Author: Neil Godfrey

In my last three posts I explained why I believe we have sound reasons for thinking that the Old Testament story of King Josiah’s “book of the law”, generally understood by modern scholars as the book of Deuteronomy, is a “pious fiction.” I further proposed reasons for believing the story to have originated in Hellenistic times.

This episode has some importance in the field of biblical studies because the story of the discovery of this book in Josiah’s time (late seventh century BCE) is widely seen as a lynch pin for dating the composition of many of our biblical books, especially major revisions to the Pentateuch and the narrative of Israel’s history from Joshua to the Babylonian captivity. If the biblical literature was actually a product of Hellenistic times then we may be invited to further read it through Greek eyes — and that might prove discombobulating to a few of us.

I intend to follow up my last three posts with another that, not really to be contrary, notes evidence that there probably were “religious reforms” in Judah around the time of Josiah. I hope readers will see how they “fit with” but do not overturn the view that the biblical story of the discovery of the law was a late invention. That will be my next post.

In the meantime, here is a table that demonstrates how the biblical story of the discovery of the book of the law in the temple in Josiah’s day fits a standard fictional template for similar stories about discovering long lost writings in sacred places.

The above layout is adapted from the following article by Katherine Stott:

• Stott, Katherine. “Finding the Lost Book of the Law: Re-Reading the Story of ‘The Book of the Law’ (Deuteronomy–2 Kings) in Light of Classical Literature.” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 30, no. 2 (December 2005): 153–69.

Continuing from Why Josiah’s Reforms “Must Have Happened” – part 2 

Rainer Albertz is disputing the arguments of Philip R. Davies that the book of Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic History could not have been written as early as the time of King Josiah. Part 2 addressed Deuteronomy itself; part 3 looks at the dating of the Deuteronomistic History.

We saw in Part 1 that Finkelstein and Silberman defaulted to the view that Josiah’s reforms had to have been historical despite the lack of unambiguous archaeological evidence. Albertz points out that there is wide acceptance of this view:

The suggestion that the report of Josiah’s reform was contemporary with the events, which is advocated by most scholars of the Cross school, has led I. Finkelstein and N.A. Silberman, among others, to believe that the DtrH is completely reliable on this point. (37)

What is the Cross school? It is the viewpoint aligning with much of the work of Frank Moore Cross, in particular beginning with Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic. There we read:

We are pressed to the conclusion by these data that there were two editions of the Deuteronomistic history, one written in the era of Josiah as a programmatic document of his reform and of his revival of the Davidic state. In this edition the themes of judgment and hope interact to provide a powerful motivation both for the return to the austere and jealous god of old Israel, and for the reunion of the alienated half kingdoms of Israel and Judah under the aegis of Josiah. The second edition, completed about 550 B.C., not only updated the history by adding a chronicle of events subsequent to Josiah’s reign, it also attempted to transform the work into a sermon on history addressed to Judaean exiles. (Cross, 287)

As we saw in Part 1, that was exactly the view F&S were following.

But Cross is not given the last word when it comes to the date of the Deuteronomistic History in which the narrative of Josiah and the discovery of the scroll of the Law is found.

But recently Th. Römer, who sympathizes with the Cross school, has shown convincingly that 2 Kings 22-23 ‘should be dated from the exilic period’ (Römer 1997: 10). (37)

Römer lays out a fascinating list of episodes that reflect the literary trope we find in the account of the discovery of the book of Deuteronomy in 2 Kings. Some extracts from Römer’s article:

There may be quite a consensus in critical scholarship about the seventh Century B.C.E. as the starting point of deuteronomism. . . . (2)

Scholars have often used II Reg 22 to reconstruct the »historical circumstances« of the Josianic reform. But a positivist historical reading of the book-finding event does not help much to understand the text. Speyer has demonstrated that the [motif] of book findings in temples or holy places is a quite common literary motive in Antiquity which is mostly used »um einem gerade angefertigten Werk den Schein höheren Alters und großer Heiligkeit zu verleihen« [=”in order to give a newly created work the appearance of greater age and great holiness”]. . . .

The discovery-reports are often variations of the following diagram:

1. An important person wants to change or to »restore« important features in society.
2. He is afraid of Opposition.
3. He or one of his loyal servants is sent to a holy place.
4. There he discovers a Book or written oracles which are of divine origin.
5. This discovery gives divine impulse to the projects of the hero. (7f – my list formatting)

[I]t is clear that the authors or redactors of II Reg 22—23 resort to the same literary convention . . . . (9)

⁴⁶Cf. for instance M. Rose, Der Ausschließlichkeitsanspruch Jahwes. Deuteronomistische Schultheologie und die Volksfrömmigkeit der späten Königszeit, BWANT 106, 1975. Even if Rose brings too far his Interpretation of the archeological data, it is quite clear that the kingdom of Judah became important only in the Vllth Century B.C.E. — 106 may be a typo: see pp 157ff

