As we have seen, the Israelites participated in many ways in the sacral worldview of their polytheistic neighbors, although they stood apart from them in countless ways. The Israelites also wrote sacral history, in some ways very much in keeping with the intellectual traditions of their neighboring peoples but in other ways quite revolutionary. We already saw in part I how their theology of a God who plans and guides his people over many centuries and repeatedly tells his people to remember what he has done for them in the past led to the development of a new approach toward history. This new kind of history was based on the revolutionary idea that sacral events were not limited to the time of the Creation or to cyclical, repetitive events but very much included singular acts of divine intervention that took place in the past and would never be repeated. The singular event par excellence from their past was their liberation by God’s mighty hand from Egypt, the Passover, and their being led by God into the promised land.

The main historically oriented works of the Hebrew Bible include the Pentateuch together with the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings.[1] These works are considered by most modern scholars to be composite works, having been composed and redacted at various times during the history of Israel and Judah. Yet there is still only limited consensus about the details of who wrote what verses when, despite a century or more of exhaustive scholarly analysis.

What can scarcely be disputed, however, is that these books constitute the first time in history that a nation produced a lengthy, continuous historical account of its people’s past encompassing a period of many centuries.[2] The Pentateuch relates a history stretching from the Creation down to the time when God established his covenant with the patriarch Abraham and continuing through the time of Moses and the creation of the people Israel as they were about to take possession of the land promised to Abraham. The rest of the books just mentioned narrate the remainder of the story down to the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile into Babylonia. The entire account encompasses roughly a period of more than a millennium, stretching from perhaps the eighteenth century BC to the sixth century BC. So far as we can tell from extant sources, nothing like this was ever produced by any other Near Eastern nation. Virtually all historiographical-type writings from the ancient Near East, as we have seen, dealt with very recent events, namely the deeds of the reigning monarch or perhaps of his immediate predecessor.

A serious difficulty in dealing with the historical texts in the Old Testament is the question of dating. When considering an inscription from Egypt or Assyria narrating the battles fought by a particular monarch, we can be fairly confident in nearly all cases that the text was drafted during that monarch’s reign, or in a few cases during that of his son and successor. In contrast, the Hebrew writings are all in the form of literary pieces covering many years, which might have been composed decades, even centuries, after the periods they narrate. Scholars have debated and discussed ad infinitum such matters as authorship and dating of the Pentateuch and the historical writings, and we can do no more here than briefly summarize the issues.

I will treat the issue of the first four books, Genesis through Numbers (often called the Tetrateuch), very succinctly, then move on to discuss the themes of the book of Deuteronomy at greater length. The reasons for splitting off the last book of the Pentateuch will emerge in the discussion. The remainder of this treatment will then focus on the rest of the historical books, often referred to as the Deuteronomic History (DH).

According to long-standing tradition, both Jewish and Christian, the Pentateuch (the five books of Moses) was actually authored by Moses himself. However, since at least the mid-nineteenth century many students of the Hebrew scriptures have challenged that tradition and held that, in fact, these books were written by much later authors who lived hundreds of years after Moses. The so-called Documentary Hypothesis, established in the later nineteenth century and still embraced in large part by a majority of Old Testament scholars, theorizes that the text as we currently have it was composed by multiple authors in different eras and was, in effect, stitched together by a later editor into a composite work, and that the seams of this stitching still show. The two main types of evidence for this hypothesis consist of “doublets,” where the text in effect tells the same story twice, and the use of two different names for deity. The two principal sources for the first four books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers) are identified as J for Jehovah or Yahweh (Jahweh in German) and P for a “priestly” source written with a strong priestly bias. Two additional sources are known as E for Elohist (derived from Elohim, “God” in Hebrew) and D for Deuteronomic.

To take only one example of how this analysis of the text has suggested multiple sources, it has long been realized that there are, in fact, two separate creation accounts in the first two chapters of Genesis. The first (1:1 to 2:3) outlines the orderly process of creation of the entire world, including light, the sky, plants, animals, and humankind, in a period of seven days by “God” (Elohim), with the creation of Man (Adam) on day six; the latter (2:4–2:25) portrays the creation by “Yahweh,” focusing almost exclusively on the creation of Man from the dust of the earth, and Woman from the man’s rib, in the Garden of Eden. The first story, according to the reigning hypothesis, was composed by one or more priests, of the priesthood of Aaron, while the latter was the work of the so-called Yahwist. The Yahwist wrote the largest narrative portions of the four books, with some additions from the Elohist. The priestly writer(s) were responsible for portions relating to ritual, above all the majority of the book of Leviticus.

While there can be little doubt that the Pentateuch is to some extent a composite writing, and while the majority of biblical scholars continue to accept the Documentary Hypothesis at least as a general matter, there has been and still is considerable disagreement over many of the details, most significantly the dates when each of these authors (or groups of authors) wrote their narratives. The general consensus is that the original texts of the four sources were composed and edited at various stages during the period of the dual nations of Israel and Judah down to the time of the exile, roughly between 900 and 500 BC. Richard Elliott Friedman dates both J and E to sometime between the splitting of Solomon’s kingdom into two separate states (just shortly before 900 BC) and the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 BC. He dates P to the time of the reforms by Hezekiah (around 700 BC), and D to the reign of Josiah (around 620–610 BC).[3]

The Book of Deuteronomy

In discussions of the Pentateuch, the book of Deuteronomy is somewhat isolated from the other books. That is, the first four books are seen as an editorial synthesis of the three sources we have discussed, J, E, and P. The D source is mostly limited to the book of Deuteronomy itself, and the discussion mostly centers around whether D was written before or after P.

The broad consensus of scholars holds that the scroll discovered in the temple by the priests under the monarchy of Josiah (640–609 BC) comprised the book of Deuteronomy, at least in some form. That discovery, according to the account in 2 Kings 22–23, was the catalyst for the thoroughgoing reform implemented by Josiah, consisting of purging all elements of Baal and Asherah worship and destroying all the “high places” throughout the nation so that worship of Yahweh would thereafter be restricted to the temple in Jerusalem. Josiah instituted the keeping of the Passover, “as prescribed in this book of the covenant,” which had not been kept “since the days of the judges who judged Israel, even during all the days of the kings of Israel and of the kings of Judah” (23:21–22).

When Josiah heard the words of the book, he was highly distraught and tore his clothes, perceiving that the Lord was angered against the whole nation “because our ancestors did not obey the words of this book, to do according to all that is written concerning us” (2 Kings 22:11–13). The Lord confirmed through the prophetess Huldah that their disobedience would result in calamity for the nation: “I will indeed bring disaster on this place and on its inhabitants—all the words of the book that the king of Judah has read. Because they have abandoned me and have made offerings to other gods, so that they have provoked me to anger with all the work of their hands, therefore my wrath will be kindled against this place, and it will not be quenched” (vv. 14–17).

