An Objective Criterion for the Dating of Deuteronomy

Abstract

That the dating of the Book of Deuteronomy has been of central importance for the criticism and religious history of the Old Testament since the days of DeWette and still remains such is a thesis familiar to every worker in the field. The current theory has seen in the book a body of literature that can be fixed within reasonable time limits, thus offering a wealth of information on religious thinking and practices and social conditions at the height of the period of the kingdoms. It provides then a fixed point and definite criteria from which to work both backward and forward. Even the books of the prophets, in themselves somewhat precisely fixed and serving as further criteria for criticism and for the history of religion, have been subjected to this same measuring rod. However, such usefulness of Deuteronomy has depended upon the theory that identifies it with the lawbook of Josiah's reform. But this view, whatever its dependability, is not an obvious identification but a result hard won by a complicated process of induction from a variety of facts. That the argument is not devoid of high cogency is attested by its command of the support of successive generations of scholars and its survival of the intensely critical period that has intervened since DeWette's days. Yet, equally, that it is somehow deficient is apparent in that the issue has recently been thrown wide open once more, with conclusions so far apart as those of Kennett and Holscher, on one side, and Oestreicher and Welch, on the other, to say