If II Reg 22—23 is to be read as the foundation myth of the dtr. group and as an ideological or theological attempt to have the end of monarchy accepted, then this text can hardly be used for a reconstruction of the historical circumstances, of the so-called Josianic reform. We should follow scholars like Würthwein, Davies and others and consider II Reg 22—23 above all as a literary and theological construct. This does not mean that no »reform« under Josiah ever existed, we may have even some archaeological support for it⁴⁶, but it is methodological circularity to claim that such a recognization [sic] of politics and cultic affairs under Josiah has been caused by the »discovery« of Deuteronomy. It may also be still possible to reconstruct a Josianic Urdeuteronomium, even if there is no consensus about this reconstruction in recent attempts. II Reg 22—23 should be dated from the exilic period. (10)

So we return to where we began — with Philip Davies’ pointing out the circularity of using the 2 Kings account of the discovery of the book of Deuteronomy to date the book of Deuteronomy and verify the historicity of Josiah’s reforms. Further, the entire narrative should rather be dated from the exilic period, the time of the Babylonian exile, Albertz concurs. (Of course, I am proposing that it could be dated even later — to the Hellenistic period. The point here is that there is no immovable anchor that binds the origin of the narrative to the seventh century.)

The Deuteronomistic History concludes with the deported king of Judah being shown mercy in Babylon and restored to a comfortable life in the royal court. 2 Kings 25:27-30

27 In the thirty-seventh year of the exile of Jehoiachin king of Judah, in the year Awel-Marduk became king of Babylon, he released Jehoiachin king of Judah from prison. He did this on the twenty-seventh day of the twelfth month. 28 He spoke kindly to him and gave him a seat of honor higher than those of the other kings who were with him in Babylon. 29 So Jehoiachin put aside his prison clothes and for the rest of his life ate regularly at the king’s table. 30 Day by day the king gave Jehoiachin a regular allowance as long as he lived.

Römer further observes that that conclusion to the Deuteronomistic History

shares literary conventions with the stories of Esther and Joseph which Meinhold called »novels of the diaspora«. Yoyakin’s fate is similar to that of Mardochai and Joseph. In all three cases an exiled person among others becomes second to the king (II Reg 25,28; Est 10,3; Gen 41,40), and the accession to this new status is symbolized by changing clothes (II Reg 25,29; Est 6,10-11; 8,15; Gen 41,42). These accession stories transform exile into diaspora. The land of deportation changes into a land where the foreigner is welcome. One can live very well outside eretz yisrael and manage interesting careers. It is then not so astonishing that the »hope for return« is quite discreet in the DH. It is enough to know how to pray towards the temple (I Reg 8,48).

Why, then, do we not see any hints of a Persian period in the text if it was really written during that time?

We may still ask why are there no direct allusions to the Persian period in DH. Probably because the Dtrs. of the postexilic times were quite »modern« historians: if you write a historiography you do not include your own present⁵¹.

The question then becomes, “Is it possible to define a latest possible date” for the composition of the Deuteronomistic History?

To answer this question Albertz notes that in every reference to the exile in the Deuteronomistic History (as in Solomon’s prayer and the conclusion of 2 Kings) there is no hint that the author is aware that the Babylonian exile will come to an end. There is no hint of awareness that the Babylonian empire will fall.

In other prophetic works — Jeremiah 29:10-14 and Isaiah 40:1-2 — Albertz points out that the authors foresaw the collapse of the Babylonian empire with the advancing power of the Persians. He finds other references to the return from exile (Deuteronomy 4:29-31, 30:1-11, Jeremiah 31:31-33; 32:37-41; etc — being written from the perspective of early days in the return from exile.

In the event that the DtrH emerged largely between 562 and 547 and its later parts followed until the year 520, then several conclusions can be drawn which are of some importance for the assessment of the Josianic reform. First, we get another important confirmation that the book of Deuteronomy could not have emerged in the later Persian period but must have been written earlier. Since Deuteronomy 4 presupposes not only the Deuteronomic core in chs. 12-26 [in Part 2 we saw how Albertz dated this work to Josiah’s time], but also includes its admonitory frame in Deut. 4.44-30.20, the book of Deuteronomy must have been largely finished by 540. Second, since most of the DtrH was composed during the 15 years following the release of Jehoiachin (562), their authors were not too far away from the period when Josiah’s reform was carried through (622-609 BCE).

This brings us to what I call might call a “classic” argument so often used in attempting to date biblical narratives close to the time of the events they describe:

This would mean that the Deuteronomistic Historians had to be aware that there were still some eye-witnesses alive and that there were a lot of people among their audience whose fathers or grandfathers had participated in Josiah’s government. So they could not invent fabulous fairy tales, whatever religious ideology they wanted to promote. They could overstate some measures and they could ignore others — and they did both: they generalized the cult reform, but they ignored the social and national reform attempts — nevertheless, they could not lie. This means that the reliability of the DtrH for the events of the late seventh and early sixth century can be assessed as good, if we take its ideology into account.