Josiah read the book of the covenant in the temple to all the people of Judah and publicly “made a covenant before the Lord, to follow the Lord, keeping his commandments, his decrees, and his statutes, with all his heart and all his soul, to perform the words of this covenant that were written in this book. All the people joined in the covenant” (2 Kings 23:2–3). This attempt to defuse the anger of the Lord through renewal of the covenant was one of the most dramatic events during the life of both Jeremiah and Lehi, and it is reasonable to assume that Lehi would have been at the very least familiar with the general content of Deuteronomy as it existed in his day. It is also likely that the book of Deuteronomy would have been included in the brass plates and therefore available to Mormon. While we cannot be certain that Mormon made conscious use of Deuteronomic themes in composing his history, it is reasonable to suppose that some of those themes may have played a significant role in his thinking. On this basis, it is worthwhile to examine some of the major themes typical of Deuteronomy, which will provide in turn a basis for our later consideration of the themes of the historical writings of the Old Testament (DH), and, in chapter 11, the most prevalent themes in Mormon’s record.[4]

Covenantal Themes in Deuteronomy

All the following themes center on the idea of covenant with Yahweh, and specifically the obligation of the children of Israel to remain loyal to the covenant if they wished to receive the Lord’s blessings; otherwise they would be cursed.[5]

The people should remember past blessings from God, especially their deliverance from bondage in Egypt

A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. (Deuteronomy 26:5–9; compare 5:15; 6:10–12, 20–23; 7:18–19)

But take care and watch yourselves closely, so as neither to forget the things that your eyes have seen nor to let them slip from your mind all the days of your life; make them known to your children and your children’s children—how you once stood before the Lord your God at Horeb, when the Lord said to me . . . (4:9–13)

The people of Israel are a choice and favored people

For you are a people holy to the Lord your God; the Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession. It was not because you were more numerous than any other people that the Lord set his heart on you and chose you—for you were the fewest of all peoples. It was because the Lord loved you and kept the oath that he swore to your ancestors, that the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. Know therefore that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who maintains covenant loyalty with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations, and who repays in their own person those who reject him. (Deuteronomy 7:6–10)

The Lord set his heart in love on your ancestors alone and chose you, their descendants after them, out of all the peoples. (10:15)

The covenant involves granting the people of Israel a choice land (contingent on their obedience)

This entire commandment that I command you today you must diligently observe, so that you may live and increase, and go in and occupy the land that the Lord promised on oath to your ancestors. Remember the long way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, in order to humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commandments. He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. The clothes on your back did not wear out and your feet did not swell these forty years. Know then in your heart that as a parent disciplines a child so the Lord your God disciplines you. Therefore keep the commandments of the Lord your God, by walking in his ways and by fearing him. For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, a vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land where you may eat bread without scarcity, where you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron and from whose hills you may mine copper. You shall eat your fill and bless the Lord your God for the good land that he has given you. (Deuteronomy 8:1–10; see 1:8, 21; 7:1)

Remember the statutes and judgments

So now, Israel, give heed to the statutes and ordinances that I am teaching you to observe, so that you may live to enter and occupy the land that the Lord, the God of your ancestors, is giving you. (Deuteronomy 4:1)

Hear, O Israel, the statutes and ordinances that I am addressing to you today; you shall learn them and observe them diligently. (5:1; see 4:5, 8, 14, 40, 45; 5:31; 6:1, 20; 7:11; 11:1; 12:1; 26:16; 30:16)

Obedience will bring blessings, while disobedience will bring curses

See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse: the blessing, if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today; and the curse, if you do not obey the commandments of the Lord your God, but turn from the way that I am commanding you today, to follow other gods that you have not known. (Deuteronomy 11:26–28; see Leviticus 26)

Deuteronomy 28 consists of an extensive list of blessings that will follow if the people “will only obey the Lord your God, by diligently observing all his commandments that I am commanding you today” (v. 1), followed by a list of curses that will overtake them if they do not obey. The enumerated blessings are comprehensive, amounting to great prosperity in all aspects of life:

The Lord will cause your enemies who rise against you to be defeated before you; they shall come out against you one way, and flee before you seven ways. The Lord will command the blessing upon you in your barns, and in all that you undertake; he will bless you in the land that the Lord your God is giving you. The Lord will establish you as his holy people, as he has sworn to you, if you keep the commandments of the Lord your God and walk in his ways. All the peoples of the earth shall see that you are called by the name of the Lord, and they shall be afraid of you. The Lord will make you abound in prosperity, in the fruit of your womb, in the fruit of your livestock, and in the fruit of your ground in the land that the Lord swore to your ancestors to give you. The Lord will open for you his rich storehouse, the heavens, to give the rain of your land in its season and to bless all your undertakings. (28:7–12)

The curses for disobedience are the mirror image of the blessings, but in even more explicit detail:

The Lord will cause you to be defeated before your enemies; you shall go out against them one way and flee before them seven ways. You shall become an object of horror to all the kingdoms of the earth. Your corpses shall be food for every bird of the air and animal of the earth, and there shall be no one to frighten them away. The Lord will afflict you with the boils of Egypt, with ulcers, scurvy, and itch, of which you cannot be healed. The Lord will afflict you with madness, blindness, and confusion of mind; you shall grope about at noon as blind people grope in darkness, but you shall be unable to find your way; and you shall be continually abused and robbed, without anyone to help. You shall become engaged to a woman, but another man shall lie with her. You shall build a house, but not live in it. You shall plant a vineyard, but not enjoy its fruit. Your ox shall be butchered before your eyes, but you shall not eat of it. Your donkey shall be stolen in front of you, and shall not be restored to you. . . . A people whom you do not know shall eat up the fruit of your ground and of all your labors; you shall be continually abused and crushed, and driven mad by the sight that your eyes shall see. (28:25–31, 33–34)

These cause-and-effect relationships should be seen in light of the sacral nature of ancient society as discussed in part I. As we observed there, it was believed that general prosperity would accrue to a people when the king obeyed the gods, and conversely:

If a king does not heed justice, his people will be thrown into chaos and his land will be devastated.[6]

The king of Egypt was expected to follow maat, which included carrying out the proper daily rituals for the gods, but also to follow all the proper principles laid down by the gods in primordial times, including administration of justice. The people, too, were expected to perform maat, but the primary responsibility fell on the king. The same was true for the Israelites during the time of the kingship, but Israel was fundamentally different because the covenant with Yahweh predated the kingship and all the people were direct participants in the covenant.[7] In the time of Joshua the whole people bound themselves by a formal agreement:

And the people said to Joshua, “No, we will serve the Lord!” Then Joshua said to the people, “You are witnesses against yourselves that you have chosen the Lord, to serve him.” And they said, “We are witnesses.” . . . The people said to Joshua, “The Lord our God we will serve, and him we will obey.” (Joshua 24:21–22, 24)[8]

The same pattern of blessings and curses can also be found in Leviticus 26.

Prosperity comes from keeping the commandments

Then you shall again obey the Lord, observing all his commandments that I am commanding you today, and the Lord your God will make you abundantly prosperous in all your undertakings, in the fruit of your body, in the fruit of your livestock, and in the fruit of your soil. For the Lord will again take delight in prospering you, just as he delighted in prospering your ancestors, when you obey the Lord your God by observing his commandments and decrees that are written in this book of the law, because you turn to the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul. (Deuteronomy 30:8–10; see v. 15)

If you will only heed his every commandment that I am commanding you today—loving the Lord your God, and serving him with all your heart and with all your soul—then he will give the rain for your land in its season, the early rain and the later rain, and you will gather in your grain, your wine, and your oil; and he will give grass in your fields for your livestock, and you will eat your fill. (11:13–15; see 4:40; 8:7–10; 15:4; 28:4, 11–12)

If you heed these ordinances, by diligently observing them, the Lord your God will . . . love you, bless you, and multiply you; he will bless the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your ground, your grain and your wine and your oil, the increase of your cattle and the issue of your flock, in the land that he swore to your ancestors to give you. You shall be the most blessed of peoples, with neither sterility nor barrenness among you or your livestock. The Lord will turn away from you every illness. (7:12–15)[9]

There is a need to choose between good and evil, life and death

I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the Lord swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. (Deuteronomy 30:19–20)

The people must be watchful for pride and arrogance

When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, who led you through the great and terrible wilderness, an arid wasteland with poisonous snakes and scorpions. He made water flow for you from flint rock, and fed you in the wilderness with manna that your ancestors did not know, to humble you and to test you, and in the end to do you good. Do not say to yourself, “My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.” But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, so that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your ancestors, as he is doing today. (Deuteronomy 8:12–18; compare 9:4–6; 31:20–21)

If they do not keep the laws and ordinances of the covenant, they will be cursed, scattered, smitten.

