Deutero-nomy: Greek for "second law," which is suggestive of redundancy and therefore unpromising, the reading experience having been dull enough the first time around. With Israel encamped in Moab, poised to attack Canaan from the east, we are treated to a retrospective from a source, D (for "Deuteronomist"), that isn't a lot more entertaining than P. The battle stories are coming, but first, the rules and regulations, again.
The conceit is Moses's farewell. In three long discourses, he addresses his people and reminds them of their recent history before they embark on a venture--holy war in Canaan--on which he will not accompany them. The main theological theme of the book may strike a general reader as crude and oversimple. It's baldly stated several times, including at 28:1:
"And if you obey the voice of the Lord your God, being careful to do all his commandments which I command you this day, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth. And all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, if you obey the voice of the Lord your God."
The predictable corollary, concerning how disobedience will result in calamitous misfortune, is by no means abjured. In our time, manifest religious hucksters are sometimes criticized for putting forward a rewards-and-punishment theology that is said to be "unbiblical." But the notion that the healthy and wealthy are enjoying God's favor, while the impoverished sick must have done something to deserve their misery, qualifies as "Deuteronomic" and is therefore biblical.
This motif of a rewards theology is sufficiently prominent in Deuteronomy to have caused embarrassed commentators to discover mitigating circumstances. One of these is worth mentioning since it sheds light on the book as a whole. Just a wee bit of biblical literacy tempts one into thinking of the Pentateuch as a unified whole set off from the rest of the Old Testament. It has, after all, its own names--"Pentateuch," "Torah," "Five Books of Moses"--and is the subject of sections with titles like "Introduction to the Pentateuch" in study Bibles. It should follow that Deuteronomy functions as a conclusion to the Pentateuch, a view that is neatly confirmed by the way in which it ends with the death of Moses, its leading character.
Scholars, however, attribute to the D source much of the historical material that follows the Pentateuch, especially in the books of Judges and Kings. Since the D tradition is more recent than either J or E, it seems we have in Deuteronomy, not the conclusion to the Pentateuch, but the opening of an ambitious historical work that covers, not the forty days of Moses's fifth book, but time stretching from Egyptian bondage to national power under King David and onward toward exile in the sixth century B.C. This history is deeply concerned about the fate of the Mosaic faith, established among wandering nomads in the wilderness, after Israel attains prosperous nationhood in a new land. The Deuteronomist's interpretation of history involves a repeating cycle that goes like this. Obedience to God's commandments is the cause of prosperity and good fortune, which is the cause of apostasy, which is the cause of affliction, which is the cause of repentance, which is the cause of prosperity and good fortune.
The rewards for obedience, and tribulations for straying, that the reader of the book of Deuteronomy may find rather too tidy is actually a miniature version of a sweeping historical process described by the Deuteronomist. I don't understand, however, why this should make anyone less skeptical about the tidiness. It's true that, when things are going well in this tradition, there is an unattractive sheen of national and religious triumphalism that then gets rubbed out when the inevitable catastrophe chastens the celebrants. But making the story less repugnant doesn't make it more believable.
Anyway, there is still a lot that's repugnant. Plowing through Deuteronomy is a lot like plowing through Leviticus and Numbers, which is to say, you are occasionally jarred awake by lurid passages that are, or ought to be, more of an embarrassment than all the emphasis on rewards. There are few constraints imposed upon those about to wage "holy war" against the inhabitants of Canaan:
"When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it. And if its answer to you is peace and it opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall serve you. . . . Thus you shall do to all the cities which are very far from you, which are not cities of the nations here. But in the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God gives you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the Lord your God has commanded. . ."
American Christians would probably be more familiar with such a passage if it occurred in the Koran. Cruel and unusual punishments persist:
"If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son, who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of is mother, and, though they chastise him, will not give heed to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall say to the elders of his city, 'This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.' Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones; so you shall purge the evil from your midst; and all Israel shall hear, and fear."
Concerning this passage, the editor of The Oxford Annotated Bible helpfully observes that "the law is severe." I had to read the following several times:
"You shall have a place outside the camp and you shall go out to it; and you shall have a stick with your weapons; and when you sit down outside, you shall dig a hole with it, and turn back and cover up your excrement. Because the Lord your God walks in the midst of your camp, to save you and to give up your enemies before you, therefore your camp must be holy, that he may not see anything indecent among you, and turn away from you."
An irreverent comedian could have some fun. What? God did not want to be reminded that his chosen people were the kind who? . . . you know. Then, pantomime.
It seems it shouldn't be so hard to persuade people that we are separated from these texts by a great gulch of time and culture and that it's sort of childish to regard the whole shooting match as an inspired transcript from God.