The same logic is used to argue for dating the gospels to the generation who “eye-witnessed” the events related, the book of Acts to the late first century, and to date Paul’s letters to the mid-first century. I do not recall ever encountering this type of reasoning to verify historical source material in any relatively modern discussion of historical events in other (non-biblical) fields of enquiry. However, I have seen incredulous remarks of other historians about the methods of their “biblical” peers. See The Bible – History or Story for Davies’ response to this kind of argument.

The very notion that one should give a priori  credence to a narrative whose author(s) we do not know, whose time and place of composition we do not know, and whose source materials are equally opaque, is unheard of, I suspect, in other fields of historical inquiry.

Thus the entire discussion is a weighing of the extent to which biblical texts can be assigned with plausibility to either the seventh or sixth centuries, the time of Josiah or the time of captivity and soon afterwards. The ultimate justification for defaulting to the early Persian era as the “latest most probable” is the silence about any later period in those texts. In this respect, Albertz may have appeared to have overlooked Römer’s point:

We may still ask why are there no direct allusions to the Persian period in DH. Probably because the Dtrs. of the postexilic times were quite »modern« historians: if you write a historiography you do not include your own present.

But he did not overlook it at all. In fact, he found it inadequate as an explanation for the silence:

But [Römer’s] answer, that the Deuteronomistic Historians — like modem ones — avoided including their own present, is not convincing. The present can be excluded or not, but in every historical work, whether ancient or modern, the reader can find out from what temporal perspective it was written. (Albertz, 38)

If we agree with that statement — that a “historical work” cannot avoid betraying (however implicitly) the time perspective from which it is written — then we may argue that the stronger case for the origin of the story of Josiah’s reforms is actually in the Hellenistic period. It is in the Deuteronomistic History that one finds the model of Greek historiography, and even in the Book of Deuteronomy itself as we saw again in the previous post, we see striking correspondences to Greek thought. We also find a historical context in the fluctuating relationships between the Judean and Samaritan peoples and contest over the place of Jerusalem in the Yahweh cult of the early Hellenistic era.

Finally,

The Historical Evidence

The final point of Albertz’s discussion is “the historical evidence”. For Davies, there was no time when the kingdom of Judah was free from the domination of great powers. After the Assyrians retreated Judah became a vassal of Egypt. Accordingly, there was no period during which Josiah was free to undertake any kind of expansionist policy to try to incorporate the erstwhile northern kingdom of Israel into his control — which, recall, has been claimed to be the reason for Josiah’s propaganda of the Deuteronomistic literature. It was to unite Judah in support of a “single Israel” under one cult based in Jerusalem.

Finkelstein and Silberman accept the reconstruction that has Egypt immediately filling in the space left by the Assyrian withdrawal. In order for them to allow Josiah to undertake his reforms, though, they have to limit the active area of interest of Egypt to the coastal fringes of Canaan. Albertz responds that the evidence is simply too sparse for us to draw any firm conclusions. The argument falls back on a majority view of scholars:

Whatever concrete scenario one might imagine, however, it is interesting to notice that even most of those scholars who think that the domination over Palestine passed uninterrupted from the Assyrians to the Egyptians do not want to deny the possibility of the Josianic reform. (42)

Why Josiah’s Reforms “Must Have Happened”?

There is no evidence in the historical record that they did happen.

But the authors of the biblical literature evidently needed to assign to those texts a history that would lend them credibility.

The literary tradition of discovering lost texts or other sacred artefacts was as old as time, at least as old as ancient Pharaohs and Mesopotamian kings. The motif continued through to Greco-Roman times and beyond. One may even suggest the discovery of Deuteronomy in Josiah’s time has the same level of credibility as Joseph Smith’s discovery of the Book of Mormon. But if the discovery is to have any import, it cannot be told as a simple pedestrian event. Some response that speaks to the extraordinariness of the find is required.

The narrative of Josiah’s reforms in the wake of the discovery “must have happened”. They were as necessary and inevitable as the thunder, lightning, thick cloud and trumpet blast that accompanied the voice of God on Mount Sinai.

Albertz, Rainer. “Why a Reform like Josiah’s Must Have Happened.” In Good Kings and Bad Kings: The Kingdom of Judah in the Seventh Century BCE, edited by Lester L. Grabbe, 27–46. London: T&T CLARK, 2007.

Cross, Frank Moore. Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Davies, Philip R. In Search of “Ancient Israel.” Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1992.

Silberman, Neil Asher, and Israel Finkelstein. The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts. New York: Touchstone, 2002.

Gmirkin, Russell E. Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible. New York: Routledge, 2016.

Römer, Thomas C. “Transformations in Deuteronomistic and Biblical Historiography On »Book-Finding« and other Literary Strategies.” Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 109, no. 1 (January 1, 1997): 1–11.

Continuing from Why Josiah’s Reforms “Must Have Happened” – part 1 

Rainer Albertz is disputing the arguments of Philip R. Davies that the book of Deuteronomy could not have been written as early as the time of King Josiah.