If you do forget the Lord your God and follow other gods to serve and worship them, I solemnly warn you today that you shall surely perish. Like the nations that the Lord is destroying before you, so shall you perish, because you would not obey the voice of the Lord your God. (Deuteronomy 8:19–20)

When you have had children and children’s children, and become complacent in the land, if you act corruptly by making an idol in the form of anything, thus doing what is evil in the sight of the Lord your God, and provoking him to anger, I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that you will soon utterly perish from the land that you are crossing the Jordan to occupy; you will not live long on it, but will be utterly destroyed. The Lord will scatter you among the peoples; only a few of you will be left among the nations where the Lord will lead you. (4:25–27)

Why would the Lord destroy his own people?

The next generation, your children who rise up after you, as well as the foreigner who comes from a distant country, will see the devastation of that land and the afflictions with which the Lord has afflicted it—all its soil burned out by sulfur and salt, nothing planted, nothing sprouting, unable to support any vegetation, like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim, which the Lord destroyed in his fierce anger—they and indeed all the nations will wonder, “Why has the Lord done thus to this land? What caused this great display of anger?” They will conclude, “It is because they abandoned the covenant of the Lord, the God of their ancestors, which he made with them when he brought them out of the land of Egypt. They turned and served other gods, worshiping them, gods whom they had not known and whom he had not allotted to them; so the anger of the Lord was kindled against that land, bringing on it every curse written in this book. The Lord uprooted them from their land in anger, fury, and great wrath, and cast them into another land, as is now the case.” (Deuteronomy 29:22–28; compare Leviticus 26:27–45)

Because the Lord is a merciful God, he will not utterly forget the covenant

[After being scattered among the nations] there you will serve other gods made by human hands, objects of wood and stone that neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell. From there you will seek the Lord your God, and you will find him if you search after him with all your heart and soul. In your distress, when all these things have happened to you in time to come, you will return to the Lord your God and heed him. Because the Lord your God is a merciful God, he will neither abandon you nor destroy you; he will not forget the covenant with your ancestors that he swore to them. (Deuteronomy 4:28–31)

The Lord your God will restore your fortunes and have compassion on you, gathering you again from all the peoples among whom the Lord your God has scattered you. Even if you are exiled to the ends of the world, from there the Lord your God will gather you, and from there he will bring you back. The Lord your God will bring you into the land that your ancestors possessed, and you will possess it; he will make you more prosperous and numerous than your ancestors. (30:3–5)

Deuteronomic History

The so-called historical books following Deuteronomy—Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings—are frequently referred to as the Deuteronomic (or Deuteronomistic) History (hereafter DH). This term goes back to a scholarly work from 1943 by the eminent German biblical scholar Martin Noth, who presented the theory that those six books of the Bible were all written by the same individual in the early period of the exile following the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC. This author, whom Noth identified simply as the Deuteronomist historian, had access to various written sources and oral traditions about the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, enabling him to write his connected history of this extended period. Noth perceived that all these books shared a common vocabulary and writing style as well as a similar theological viewpoint.[10]

Noth theorized that in fact the Deuteronomist had access to an earlier form of the book of Deuteronomy and revised and added to it, adopting much of its perspective. Under this formulation, Deuteronomy was better considered part of the Deuteronomistic writings than as part of the Pentateuch. According to Noth, the Deuteronomist historian wrote this grand work in order to explain why Israel and then Judah were destroyed, attributing their fall to the sinfulnessof the people and most importantly the kings.

Steven L. McKenzie has noted how the Deuteronomist (Dtr) drew on Deuteronomy for an organizing framework and guiding theme for his history:

He placed [the book of Deuteronomy] at the head of his History as articulating the standard by which Israel would be judged. Dtr also adopted Deuteronomy’s doctrine that prosperity and disaster were the inevitable results of righteousness and sin, respectively, and presented his history of Israel as the working out of this doctrine, at least the negative side of it. It was this dependence on Deuteronomy that led Noth to adopt the name Deuteronomistic History.[11]

Various scholars since Noth have modified his theory. The most important of these modifications for our purposes argued that there were actually two stages of composition of the DH. The American scholar Frank Moore Cross at Harvard University noticed that certain passages suggested that the history was at least partly written by someone living before the fall of Judah. Second Kings 8:22, for example, states that “Edom has been in revolt against the rule of Judah to this day.” It would be hard to explain the phrase “to this day” if at the time of writing the kingdom of Judah no longer existed. Accordingly, Cross hypothesized that there were at least two deuteronomist historians, one who lived before the fall of Jerusalem and one who lived after. The first most likely lived in the day of King Josiah and supported Josiah’s reform movement. The second lived after the time of the exile and added material relating to the fall of Jerusalem. In the 1980s, Richard Elliott Friedman at UC San Diego proposed that the two writers/editors were in fact the same person and that that person might well be Baruch, the scribe of the prophet Jeremiah, writing under the direct influence of Jeremiah himself.[12] Jeremiah (with Baruch as scribe) could have written the first edition of his history (i.e., the DH) during or shortly after the reign of Josiah, whom he extolled as the ideal Davidic king, and later revised it following the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC. For the most part, in the books of Joshua, Judges, and 1 and 2 Samuel, he took material from preexisting sources and added only a few lines here and there (“short, but carefully worded and artfully inserted”) to provide thematic unity to the whole work based on the themes and at times even the language of Deuteronomy. For the books of 1 and 2 Kings, he had to do more original drafting based on a variety of sources available in the archives, weaving together accounts relating to the various kings of both Israel and Judah. In other words, he was “fashioning a history of his people, a history with a purpose and a message.”[13]

It is quite possible, then, that the great historiographer of Israel down to the time of the exile was in fact a prophetic scribe, writing in the decades during and after the rule of Josiah, and again just following the final conquest of Jerusalem by the Babylonian Empire. The main purpose of the history was to explain how and why the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah were abandoned by the Lord and fell. We are given limited but helpful information about the sources on which the writer based his narration, mostly in the book of Kings. Reference is made to the Book of Jashar (Joshua 10:13; 2 Samuel 1:18) and the Book of the Acts of Solomon (1 Kings 11:41), while repeated reference is made to the Book of the Annals of the Kings of Judah[14] and the Book of the Annals of the Kings of Israel.[15] We of course have no real idea of the form or content of such books, but the term annals certainly reminds us of the annalistic writings we have encountered among the Egyptians and Mesopotamians. The official who kept the court chronicles was called the “recorder” or “chronicler,” literally “remembrancer.”[16]

