave to his master, protects the wages of the poor laborer and the dignity of the debtor, orders that gleanings be left in the field, and grounds each measure in the same refrain — that Israel was a slave in Egypt and was redeemed. Where Leviticus legislates holiness as separation, Deuteronomy legislates it as memory turned into mercy.

The covenant’s form is striking. Scholars working after the decipherment of ancient Near Eastern archives noticed that the book’s structure — historical preamble, stipulations, deposit and public reading of the text, witnesses, blessings for obedience and curses for breach — closely follows the shape of the treaties a great king imposed on a vassal. Moshe Weinfeld traced the closest parallels not to the older Hittite treaties but to the Neo-Assyrian vassal treaties of Esarhaddon, sworn in 672 BCE, whose curses against a faithless vassal run line for line beside the curses of Deuteronomy 28. In that reading the book takes the political language of empire and turns it upward: God stands in the place of the great king, Babylon’s or Assyria’s overlord recast as the sovereign of heaven, and Israel is the vassal sworn to exclusive loyalty. The first commandment — no other gods — becomes, in this frame, the treaty clause forbidding a vassal to seek another suzerain. The covenant idea that runs through later Judaism and Christianity owes much of its legal vocabulary to this transfer of an imperial form to a theological purpose.

The book found in the Temple

Critical scholarship has placed Deuteronomy at the heart of how the Hebrew Bible was assembled. A long-standing reconstruction identifies it, in some early form, with the book of the law said to have been found in the Temple during repairs in the eighteenth year of King Josiah of Judah, around 622 BCE, as told in 2 Kings 22. The king, hearing it read, tears his clothes and launches a sweeping reform: he purges the Temple of foreign cult, destroys the rural high places, defiles the altars outside Jerusalem, and concentrates worship — and the Passover — in the capital. The reform tracks the Deuteronomic Code so closely, above all in the demand for a single sanctuary that no other book of the Pentateuch makes, that since the early nineteenth century scholars have taken the found scroll to be the core of Deuteronomy itself, whether genuinely recovered or freshly composed and presented as ancient. The book is, for this reason, the one major stratum of the Pentateuch whose date can be fixed with any confidence: its core belongs to the late seventh century BCE, in the orbit of the Josianic reform, with antecedents reaching back toward Hezekiah and editing continuing into the years after the kingdom fell.

That dating made Deuteronomy the keystone of a larger theory. Its theology — the single sanctuary, the conditional covenant, the iron logic by which fidelity brings the land and apostasy brings exile — also governs the long historical narrative that follows it. Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings read as a single extended account, judging each generation and each king by the Deuteronomic standard and explaining the catastrophe of conquest and exile as the covenant curse coming due. Martin Noth named this connected work the Deuteronomistic History; the proposal that one school of thought composed the law and then wrote the nation’s story to its measure remains a foundation of how the Hebrew Bible’s historical books are studied. The dating and the editorial layers stay debated — how much is Josianic, how much exilic, how many hands — but the book’s grip on the shape of the canon is not in dispute.

In the text and the year

Deuteronomy is also a book about books. It is the first part of scripture to imagine itself as written scripture — to command that the law be copied, read aloud to the whole people every seventh year, deposited beside the ark, kept by the king as his own copy, and neither added to nor subtracted from. The insistence on an authoritative written text, exact and unalterable, is itself a Deuteronomic innovation, and it sets a pattern that rabbinic Judaism would carry to its furthest reach. When later Jewish mysticism came to read the Torah not as a record but as a body of divine names, and the letters and numbers of the Hebrew text as a structure of the divine itself, it was building on a book that had already declared its own words holy down to the letter.

In Jewish practice Deuteronomy closes the annual cycle of Torah portions. The yearly reading ends, on the festival of Simchat Torah, with Moses’s death on Nebo and the verdict that no prophet has since arisen in Israel like him — and then turns immediately back to the first words of Genesis, so that the Torah never finishes and the scroll is never rolled shut. Its commands and its rhetoric of love and choice run forward into rabbinic law and liturgy and, by way of the Gospels’ citation of the great commandment — the command to love God with all one’s heart, named first among all the commandments — into Christianity and its New Testament as well. The same verse anchors both the Shema of the synagogue and the great commandment of the church: the same words carried into two traditions that read them differently.

Critical study and the primary text

Modern study of Deuteronomy turns on a few landmark works. Moshe Weinfeld’s Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School (Oxford, 1972) remains the authoritative account of the book’s scribal background and its debts to wisdom literature and the Neo-Assyrian treaty form; it is now reissued by Eisenbrauns, whose catalog entry gives the work’s scope. Jeffrey H. Tigay’s The JPS Torah Commentary: Deuteronomy (Jewish Publication Society, 1996), described by its publisher as setting the traditional Hebrew text beside a fresh translation and a verse-by-verse commentary, is the standard modern reference, attentive both to the centralization law and to the unresolved grammar of the Shema. Gerhard von Rad’s earlier Deuteronomy: A Commentary (1966) gave the theological reading that shaped a generation, and Bernard M. Levinson’s Deuteronomy and the Hermeneutics of Legal Innovation (Oxford, 1997) showed in detail how the Deuteronomic Code rewrites the older Covenant Code of Exodus — the legislative revision the book’s Greek name half-accidentally describes. The connection of the book’s core to the Josianic purge of the rural shrines is laid out in the survey of the Deuteronomic Reform, which dates the discovery of the law-scroll to about 622 BCE. The Hebrew text and its English translations, including the verses of the Shema, are freely available in full.

→ Related: Torah · Pentateuch · Old Testament · New Testament · Ten Commandments · Joshua · Canaan · Jewish Mysticism · Hebrew Gematria Kabbalah · Second Temple Judaism