Argument 1:

According to Davies, since Deuteronomy uses the name “Israel” to refer to all of the people of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, it would not have made sense in the time of Josiah. The reason? In the time of Josiah “Israel” referred only to the northern kingdom, not to Josiah’s kingdom of Judah in the south. See the map. Furthermore, the northern kingdom of Israel had already been overcome by the Assyrians so it no longer existed in Josiah’s time. Deuteronomy’s Israel is a fully united people of all twelve tribes, Judah included — an anomaly in the seventh century BCE.

Albertz’s rebuttal is as follows:

1. — The name “Israel” in the books of Samuel and Kings can sometimes refer exclusively to the northern kingdom of Israel but it can also refer more generally to the kingdoms of Israel plus Judah — 2 Samuel 5:12; 6:20-21; 8:15; 19:22; I Kings 1:34; 4:1; 11:42.

2. — Isaiah 8:17 “clearly contradicts Davies’ hypothesis”:

[I]n Isa. 8.17 the prophet Isaiah could call the Southern and Northern Kingdom ‘both houses of Israel’. Here the term ‘Israel’ explicitly embraces the two states ( בתים ). This means that unless one wants to question Isaiah’s preaching during the Syro-Ephraimite crisis 734-732 BCE, the inclusive meaning of the name ‘Israel’ is already common during the eighth century. (31)

3. — The Book of Nehemiah,

which we can date with a high degree of probability in the second part of the fifth century, does not lay any emphasis on the term ‘Israel’. . . . Thus it seems to me extremely difficult to explain the inclusive usage of the term ‘Israel’ in Deuteronomy from a fifth century background.” (31f)

4. — The biblical record speaks of the two kingdoms, north and south, sharing “common moral and religious values.”

‘No such thing ought to be done in Israel’, said the Judaean princess Tamar to Amnon who wanted to rape her in Jerusalem. The God Yhwh is always named the ‘God of Israel’, never the God of Judah, even when he was venerated in Jerusalem. (32)

Argument 2:

Another reason Davies cannot accept Deuteronomy being a product of seventh century Judah is the book’s call to destroy the religious icons of the “nations” of the land, even to wipe out those peoples themselves. Such a call in seventh century Judah, a kingdom that consisted of a number of population groups and most likely different religious customs, would have been a call to civil war against a huge swathe of the king’s population. Much more likely, in Davies’ view, is that Deuteronomy was addressing an ideological conflict between immigrants and the indigenous population.

Albertz’s response:

Philip Davies thinks that the sharp distinction between Israel and the foreign nations presented by the Deuteronomy would make no sense in a reform under a king whose subjects include a plurality of cultures or population elements . . . . Interpreted as a contrast between the immigrants and the indigenous population it would fit much better in the conflict between the returnees and the ‘people of the land’ in the Persian period. It can be admitted that there are material parallels between the concepts of Deuteronomy and Ezra/Nehemiah. Nevertheless, there is the problem that the terminology in Deuteronomy and in Ezra/Nehemiah is completely different . . . .

Albertz notes the different terminology used by Deuternomy and Ezra/Nehemiah for “foreigners” and “people of the land” and “nations in the land”.  Ezra/Nehemiah, of course, is in Albertz’s view most probably from the Persian era when Judeans were returning in Persian times to their homeland from their Babylonian exile.

Thus it is not possible to bring Deuteronomy and Ezra-Nehemiah into a literary coherence. (33)

For Albertz, the differences in terminology and character of the two works — Deuteronomy and Ezra/Nehemiah — testify to the unlikelihood of them both coming from the same time in the relatively small population province of Persian Yehud. The works are too different for us to imagine them coming from the same place and time, especially given the small size of that place at that time.

Further, we must accept that when Ezra/Nehemiah speaks of a reading of the Law, it is referring to the reading of Deuteronomy (Neh 13:1-2; Deut 23:4). Hence Deuteronomy must have existed “a long time” prior to Ezra/Nehemiah (33).

Besides, Albertz continues, in the time of Josiah the multiple population groups within the kingdom of Judah would have merged more or less into a single cultural entity, so Josiah’s call for religious reform would have been aimed at the remnants of idolatry that had crept in when the Assyrians had dominated the area. The Assyrians had by Josiah’s time since left, leaving Judah a newly found independence, Albertz suggests.

Argument 3: 

Philip Davies followed S.A. Geller (2000: 273-319) who stated that Deuteronomic legislators support an individual concept of covenant that would constitute a close parallel to the book of Nehemiah. Geller thinks that a new examination of Deuteronomy would conclude ‘that the collectivity of the covenant community barely masks the fact that it is a radically new type of association of individuals’ (2000: 300). Geller and Davies have rightly pointed out that many laws of Deuteronomy stress the responsibility of the individual, like Deut. 13.7-12. (33)

That is, Deuteronomy and the “evidently” Persian era Nehemiah share the same concept of a covenant between the individual and God as distinct from the supposedly pre-Persian notion of a collective national covenant.