Some scholars doubt the existence of these books or records at all, but assuming they were real, it seems they were quite different from the annals and chronicles composed by Israel’s neighbors. Those other writings comprised little more than accounts of battles and temple building, while the books of annals the Deuteronomist referred to must have included a wider variety of details. To take one example, that of Manasseh of Judah in 2 Kings 21:1–18, we are given Manasseh’s age when he began his reign and the name of his mother. We are told of his various sins (e.g., building altars to Baal and other deities and causing his son to “pass through fire”) and where his body was buried. The writer then asks the rhetorical question, “Now the rest of the acts of Manasseh, all that he did, and the sin that he committed, are they not written in the Book of the Annals of the Kings of Judah?” (v. 17). We are left with the impression that this record was quite thorough, including “all that he did,” many more details than our text includes. Thus we can be reasonably confident that the Deuteronomist made use of sources with extensive details about each king’s reign and carefully selected details from those sources to properly tell the story of the decline and fall of Israel and later of Judea. Noth insisted that the Deuteronomist “was not merely an editor but the author of a history which brought together material from highly varied traditions and arranged it according to a carefully conceived plan.” He was not just a redactor of “a historical narrative that was already more or less complete; rather, we must say that Dtr was the author of a comprehensive historical work, scrupulously taking over and quoting the existing tradition but at the same time arranging and articulating all the material independently, and making it clear and systematic by composing summaries which anticipate and recapitulate.”[17]

Deuteronomic Themes in the DH

However accurate these theories might be regarding how the books of the DH came into being, it is quite clear that they made extensive use of the book of Deuteronomy. Several phrases are copied repeatedly from Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy 6:5 states, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” An abbreviated version is also used repeatedly: “. . . with all your heart and with all your soul” (10:12; 11:13; 13:3; 26:16; 30:2, 6, 10). The longer version is copied in 2 Kings in reference to Josiah: Josiah “turned to the Lord with all his heart, with all his soul, and with all his might, according to all the law of Moses” (23:25). The abbreviated version occurs in Joshua, twice in 1 Kings, and once in 2 Kings (Joshua 22:5; 1 Kings 2:4; 8:48; 2 Kings 23:3). An even more striking example is where Moses states in Deuteronomy 5:32, “You must therefore be careful to do as the Lord your God has commanded you; you shall not turn to the right or to the left.” This specific phrase at the end occurs three more times in Deuteronomy (17:11, 20; 28:14); it then occurs twice in Joshua (1:7; 23:6) and once in 2 Kings, again in conjunction with King Josiah: “He did what was right in the sight of the Lord, and walked in all the way of his father David; he did not turn aside to the right or the left (22:2).

In addition to copying the language of Deuteronomy, the DH closely adheres to many themes typical of the book of Deuteronomy. The latter’s principal theme, as already discussed, was the covenant; this theme is accordingly reflected throughout the DH. More specifically, the Deuteronomist wrote to explain that the people of Judah had been repeatedly warned that their fate was dependent on how faithfully they followed the instructions and commandments given them by God, and the history of Israel and Judah was a record of how well they fared to the degree that they heeded this warning.[18]

Dtr. [the Deuteronomist] did not write his history to provide entertainment in hours of leisure or to satisfy a curiosity about national history, but intended it to teach the true meaning of the history of Israel from the occupation to the destruction of the old order. The meaning which he discovered was that God was recognizably at work in this history, continuously meeting the accelerating moral decline with warnings and punishments and, finally, when these proved fruitless, with total annihilation.[19]

The majority of the major themes of Deuteronomy that we have already considered reappear in the DH, as the following excerpts make clear:

Remember past blessings from God, especially their deliverance from bondage in Egypt

Did I not deliver you from the Egyptians and from the Amorites, from the Ammonites and from the Philistines? The Sidonians also, and the Amalekites, and the Maonites, oppressed you; and you cried to me, and I delivered you out of their hand. Yet you have abandoned me and worshipped other gods; therefore I will deliver you no more. (Judges 10:11–13)

I brought up Israel out of Egypt, and I rescued you from the hand of the Egyptians and from the hand of all the kingdoms that were oppressing you. (1 Samuel 10:18)

The people of Israel are a choice and favored people

Who is like your people, like Israel? Is there another nation on earth whose God went to redeem it as a people, and to make a name for himself, doing great and awesome things for them, by driving out before his people nations and their gods? And you established your people Israel for yourself to be your people forever; and you, O Lord, became their God. (2 Samuel 7:23–24)

He [Solomon] said, “Oh Lord, God of Israel, there is no God like you in heaven above or on earth beneath, keeping covenant and steadfast love for your servants who walk before you with all their heart, the covenant that you kept for your servant my father David as you declared to him; you promised with your mouth and have this day fulfilled with your hand. (1 Kings 8:23)

The covenant involves granting them a choice land (contingent on their obedience)

Remember the word that Moses the servant of the Lord commanded you, saying, “The Lord your God is providing you a place of rest, and will give you this land.” (Joshua 1:13)

The Lord your God will push them back before you, and drive them out of your sight; and you shall possess their land, as the Lord your God promised you. Therefore be very steadfast to observe and do all that is written in the book of the law of Moses, turning aside from it neither to the right nor to the left. (Joshua 23:5–6; compare 1:13)

Remember the statutes and judgments

If you will walk in my statutes, obey my ordinances, and keep all my commandments by walking in them, then I will establish my promise with you, which I made to your father David. I will dwell among the children of Israel, and will not forsake my people Israel. (1 Kings 6:12–13)

The Lord our God be with us, as he was with our ancestors; may he not leave us or abandon us, but incline our hearts to him, to walk in all his ways, and to keep his commandments, his statutes, and his ordinances, which he commanded our ancestors. (1 Kings 8:57–58; compare 9:4; 11:33; 2 Kings 17:13, 37)

Obedience will bring blessings, while disobedience will bring curses

Joshua outlines the same blessing/curse pattern found in Deuteronomy, but in briefer terms:

“And now I am about to go the way of all the earth, and you know in your hearts and souls, all of you, that not one thing has failed of all the good things that the Lord your God promised concerning you; all have come to pass for you, not one of them has failed. But just as all the good things that the Lord your God promised concerning you have been fulfilled for you, so the Lord will bring upon you all the bad things, until he has destroyed you from this good land that the Lord your God has given you. If you transgress the covenant of the Lord your God, which he enjoined on you, and go and serve other gods and bow down to them, then the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you, and you shall perish quickly from the good land that he has given to you.” (Joshua 23:14–16)

Samuel said to the people, “The Lord is witness, who appointed Moses and Aaron and brought your ancestors up out of the land of Egypt. Now therefore take your stand, so that I may enter into judgment with you before the Lord, and I will declare to you all the saving deeds of the Lord that he performed for you and for your ancestors. When Jacob went into Egypt and the Egyptians oppressed them, then your ancestors cried to the Lord and the Lord sent Moses and Aaron, who brought forth your ancestors out of Egypt, and settled them in this place. But they forgot the Lord their God; and he sold them into the hand of Sisera, commander of the army of King Jabin of Hazor, and into the hand of the Philistines, and into the hand of the king of Moab; and they fought against them. Then they cried to the Lord, and said, ‘We have sinned, because we have forsaken the Lord, and have served the Baals and the Astartes; but now rescue us out of the hand of our enemies, and we will serve you.’ And the Lord sent Jerubbaal and Barak, and Jephthah, and Samson, and rescued you out of the hand of your enemies on every side; and you lived in safety. But when you saw that King Nahash of the Ammonites came against you, you said to me, ‘No, but a king shall reign over us,’ though the Lord your God was your king. See, here is the king whom you have chosen, for whom you have asked; see, the Lord has set a king over you. If you will fear the Lord and serve him and heed his voice and not rebel against the commandment of the Lord, and if both you and the king who reigns over you will follow the Lord your God, it will be well; but if you will not heed the voice of the Lord, but rebel against the commandment of the Lord, then the hand of the Lord will be against you and your king. Now therefore take your stand and see this great thing that the Lord will do before your eyes.” (1 Samuel 12:6–16)

