DEUTERONOMY AS COVENANT

Deuteronomy as Covenant

This post is a little more technical in nature than most of mine and may appeal to a narrower audience. Therefore I will try to keep it short.

Many king-vassal treaties or covenants have been uncovered from the ancient Middle East, each with its own characteristics. This is not the place to discuss this complicated subject in any detail, but references 1 and 2 below offer good, brief summaries. The closest literary model to Deuteronomy from among these legal documents appears to be the form used in late 2nd millennium B.C. Hittite treaties. Despite skeptical opinions regarding the validity of these parallels (such as voiced by Mayes), there is a reasonable consensus among scholars on which sections in Deuteronomy correspond with the various elements of the Hittite covenants.

For example, the first five verses probably constitute a longer version of the document's title; the remainder of ch. 1 through ch. 3 or 4 is the historical prologue; the stipulations are found next through ch. 26; and the remaining treaty elements are scattered throughout the last chapters in an order that differs somewhat from the Hittite model (see Ref. 3 for a variation). Yet another attempt to match up these elements is given in Figure 2, based on the divisions in Deuteronomy which I developed earlier (See the post “Deuteronomy: Introduction to the Literary Structure”) and are pictured in Figure 1.

Figure 1: The Overall Structure of Deuteronomy

I. Introduction: Israel's Past (1:1-4:49)

II. God Gives the Law to His People (5:1-11:25)

III. Specific Legislation (11:26-28:68)

IV. God's Covenant with His People (29:1-30:20)

V. Conclusion: Israel's Future (31:1-34:12)

Figure 2: Deuteronomy as Covenant

Section     Verses             Deuteronomy                 2nd Millennium Hittite

I                 1:1-5              Preface                          Title

I                1:6-4:49         Historical Prologue        Historical Prologue

II               4:50-11:32     Stipulations, General     Stipulations

IIIB           chs. 12-26     Stipulations, Specific             "

IIIB&A'    11:26-30;

                 chs. 27-28     (Blessings) & Curses      Deposit of Text

II'             chs. 29-30      Recap of Covenant        (Public Reading)

I'A2         31:9-13           Public Reading                      "

I'A2'        31:24-29         Deposit of Text              Witnesses

I'D           31:30-32:44    Witnesses                        Curses

I'A'2&2'  32:45-47;

                33:1-29          Blessings                         Blessings

As can be seen from Fig. 2:

1. For the most part, the discrete literary divisions line up nicely with the elements of the covenant, although the order is slightly different in each case.

2. These divisions determined from the literary structure can be used to decide the controversy of where Deuteronomy 5 properly belongs, with the historical prologue (Hamilton, Mayes) or with the general stipulations (Thompson, Craigie).

3. This scheme accounts for all the text of Deuteronomy except the historical portions of Section I'. Identification of Section II' as the first example of a required public recitation may definitively decide the fate of a section either ignored in the covenant context or variously assigned to other legal elements.

4. Recognition that ch. 33 contains the bulk of the blessings found in the book (There are relatively few of them in ch. 27) provides an excellent parallel to the Hittite treaties, which similarly conclude with this element. It also explains the inordinate amount of space that seems to be devoted to the curses in ch. 27, an imbalance not in keeping with the Hittite analogues. (Cousins)

But the main conclusion to be drawn from these parallels, which are not found between Deuteronomy and later secular treaties, is that this book of the Bible is firmly placed in very ancient times and should be taken seriously as a reliable historical document.

References

1. Kitchen, Kenneth A., “The Patriarchal Age: Myth or History?,” Biblical Archeology Review, 21, #2, pp. 53-56.

2. Chavalas, M. W., “Moses” in Dictionary of the Pentateuch, p. 577.

3. “Law” in Dictionary of Biblical Imagery, p. 490.