Albertz replies:

Yes, Deuteronomy does contain the idea of an individual responsibility but this does not negate the notion of collective responsibility. Thus, for instance,

the rule of Deut. 24.16 that a son should not be punished for the sins of his father and vice versa is only valid for human jurisdiction. If God’s jurisdiction is involved, then Deuteronomic legislators know a collective responsibility for appeasing God’s anger (e.g. Deut. 21.1-9). And the same is valid for the Deuteronomic concept of covenant: in all passages where it is unfolded in some detail (Deut. 26.16-19; 28.69-29.28) it is always a collective ‘you’ who enters into the covenant with YHWH. (33f)

Deuteronomy, Albertz reminds us, has often been thought to have been influenced by the Assyrian vassal treaties that hold a king and his subjects collectively bound in loyalty to the Assyrian king.

This collective shape of the Deuteronomic concept is a heritage of the Assyrian vassal-treaties, which gave the model. A closer comparison between the shapes of covenant in Deuteronomy and Ezra/Nehemiah reveals a decisive difference: what had been a collective covenant in accordance with the vassal-treaties in Deuteronomy became in Ezra 10 and Nehemiah 10 an individual commitment according to private contracts; no longer God but only the community made the agreement, and all leaders of the families of the different groups of society signed personally that they were going to commit themselves to specific moral and religious duties. Not by chance does a different terminology for such a self commitment ( אמנה instead of ברית ) occur in Neh. 10.1. These differences in the covenant concepts are so fundamental that it is unlikely that both could come from the same post-exilic period. In my view, the parallels between the Deuteronomic concept of covenant and the Assyrian vassal-treaties make a dating in the seventh or at latest in the sixth century more probable.²⁵

Argument 4: 

Then there is the law in Deuteronomy that neuters the king of all his privileges and traditional powers.

Davies mainly pointed out that the radical limitations of monarchical power made in 17.16-20 were completely unrealistic: ‘There are no plausible explanations why a king should accept a reform that deprives him of the essential powers of monarchy, justice and warfare’ . . .  (34)

Albertz:

Admittedly, the law of kings sounds unrealistic to us; the question remains whether a later date would make its utopian concept more realistic. Moreover, there is no hint in the text that its author was looking forward to the restoration of an idealized kingship (cf. Nelson 2002: 223), in contrast to many exilic and postexilic prophetic texts. Every attempt to date Deut. 17.14-20 in the Persian period is confronted with the problem that this law still held on to the divine election of the king according to the Davidic theology (Ps. 89.4,20), whereas the Davidides disappeared from the political stage after the failure of Zerubbabel 519/518 BCE. (34)

Albertz appeals further:

What the Deuteronomic legislators intended with their radical law was nothing else than the creation of what was called later a ‘constitutional monarchy’. The measures may have been impractical to some degree and somewhat utopian like other archaic reform models of the ancient world,²⁹ but the goal was very concrete and — as we can see in the later history of humankind — with other measures definitely realizable. But why should such a far reaching constitutional reform be conceptualized at a time when the legal limitation of monarchic power was completely irrelevant for Judah? In my view, the most probable period for dating the Deuteronomic law of kings are the reigns of Jehoiakim and Zedekiah, when the alliances with Egypt became a new threat for Judah (17.16) and when the Shaphanide scribes, who are the best candidates for having written the Deuteronomic law, resisted the ruling kings (Jer. 26.24; 36.9-26).³⁰ (35)

Argument 5:

Philip Davies suggested that the centralization of the cult was a problem of the early Persian period, when after the reconstruction of the Jerusalem temple its claim to be the only authorized temple of YHWH had to be carried through against the claim of other cult places like that in the former capital Mizpeh. (36)

Here is Davies’ argument. Yes, the prophetic books of Isaiah and Ezekiel do presuppose a centralized cult at Jerusalem, but

. . . the realities of life in Judah during the neo-Babylonian period [inform us that] the capital was at Mizpeh. We do not know whether Jerusalem had any kind of sanctuary at this time, but evidence does suggest that several sanctuaries in the vicinity of Mizpah functioned: Gibeon, Mizpah itself, and especially Bethel. How, and when, Jerusalem was reinstated as capital is not clear; the process of building the Persian period temple is itself unclear, and it is unthinkable that the change of capital from Mizpeh to Jerusalem was achieved without some resentment, nor the reinstatement of Jerusalem as the central sanctuary. Indeed, the replacement of Bethel by Jerusalem as the chief sanctuary of Judah in the mid-fifth century explains a great deal about the Josiah tradition, as I shall now suggest. (Davies, 75 in Grabbe, Good Kings and Bad Kings)

Albertz finds Davies’ argument entirely speculative. There is no evidence for the existence of rival temples in Gibeon, Mizpah or Bethel. No other biblical texts indicate that there were rival sanctuaries to YHWH worship in particular.