Prosperity comes from keeping the commandments

When David’s time to die drew near, he charged his son Solomon, saying: “I am about to go the way of all the earth. Be strong, be courageous, and keep the charge of the Lord your God, walking in his ways and keeping his statutes, his commandments, his ordinances, and his testimonies, as it is written in the law of Moses, so that you may prosper in all that you do and wherever you turn.” (1 Kings 2:1–3)

There is a need to choose between good and evil, life and death

Now if you are unwilling to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served in the region beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord. (Joshua 24:15)

The people must be watchful for pride and arrogance

The Lord said to Gideon, “The troops with you are too many for me to give the Midianites into their hand. Israel would only take the credit away from me, saying ‘My own hand has delivered me.’” (Judges 7:2)

If the people do not keep the laws and ordinances of the covenant, they will be cursed, scattered, smitten.

But just as all the good things that the Lord your God promised concerning you have been fulfilled for you, so the Lord will bring upon you all the bad things, until he has destroyed you from this good land that the Lord your God has given you. If you transgress the covenant of the Lord your God, which he enjoined on you, and go and serve other gods and bow down to them, then the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you, and you shall perish quickly from the good land that he has given to you. (Joshua 23:15–16; compare 24:20)

Why would the Lord destroy his own people?

“If you turn aside from following me, you or your children, and do not keep my commandments and my statutes that I have set before you, but go and serve other gods and worship them, then I will cut Israel off from the land that I have given them; and the house that I have consecrated for my name I will cast out of my sight; and Israel will become a proverb and a taunt among all peoples. This house will become a heap of ruins; everyone passing by it will be astonished, and will hiss; and they will say, ‘Why has the Lord done such a thing to this land and to this house?’ Then they will say, ‘Because they have forsaken the Lord their God, who brought their ancestors out of the land of Egypt, and embraced other gods, worshiping them and serving them; therefore the Lord has brought this disaster upon them.’” (1 Kings 9:6–9)

In the ninth year of Hoshea the king of Assyria captured Samaria; he carried the Israelites away to Assyria. . . . This occurred because the people of Israel had sinned against the Lord their God, who had brought them up out of the land of Egypt from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. They had worshiped other gods and walked in the customs of the nations whom the Lord drove out before the people of Israel, and in the customs that the kings of Israel had introduced. . . . They did wicked things, provoking the Lord to anger; they served idols, of which the Lord had said to them, “You shall not do this.” . . . Therefore the Lord was very angry with Israel and removed them out of his sight; none was left but the tribe of Judah alone. Judah also did not keep the commandments of the Lord their God but walked in the customs that Israel had introduced. The Lord rejected all the descendants of Israel; he punished them and gave them into the hand of plunderers, until he had banished them from his presence. (2 Kings 17:6–9, 11–12, 18–20)

Because the Lord is a merciful God, he will not utterly forget the covenant

[From Solomon’s dedicatory prayer of the new temple:]

“Hear the plea of your servant and of your people Israel when they pray toward this place; O hear in heaven your dwelling place; heed and forgive. If someone sins against a neighbor and is given an oath to swear, and comes and swears before your altar in this house, then hear in heaven, and act, and judge your servants, condemning the guilty by bringing their conduct on their own head, and vindicating the righteous by rewarding them according to their righteousness. When your people Israel, having sinned against you, are defeated before an enemy but turn again to you, confess your name, pray and plead with you in this house, then hear in heaven, forgive the sin of your people Israel, and bring them again to the land that you gave to their ancestors. When heaven is shut up and there is no rain because they have sinned against you, and then they pray toward this place, confess your name, and turn from their sin, because you punish them, then hear in heaven, and forgive the sin of your servants, your people Israel, when you teach them the good way in which they should walk; and grant rain on your land, which you have given to your people as an inheritance. . . .

“If they sin against you—for there is no one who does not sin—and you are angry with them and give them to an enemy, so that they are carried away captive to the land of the enemy, far off or near; yet if they come to their senses in the land to which they have been taken captive, and repent, and plead with you in the land of their captors, saying, ‘We have sinned, and have done wrong; we have acted wickedly’; if they repent with all their heart and soul in the land of their enemies, who took them captive, and pray to you toward their land, which you gave to their ancestors, the city that you have chosen, and the house that I have built for your name; then hear in heaven your dwelling place their prayer and their plea, maintain their cause and forgive your people who have sinned against you, and all their transgressions that they have committed against you; and grant them compassion in the sight of their captors, so that they may have compassion on them.” (1 Kings 8:30–36, 46–50)

In addition to mirroring these specific themes found in Deuteronomy, the writer of the DH included two historical patterns that closely track the covenantal ideas typical of Deuteronomy.

Cyclical Pattern in Judges

Much of the book of Judges follows a cyclical pattern that is rooted in Deuteronomic themes of disobedience, divine anger, and redemption. The cycle can be described as follows:

• The Israelites do “what [is] evil in the sight of the Lord” (e.g., Judges 2:11), worshipping other deities (Baal and Astarte).
• The Lord is provoked to anger.
• The Lord allows them to be plundered and overcome by their enemies.
• Being in distress, the Israelites call out to Yahweh for relief.
• The Lord is moved to pity by their groaning and raises up a deliverer.
• The deliverer (“judge”) delivers them out of the power of their oppressors.
• After the death of the judge, the people revert to their evil ways and the Lord’s anger is kindled once again.[20]

One surprising element in this cycle is that there is never any explicit mention of the Israelites repenting of their sins. At times the historian seems to be saying that the Lord is simply moved to pity by the suffering and groaning of his people and provides them with a redeemer even without any significant change of behavior on their part. In other cases, we are told that they recognized that they had done wrong in worshipping other gods and accordingly “put away the foreign gods from among them and worshiped the Lord” (Judges 10:16). The quoted phrase, in turn, has been interpreted to mean that the historian was interested only in cultic matters—that the people repented only in respect of renouncing the pagan cultic practices and otherwise did not change their behavior. This is unlikely. Although there is no specific mention of other types of repentance, it is unthinkable that a conversion to the worship of Yahweh did not also entail changes in other behaviors. So much of the Mosaic code was based on matters of behavior, not only the Ten Commandments but also the so-called Holiness Code (Leviticus 17–26), and God’s condemnation of the preexisting Canaanite peoples was based explicitly on their deeds (Leviticus 18:3; Deuteronomy 12:30–31; 18:12). Thus, it seems clear that when the Israelites “cry out” to the Lord, they are once again acknowledging him as their God and there is an implicit promise to keep the laws and ordinances of his covenant.

Patterns of Righteous and Unrighteous Kings in 1–2 Kings

Another related pattern is found in 1–2 Kings. Beginning with the reign of Jeroboam, king of Israel, the historian makes a direct, succinct moral and ritual pronouncement regarding each king of each of the two kingdoms, declaring them wicked or righteous. He denounces the majority of rulers as doing (as in the case of the Israelites in Judges) “what was evil in the sight of the Lord” (e.g., Judges 2:11) or, in alternative language, as having “committed all the sins that his father did before him” (1 Kings 15:3). The kings of the northern kingdom of Israel are treated especially harshly: the historian condemns every single one of them as following the sins of Jeroboam (e.g., 1 Kings 13:33; 15:34; 16:25–26).[21] Several kings of Judah are praised for their walking in the footsteps of David and doing “what was right in the sight of the Lord” (e.g., Asa, 1 Kings 15:11–15; Jehoash, 2 Kings 12:2–3). Above all the others, the historian praises Hezekiah (2 Kings 18:3–7) and especially Josiah: “Before him there was no king like him, who turned to the Lord with all his heart, with all his soul, and with all his might, according to all the law of Moses; nor did any like him arise after him” (2 Kings 23:25).

The Old Testament as Sacral History

The historiographical narration found in the DH is obviously sacral in nature. God plays a central role in the history and the fate of the twin nations of Israel and Judah. However, in contrast to the writings of Mesopotamian and Egyptian origin that we examined above, the Hebrew writings show a much higher degree of divine involvement in human activities. In the five books of Moses and the book of Joshua, God maintains a constant and visible presence. Thereafter, in the books of Samuel and Kings, by contrast, God is depicted as somewhat less active in an explicit sense; but with respect to issues of morality and piety, he is still highly present, and the covenant themes we have just discussed carry an implicit understanding that God takes direct and vigorous interest in the acts of his people.

There are additional significant differences in the nature of sacral history between the Israelites and their neighbors. In general, the relationship between the Israelites and their god Yahweh is much more extensive than in the case of the Egyptians and Mesopotamians. We will consider the four different aspects of the notion of sacral history as already discussed in the section above, plus two additional ways in which God and humankind are shown in the Bible to interact.

1. Direct intervention (in war, etc.)

We have seen in Near Eastern military annals that the various deities are often depicted in general terms as strengthening the arm of the king and supporting him in his victories, even granting him victory. This is the most common form of divine intervention in ancient Near Eastern historiographical texts and is very similar in the Hebrew scriptures. It is found repeatedly in the Old Testament. Numerous passages sound much like the other Near Eastern documents—for example: “The Lord gave Lachish into the hand of Israel” (Joshua 10:32; compare 1 Samuel 14:12) or “the Lord gave them into my hand” (Judges 12:3).

But more often than not, there is much more going on between the Lord and his people than is indicated in these summary phrases. In Joshua 10:8–11, when the Israelites are defending the Gibeonites against the Amorites, the Lord says to Joshua: “Do not fear them, for I have handed them over to you; not one of them shall stand before you.” Here there is not simply an impersonal, third-person mention of the Lord, but the Lord makes an explicit promise to his people, which he then carries out with his personal involvement:

So Joshua came upon them suddenly, having marched up all night from Gilgal. And the Lord threw them into a panic before Israel, who inflicted a great slaughter on them at Gibeon, chased them by the way of the ascent of Beth-horon, and struck them down as far as Azekah and Makkedah. As they fled before Israel, while they were going down the slope of Beth-horon, the Lord threw down huge stones from heaven on them as far as Azekah, and they died; there were more who died because of the hailstones than the Israelites killed with the sword. (Joshua 10:9–11)

The text states that the Lord, after promising the Israelites that he would give the Amorites into their hand, “threw [the Amorites] into a panic”; thereafter the Lord “threw down huge stones from heaven” from which more Amorites died than from the swords of the Israelites. Here the Lord does not merely “strengthen” Joshua or make him “great.”

Similarly, in Joshua’s final discourse, he quotes the words of the Lord declaring that when the people fought against their various enemies, “I handed them over to you. I sent the hornet ahead of you, which drove out before you the two kings of the Amorites; it was not by your sword or by your bow” (Joshua 24:11–12).

Thus we find here and throughout the Old Testament a much higher level of direct interaction between God and men, often in the form of a divine revelation promising victory, followed by the direct hand of God in effecting that victory.

2. Description of specific miracles and wonders

In the Hebrew Bible, overt miracles are much more common than in other Near Eastern historiographical writings, and divine intervention, as we have just seen, often takes the form of a specific miracle. The parting of the Red Sea (Exodus 14) is only the most spectacular of these miraculous interventions.[22] In Joshua, the same miracle is effected on a smaller scale when the Israelites cross the Jordan River (Joshua 3–4). In the story of the taking of Jericho, the Lord gives Joshua specific instructions about circling the city and the blowing of trumpets and shouting, causing the city wall to collapse (Joshua 6).

An astounding miracle occurs when the children of Israel are fighting the Amorites and the Lord caused that “the sun stopped in midheaven, and did not hurry to set for about a whole day. . . . The Lord fought for Israel” (Joshua 10:13–14). A hailstorm destroys the opposing army (v. 11). When the king of Aram surrounds Dothan with “a great army,” the Lord opens the eyes of Elisha and his servant to reveal the mountain “full of horses and chariots of fire.” Elisha subsequently asks the Lord to strike the Arameans with blindness, which he does (2 Kings 6:15–19). When the Assyrian army attempts to take Jerusalem, the Angel of the Lord intervenes:

“Therefore thus says the Lord concerning the king of Assyria: He shall not come into this city, shoot an arrow there, come before it with a shield, or cast up a siege ramp against it. By the way that he came, by the same he shall return; he shall not come into this city, says the Lord. For I will defend this city to save it, for my own sake and for the sake of my servant David.” That very night the angel of the Lord set out and struck down one hundred eighty-five thousand in the camp of the Assyrians; when morning dawned, they were all dead bodies. (2 Kings 19:32–35)[23]

3. The principle of revelation

God’s direct and open communication with prophets and leaders is found throughout the biblical histories, but particularly in the earlier books. It is very common in the Pentateuch; for example, in the story of the Exodus the Lord tells Moses specifically to

“stretch out your hand over the sea, so that the water may come back upon the Egyptians, upon their chariots and chariot drivers.” So Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and at dawn the sea returned to its normal depth. As the Egyptians fled before it, the Lord tossed the Egyptians into the sea. The waters returned and covered the chariots and the chariot drivers, the entire army of Pharaoh that had followed them into the sea; not one of them remained. But the Israelites walked on dry ground through the sea, the waters forming a wall for them on their right and on their left. (Exodus 14:26–29)

The book of Joshua has numerous instances of this type of divine involvement. To take just one example, God gives Joshua detailed and explicit instructions on how to take the city of Jericho; when those instructions are followed, the Lord’s promise to Joshua is fulfilled: “See, I have handed Jericho over to you, along with its king and soldiers” (6:2). And in Judges 6:11 an angel appears to Gideon and delivers an extensive message from the Lord.