Thus, we cannot rule out that there were again rivalries between different YHWH sanctuaries in the post-exilic time, but we can say that cult centralization was no serious problem of that period. (36)

Conclusion

On the basis of the above rebuttals to Davies’ arguments for positing that the date of Deuteronomy better fits the Persian era than it does the time of King Josiah, Albertz writes:

Thus we can conclude: None of Davies’ arguments that Deuteronomy 12-26 should be better dated into the fifth century is convincing. There might be some doubts on a seventh century dating, but the Deuteronomic legislation fits rather less well the socio-political conditions and the literature of the Persian period. (36)

As for my own view, I find some of Albertz’s criticisms limited in their focus. His criticism in Argument 1 relies on dating Ezra/Nehemiah to the Persian period and on the assumption that those works reflect genuine history. See for an alternative view my series of five posts on fallacies of historical method and literary criticism that lie at the heart of common interpretations of Nehemiah.  Albertz also relies on a face value acceptance that the early chapters of Isaiah were written in the monarchic period.

His Arguments 2 and 3 responses hang entirely upon the assumption that works with quite different terminologies and depictions of local scenarios must be from different periods. But different literary schools from the one region are not so implausible if we stretch our view to the Hellenistic period, a time of increasing population and cultural and social developments.

Argument 4 is evidently one that Albertz himself admits to having some difficulty. He acknowledges that Deuteronomy’s law for the king is “unrealistic to us”. The footnote #29 reminds us of another discussion that does place Deuteronomy’s law in a Hellenistic setting:

Pentateuchal legislation did, however, envision a day when the children of Israel would ask for a king, and the Torah of the King (Deut. 17.14-20) speci­fied the qualifications required of that office. The description of the office of king contains many problematic elements inconsistent with the biblical monarchy in Samuel-Kings or indeed with kingship as practiced in the Ancient Near East. The king of the Ancient Near East was a ruler over subjects, with authority passed down within a dynastic royal line, and whose dominion was an expression of raw power. Ancient Near Eastern kings exercised supreme military, judicial, economic, executive and (as patrons of temples) cultic powers. Although these features of Ancient Near Eastern kingship generally cohere with the picture of kingship in Samuel-Kings, they do not correspond to implicit and explicit fea­tures of kingship in Deuteronomy. For instance, the Deuteronomic king appears to have been appointed by his fellow-citizens, that is, by the citizen assembly; the king’s rule was to be subject to written laws, from a copy prepared under priestly supervision; the king was assigned no military, judicial, cultic or executive responsibilities, and indeed the duties of his office are entirely unclear in the Torah of the King. Although the title is that of king, in actuality the envi­sioned office of kingship appears to resemble that of other Ancient Near Eastern kings in name only. Nor did the Deuteronomic kingship resemble the Judean mon­archy of biblical historiography. The commands against accumulating horses, wealth and wives – especially foreign wives – were a conscious contrast to king Solomon’s reign. The famous speech of Samuel against the kingship at 1 Sam. 8.11-18 also implicitly contrasted the Deuteronomic ideal with the actual mon­archy of Judah, which Samuel pictured as quickly descending into a tyranny in which the creation of a standing professional army (8.11-12) and the indulgences of oligarchic luxury of a ruling class (8.13-17) were predicted to result in oppres­sive taxation and the creation of a poverty-stricken underclass (8.15-18). It is thus difficult to understand the office of king in Deut. 17 as describing any biblical Judean or Israelite king or even as broadly compatible with the institution of kingship as known in the Ancient Near East.

Rather, the office of king as described in the Torah of the King appears to have been conceived along democratic Greek lines. Kingship, when it existed among the Greeks, was often an elected position. Dynastic royal lines were mainly a feature of the legendary past (Aristotle, Politics 3.1285a), with a few exceptions in the historical period, such as at Sparta and Cyrene. The evidence that Athens was ever ruled by a true king is inconclusive. In those city-states that possessed an office of king, the idea of kingship varied from polis to polis. At Sparta there were two kings from different royal houses who presided over the gerousia, and whose equal power provided a check against each other.  By Spartan law, their kings functioned as generals and religious leaders only (Aristotle, Politics 3.1285b). At Cyrene, a reform of the kingship deprived the royal line of Battus of most powers, including military command, leaving them with only the priesthood (Herodotus, Histories 4.161; cf. Hagedom 2004: 152; Berman 2008: 190 n. 23). At Mytilene and at Chios there was a panel of kings. At Athens there was a sin­gle elected king, the Archon Basileus (described earlier) whose duties, other than supervision of homicide cases, belonged mainly in the ceremonial and religious realm. The Athenian offices of king and military commander (Polemarch) were distinct since at least the Archaic Era (seventh century BCE) . According to Aris­totle, the most stable monarchic governments were those in which the functions of the king were most limited. The absence of military duties for the office of king in Deut. 17 is highly reminiscent of elected kingship as practiced in Athens (Hagedorn 2004: 152; Berman 2008: 190 n. 23).