However, after the time of Joshua, the principal means of divine communication seem to have been more indirect. This reality is reflected in 1 Samuel 3:1, “The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.” Even so, we are told that Samuel himself received numerous revelations from the Lord, beginning with the clear voice he heard as a youth (1 Samuel 3:4–14, 19–21; 8:6–9; 16:1–13). On numerous occasions prophets received messages from God and communicated them to the kings. On other occasions communications from God were obtained primarily through the use of the ephod (14:41; 30:7–8). When Saul is desperately seeking the will of the Lord and receives nothing in return, we are told that “the Lord did not answer him, not by dreams, or by Urim, or by prophets” (28:6), essentially listing the various means by which divine communication might be received.

4. The history preaches moral lessons—God blesses the righteous and curses those who sin

As we have already discussed at length, the book of Deuteronomy presents the covenant promises of the Lord in terms of blessings for the obedient and curses for the disobedient. This moral principle is ubiquitous throughout the historical writings. The book of Judges, as we have seen, constitutes an extended course in covenant-based morality. The book as a whole presents a recurring cycle in the history of the Israelites consisting of wickedness and anger of the Lord followed by deliverance. In the books of Kings, the focus of each royal narrative is narrowly concentrated on the piety and righteousness of each ruler. The framework of the narrative is structured around what is termed the “regnal formulae,” by which the reader is told when each monarch came to the throne, how long he ruled, and how righteous or obedient to God’s command he was during his reign:

In the twentieth year of King Jeroboam of Israel, Asa began to reign over Judah; he reigned forty-one years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Maacah daughter of Abishalom. Asa did what was right in the sight of the Lord, as his father David had done. (1 Kings 15:9–11)

On the other hand,

Nadab son of Jeroboam began to reign over Israel in the second year of King Asa of Judah; he reigned over Israel two years. He did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, walking in the way of his ancestor and in the sin that he caused Israel to commit. (1 Kings 15:25–26)

5. Salvation history (Heilsgeschichte)

There is one further aspect of sacral historiography that perhaps more than any other sets the Old Testament histories apart from the texts of other nations. This is often referred to as salvation history or, in German, “Heilsgeschichte”—the notion that God is guiding his people through history toward salvation. Discussions of Heilsgeschichte are often written from a Christian perspective, contending that the advent of Christ was the telos of history from the very beginning and that the entire Old Testament was merely a preface to God’s true goal of redeeming Israel and ultimately the world through the advent of his Son. However that may be, for our purpose it is preferable to restrict the scope of our vision to the perspective of the Pentateuch and the DH, which had a highly limited, if any, clear understanding of the future coming of a Messiah (unlike the Nephites).[24]

Nevertheless, the Old Testament historical writings on their own terms show a clear sense of history as divinely guided toward specific goals. The history of the Hebrews is filled with the idea that God made and fulfilled long-term plans for his people. This concept begins as early as Abraham. God not only instructs Abraham to leave his home in Ur and migrate to a new land, but he outlines his long-term plan for Abraham’s seed:

I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. (Genesis 12:2–3)

In the case of Moses, the Lord goes to great trouble to bring Abraham’s people back from Egypt to the promised land:

Go and assemble the elders of Israel, and say to them, “The Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, has appeared to me, saying: I have given heed to you and to what has been done to you in Egypt. I declare that I will bring you up out of the misery of Egypt, to the land of the Canaanites, . . . a land flowing with milk and honey. (Exodus 3:16–17)

The very idea of a promised land proclaims an interest in ongoing history that is almost completely absent among the neighboring peoples. The Mesopotamian and Egyptian gods never developed a program by which their people would migrate from one land to another or develop in any way. As we have already seen, those peoples looked back to their primordial past in order to imitate the ways of the gods and to follow the precepts given them (me and maat). The gods might also be referred to as devising certain plans or carrying out certain designs, but these are strictly short-term.[25]

Viewed in broad context, the historicist attitude of the Hebrew god was on a completely different level from that type of divine planning. Once the children of Israel arrive in the promised land, the Lord’s grand plan for his people appears to be mostly fulfilled, but his long-term “planning” does not stop. As we have seen in the book of Joshua, the Lord promises that if the people do not keep the covenant (on a long-term basis), he “will bring upon [them] all the bad things, until he has destroyed [them] from this good land” (23:15). Even more concretely, Moses predicts that if the people stray from the covenant, “the Lord will scatter you among the peoples; only a few of you will be left among the nations where the Lord will lead you” (Deuteronomy 4:27). Then, during the monarchy, the Lord’s long-term promises center around the Davidic dynasty. The Lord declares to David (through the prophet Nathan): “Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me; your throne shall be established forever” (2 Samuel 7:16).

In sum, while the following lines belong to a prophecy of Isaiah addressed to the Assyrian king Sennacherib, they could easily apply to a variety of contexts describing Yahweh’s attitude toward history in general: “Have you not heard that I determined it long ago? I planned from days of old what now I bring to pass.” (2 Kings 19:25)

Dual Causation in History

It is commonly remarked that Hebrew and other ancient Near Eastern writers of sacral or theological historiography attribute causation to the gods, while the Greeks and their modern successors present human causes for the events they discuss. This question is fundamental to any discussion of ancient historiography, but a proper analysis requires considerable nuance.

We have observed above that as a general matter the gods are present but not especially prominent in the royal annals from Mesopotamia and Egypt. (They are more prominent in some of the more literary or epic-style writings.) , it is the kings that bring about their people’s victories, while the gods are described as working behind the scenes, imparting strength to the kings and guiding outcomes through other kinds of indirect intervention.

In Old Testament narrative, the role of divinity is considerably more prominent, but nonetheless the question of historical causation is not one of “either/or” but rather “both.” Thus, for example, in the story in 1 Kings of how a division came about between the tribe of Judah and the other tribes, the historian makes it clear that the immediate cause was the foolishness of Solomon’s son Rehoboam. At the same time, he states that this development was “a turn of affairs brought about by the Lord that he might fulfill his word” (12:15). Yet despite that phrase, no one would conclude that Rehoboam would not be considered accountable for the division. So it should be concluded that causation for the biblical historians was almost always dual; the Lord was the underlying cause of everything that happened, yet the immediate causes were human.[26] This duality will likewise be apparent in the Greek historian Herodotus and others from the Greco-Roman world, as will be seen in the next chapter.

Notes

[1] One might, of course, also include the two books of Chronicles and Ezra and Nehemiah, but in the interests of simplicity I have not dealt with them. They clearly date to a period well after the departure of Lehi from Jerusalem, and discussion of those differences would add little to the purposes of this book.

[2] Richard Elliott Friedman argues on the basis of extensive historical-linguistic studies of the development of the Hebrew language that “it is linguistically impossible for J to be exilic or post-exilic.” The Hidden Book in the Bible: The Discovery of the First Prose Masterpiece (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 358–59 (emphasis in original). He also believes that J and E (in biblical studies the Yahwist and Elohist sources, two of the four theorized early sources behind portions of the Pentateuchal narrative) were both composed before the defeat of the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 BC. Hence his claim that this work (including the so-called Court History found in 2 Samuel) should be considered the first great prose work and first true history. There are scholars, most notably John Van Seters, who argue that the historical writings were composed much later, after the writing of the first histories in classical Greece. Friedman rebuts this viewpoint (see pp. 361–78). Friedman also dates the final redaction of the Pentateuch to the days of Ezra (he actually identifies Ezra himself as the most likely candidate for the redactor), which would date this “first attempt at writing history” to around 450 BC, slightly after the time of Hecataeus of Miletus and just a few decades before Herodotus of Halicarnassus wrote his Histories.