A striking feature of kingship as described in the Torah of the King was its sub­ordination to written law. The book of the law was entrusted to the levitical priests (Deut. 17.18). The king was directed to make a copy of this law under priestly supervision (Deut. 17.18), to refer to it constantly and obey its every precept, in order that his tenure as king be long and happy (Deut. 17.19-20). The requirement that the duties of the king should be performed in strict conformity to written law is a characteristically Greek notion. The creation of a copy of the law for royal reference is strikingly reminiscent of the publication of Athenian laws at the Royal Stoa. The subordination of royal rule to either written law or priestly super­vision, as in the Torah of the King, ran contrary to Ancient Near Eastern notions of kingship, but had at least three parallels in early Hellenistic literature. In the Aegyptiaca by Hecataeus of Abdera, it was claimed that the ancient pharaohs of Egypt were directed in their royal activities by priests who ensured their obedi­ence to the strictures of Egyptian law (Diodorus Siculus, Library 1.70-71). In the same text, it was claimed that Darius the Persian not only made a copy of all the ancient laws of Egypt, but studied Egyptian laws with the priests (Diodorus Siculus, Library 1.95.4-5). Finally, in the foundation story of the Jews also writ­ten by Hecataeus of Abdera, it was claimed that Moses selected the most capable men of the nation, appointed them as priests and judges, “and entrusted to them the guardianship of the laws and customs” (Diodorus Siculus, Library 40.3.4-5). None of these three Hecataean traditions can be credited as ancient or factual, but instead reflected Greek political notions foreign to both Egyptians and Jews of pre-Hellenistic times. In all three, the priests functioned as nomophylakes or Guardians of the Laws, and in the first two they additionally acted as supervisors and legal advisors to the kings of Egypt. The office of nomophylakes was found in many Greek city-states, including Athens (Aristotle, Athenian Constitution 4.4; 8.4; cf. Stanton 1990: 30-3, 68-73). Their primary responsibility was to ensure the magistrates obeyed the written laws of the polis. Secondarily, the nomophylakes supervised public behavior, ensuring that those violating public decorum were reported to the proper authorities for prosecution. In the Torah of the King, the requirement that the king, as an elected magistrate, should become knowl­edgeable in the written laws and perform his office in strict accordance with those laws (Deut. 17.18-20) was unequivocally a reflection of Greek political notions. The explicit role of the levitical priests as guardians and public advocates of the written laws that were to be obeyed by the magistrates and people alike, and implicit responsibility for educating the king in his duties of office via these writ­ings and enforcing the written statutes upon the king, casts the levitical priests in the distinctively Greek office of nomophylakes, the same office given the priestly successors to Moses in the Jewish foundation story by Hecataeus. (Gmirkin, 34ff)

Continuing in part 3

In presenting evidence for a late authorship (300 BCE) of the earliest biblical books, I’ve had to address the prevailing view that King Josiah (7th century BCE) undertook reforms based on the laws we read in the Book of Deuteronomy. I’ve already explained why some scholars (e.g. Philip R. Davies, see also Did These 2 Key Events Really Happen?) the reasons for rejecting the historical veracity of that biblical narrative so it is time I addressed the claim that it was indeed a historical event.

In response to Philip R. Davies’ case that the biblical story of Josiah’s Deuteronomistic reforms had no historical basis, Ranier Albertz wrote “Why a Reform Like Josiah’s Must Have Happened” (published in Lester Grabbe’s Good Kings and Bad Kings.)

Since Deuteronomy is primarily about the need for the worship of God to be confined to one central place and that the laws of God should rule all of the state, even the king, Albertz pointed out that it could not have been composed in the Persian era. In the Persian era there was no king of Judah and there was only one temple, the one at Jerusalem, so it makes no sense to imagine someone writing a book that condemned other places of worship and demanded the king be subject to the law, Albertz noted.

[G]iving up the seventh century dating of the Deuteronomy would have far-reaching consequences: not only important features of Israel’s religion like monotheism, exclusivism, and brotherhood would have to be dated much later, but also most of the Deuteronomic reform ideas like the centralisation of cult or the subordination of all the state to the law would lose any connection to societal reality. In the Persian province of Yehud there was only one temple and there existed no king, thus there were no need for centralisation and subordination any longer. As a result of this, an important turning point in the development of Israel’s religious history would disappear. (27)

Albertz referred to The Bible Unearthed in which archaeologists Finkelstein and Silberman explain that the reforms of Josiah are historical fact — despite their acknowledged lack of unambiguous archaeological evidence for them. To quote from Finkelstein and Silberman’s book:

The reign of King Josiah of Judah marks the climax of Israel’s monarchic history — or at least it must have appeared that way at the time. For the author of the Deuteronomistic History, Josiah’s reign marked a metaphysical moment hardly less important than those of God’s covenant with. Abraham, the Exodus from Egypt, or the divine promise to King David. It is not just that King Josiah is seen in the Bible as a noble successor to Moses, Joshua, and David: the very outlines of those great characters — as they appear in the biblical narrative — seem to be drawn with Josiah in mind. Josiah is the ideal toward which all of Israel’s history seemed to be heading. “Before him there was no king like him, who turned to the LORD with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might, according to all the law of Moses; nor did any like him arise after him,” reports 2 Kings 23:25 in a level of praise shown for no other biblical king. (275)

A new era was ushered in with Josiah:

Josiah’s messianic role arose from the theology of a new religious movement that dramatically changed what it meant to be an Israelite and laid the foundations for future Judaism and for Christianity. That movement ultimately produced the core documents of the Bible — chief among them, a book of the Law, discovered during renovations to the Jerusalem Temple in 622 BCE, the eighteenth year of Josiah’s reign. That book, identified by most scholars as an original form of the book of Deuteronomy, sparked a revolution in ritual and a complete reformulation of Israelite identity. It contained the central features of biblical monotheism: the exclusive worship of one God in one place; centralized, national observance of the main festivals of the Jewish Year (Passover, Tabernacles); and a range of legislation dealing with social welfare, justice, and personal morality.

This was the formative moment in the crystallization of the biblical tradition as we now know it. (276)

Reforms followed:

Then, in order to effect a thorough cleansing of the cult of YHWH, Josiah launched the most intense puritan reform in the history of Judah. (277)

This was when the original form of the book of Deuteronomy was written:

Such an ambitious plan would require active and powerful propaganda. The book of Deuteronomy established the unity of the people of Israel and the centrality of their national cult place, but it was the Deuteronomistic History and parts of the Pentateuch that would create an epic saga to express the power and passion of a resurgent Judah’s dreams. This is presumably the reason why the authors and editors of the Deuteronomistic History and parts of the Pentateuch gathered and reworked the most precious traditions of the people ofIsrael: to gird the nation for the great national struggle that lay ahead.

Embellishing and elaborating the stories contained in the first four books of the Torah, they wove together regional variations of the stories of the patriarchs, placing the adventures of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in a world strangely reminiscent of the seventh century BCE and emphasizing the dominance of Judah over all Israel. They fashioned a great national epic of liberation for all the tribes of Israel, against a great and dominating pharaoh, whose realm was uncannily similar in its geographical details to that of Psammetichus.

In the Deuteronomistic History, they created a single epic of the conquest of Canaan, with the scenes of the fiercest battles — in the Jordan valley, the area of Bethel, the Shephelah foothills, and the centers of former Israelite (and lately Assyrian) administration in the north — precisely where their new conquest of Canaan would have to be waged. . . . (283f)

And the evidence for all of this revolutionary development?

Although archaeology has proved invaluable in uncovering the long-term social developments that underlie the historical evolution of Judah and the birth of the Deuteronomistic movement, it has been far less successful in providing evidence for Josiah’s specific accomplishments. (287)

Albertz rightly responds:

According to the authors [Finkelstein and Silberman] Josiah was not only the key figure of a ‘new religious movement’, but also created a new Israelite identity by attempting to unify the Judaeans with the people of the former northern state. In their view, vast parts of the biblical literature, not only Deuteronomy and the first edition of the Deuteronomistic History (DtrH) but also the stories of the Patriarchs, the Exodus, the Conquest, and the Judges were written during this great religious and national upheaval. Even the stories about David and Solomon and their empire must be understood as reflections of the national hopes raised under Josiah and projected back into the past (cf. Finkelstein and Silberman 2001: 144). In ‘Appendix F’ of the book, which curiously enough was not included in the German edition, Finkelstein and Silberman admit on the grounds of archaeological considerations, however, that Josiah was possibly not able to realize his plans of a united monarchy to any large extent (cf. Finkelstein and Silberman 2001: 347-53).

One may ask what caused two scholars, who are inclined towards a minimal position, to reconstruct a vast religious and national movement under king Josiah that goes even beyond a scenario which ‘conservative maximalists’ like me would venture to draw? All methodical restrictions they made seemed to be forgotten: there are no, or no unambiguous, archaeological data which could verify Josiah’s reform. The biblical text, which includes the report given by the DtrH in 2 Kings 22-23, is suddenly taken to be reliable. If we ask in amazement how that could happen, in my opinion the answer will be easy: Finkelstein and Silberman feel obliged to create a substitute for the United Monarchy that they denied. (28)

How did the idea of a united kingdom of David and Solomon arise if it was a fiction, as the archaeological evidence tells us that it was? Albertz observes that Finkelstein and Silberman have to explain it as an invention in Josiah’s time that was meant to unify the people of Judah with those of the fallen northern kingdom of Israel.

In [Finkelstein and Silberman’s] view the ‘great reformation’ of Josiah in the late seventh century not only gave birth to Israel’s unique religion, but also to Israel’s new identity as a united nation under Judaean leadership. (29)

In other words, Albertz is saying, for the archaeologists Finkelstein and Silberman, if the united kingdom of Israel under David and Solomon did not exist, it had to be invented in the time of Josiah to give a new identity to Josiah’s hopes for a new united kingdom of Israel and Judah — all under a newly reformed religion of monotheism and central cult in Jerusalem.

The time of Josiah was the beginning of the biblical literature, according to F&S. Albertz agrees insofar as the only reasonable explanation for the date of the book of Deuteronomy is the time of Josiah — since it would make no sense being composed later in the Persian period when there was no king and a centralized cult in Jerusalem was taken for granted.

In the next post I’ll address Albertz’s more specific arguments for Deuteronomy originating in Josiah’s time.