[3] Many Latter-day Saint commentators still adhere to the traditional views and characterize the five books of Moses as having been authored by Moses. There is a growing realization, however, that there is no need to assume Mosaic authorship any more than one would hold that the book of Mosiah was written entirely by Mosiah or the book of Alma entirely by Alma. (See Richard Neitzel Holzapfel, Dana M. Pike, and David Rolph Seely, Jehovah and the World of the Old Testament [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2009], 144.) Faithful Latter-day Saint scholars need only acknowledge that the brass plates included texts referred to as the five books of Moses (see 1 Nephi 5:11). John L. Sorenson argues that what we can discern of the content of the brass plates suggests that they derived from E and thus supports the general thesis that our current text of the Pentateuch derives from multiple sources. See John L. Sorenson, “The Brass Plates and Biblical Scholarship,” in Nephite Culture and Society: Collected Papers, ed. Matthew R. Sorenson (Salt Lake City: New Sage Books, 1997), https://archive.bookofmormoncentral.org/sites/default/files/archive-files/pdf/sorenson/2018-04-25/02_john_l._sorenson_nephite_culture_and_society_1997.pdf. There is also the question of the Book of Moses in the Pearl of Great Price, which is commonly believed to have been written by Moses. The text of several chapters tracks fairly closely the text of the early chapters of Genesis (the Creation and Garden of Eden accounts). But it is important to keep in mind that the Book of Moses was not written as a stand-alone text but was part of Joseph Smith’s inspired translation of the Bible. In other words, it is not clear whether Joseph Smith was attempting to reproduce word for word the writings of Moses or was correcting and supplementing the current text of Genesis.

[4] Noel B. Reynolds makes a strong case that Lehi was consciously invoking many themes from the book of Deuteronomy in his final discourse found in 2 Nephi 1. “Lehi as Moses,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 9, no. 2 (2000): 26–35. Many of these themes closely parallel the Deuteronomic themes discussed below in parts III and IV.

[5] The book of Deuteronomy has several other key themes, but I am focusing on those that are important to our discussion of sacral history and Mormon’s record. Biblical scholar Moshe Weinfeld lists the main “theological tenets” of Deuteronomy as (1) the struggle against idolatry; (2) the centralization of the cult; (3) exodus, covenant, and election; (4) the monotheistic creed; (5) observance of the law and loyalty to the covenant; (6) inheritance of the land; (7) retribution and material motivation; (8) fulfillment of prophecy; and (9) the election of the Davidic dynasty. See his Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1972; repr., 1992), 1. Interestingly, the covenant as stated in Deuteronomy was in large measure cast in the form of an ancient Near Eastern treaty, enumerating the obligations owed by the vassal to the suzerain. See Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School, 59–157. The blessings and curses are a common element in a variety of legal settlements, including settlement of border conflicts, systems of laws (e.g., the Code of Hammurabi), and similar arrangements.

[6] See chapter 3, note 23.

[7] See Gregory Steven Dundas, “Kingship, Democracy, and the Message of the Book of Mormon,” BYU Studies Quarterly 56, no. 2 (2017): 16–17.

[8] Note also that the Ten Commandments are addressed in the second-person singular, or to each Israelite individually: “Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not commit adultery” (Exodus 20:12–14, King James Version). Judith Sanderson has noted: “A deity disclosing himself to an entire nation was unprecedented. The Decalogue has God address each Israelite individually as a grammatically masculine singular ‘you’, rather than the expected plural. In contrast to Near Eastern law, the prohibitions are universal and absolute: The aim of the law is to transform society by creating a moral community in which murder, theft, etc. will no longer exist.” Michael D. Coogan et al., eds., The New Oxford Annotated Bible, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 252.

[9] Robert Alter observes that a “full belly is the enemy of faith in Deuteronomy. The comforts of prosperity are thought of as leading to complacency. . . . Thus the history of Israel teeters on the edge of a precarious balance: if Israel punctiliously adheres to the commands of its God, it will prosper; but when it prospers, it runs the danger of falling away from its loyalty to God.” The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), 1:642. The parallel with the Book of Mormon should be obvious. See chapter 11 herein.

[10] See Steven L. McKenzie, Introduction to the Historical Books: Strategies for Reading (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 14–15.

[11] McKenzie, Introduction to the Historical Books, 15.

[12] See Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1997), 146–49.

[13] Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?, 132. To be sure, there are some differences among the several books, leading some scholars to argue against their common authorship, but this could be at least partly explained by the use of different types of sources and their respective scribal influences. For a discussion of recent criticism of the DH hypothesis, see Thomas C. Römer, The So-Called Deuteronomistic History: A Sociological, Historical and Literary Introduction (London: T&T Clark, 2005), 38–43.

[14] See 1 Kings 14:29; 15:7, 23; 22:45; 2 Kings 8:23; 12:19; 14:18; 15:6, 36; 16:19; 20:20; 21:17, 25; 23:28; 24:5.

[15] See 1 Kings 14:19; 15:31; 16:5, 14, 20, 27; 22:39; 2 Kings 1:18; 10:34; 13:8, 12; 14:15, 28; 15:11, 15, 21, 26, 31.

[16] Joseph Blenkinsopp, “Memory, Tradition, and the Construction of the Past in Ancient Israel,” Biblical Theology Bulletin 27, no. 3 (1997): 78; see 2 Samuel 8:16; 20:24; 1 Kings 4:3; 1 Chronicles 18:15; 2 Chronicles 34:8; Isaiah 36:22.

[17] Martin Noth, The Deuteronomistic History (Sheffield, UK: JSOT, 1981), 10, 15, 76.

[18] See Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?, 131.

[19] Noth, Deuteronomistic History, 89.

[20] See Judges 2:11–23; compare 3:7, 12; 4:1; 6:1; 10:6–16; 13:1. Note that the term judge here (Hebrew mishpat) means “governor” or “ruler” as well as “judge” in a judicial sense; these governor-judges also acted as military leaders, and it is in this role that they gained their fame in the book of Judges. The so-called lesser judges held exactly the same position but did not have any heroic military stories told about them. See Dundas, “Kingship, Democracy, and the Message.”

[21] See Gerhard von Rad, “The Deuteronomic Theology of History in the I and II Kings,” in The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays, trans. E. W. Trueman Dicken (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 206.

[22] The consensus of modern-day scholarship holds that the Hebrew text refers to the “Sea of Reeds” rather than the Red Sea, but this opinion is far from certain. See Bernard F. Batto, “The Reed Sea: Requiescat in Pace,” Journal of Biblical Literature 102, no. 1 (March 1983): 27–35.

[23] Friedman, in Who Wrote the Bible?, 93–94, discusses the Prism Inscription of Sennacherib, which relates the same campaign from the Assyrian point of view.

[24] The history of the messianic idea is complex, but so far as our historical sources grant us insight into the understanding of the Israelites, they had only a very limited messianic idea before the second or third century BC. The profound knowledge of the Nephites concerning the coming of Christ is surely one of the main reasons why, as we shall see, the Lord held them to a higher standard of faithfulness and righteousness than he did the Israelites.

[25] Bertil Albrektson, History and the Gods: An Essay on the Idea of Historical Events as Divine Manifestations in the Ancient Near East and in Israel (Lund, Sweden: CWK Gleerup, 1967), 91–93.

[26] See John Van Seters, “Historiography in Ancient Israel,” in A Companion to Western Historical Thought, ed. Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maza (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 15–34.