Israel’s Choices

The laws of Deuteronomy appear within a unique narrative and rhetorical context (chapters 4–11 and 27–31). The rhetorical style of the book’s framework pervades some of the legal chapters as well. Fully 50 percent of Deuteronomy’s laws are accompanied by clauses that point out their logic, their justice, or the consequences of obedience or disobedience, and some chapters of the book read more like a legal sermon than a law collection.

Unlike the other law collections of the Torah, which are set in the first year after the exodus while the Israelites were encamped at Mount Sinai, according to Deuteronomy only the Ten Commandments were given to the people then, as the stipulations of God’s covenant with Israel. The laws of Deuteronomy 12–26, although given to Moses at the same time and bearing the same authority as the Ten Commandments, were transmitted by him only forty years later to the next generation encamped in the land of Moab and about to enter the Promised Land. Accordingly, in Deuteronomy Moses has this new generation commit to a second covenant that binds them to obey these laws.

Woven into this narrative are a series of arguments in which Moses reminds the new generation how the exodus and the theophany at Mount Sinai showed that there is only one God and why idols are forbidden. He exhorts them to observe the laws in a spirit of love and reverence for God, to learn them, and to teach them to their children. He then presents the laws, and he concludes by spelling out the privileges that the new covenant entails and the blessings or curses that will follow, depending on whether the people obey its terms or violate them.

Deuteronomy’s laws are characterized by a strong emphasis on humanitarian measures to protect and help the disadvantaged members of society as well as animals. A unique Deuteronomic feature is the rule that sacrificial worship and pilgrimage festivals may take place only at a single sanctuary in the religious capital.

Most of Deuteronomy’s laws reflect the rural society of the premonarchic period (as do other laws in the Torah), but a few of them reflect conditions in monarchic times, notably the monarchy itself, siege warfare, and the forced labor of defeated populations (Deuteronomy 20:11–12, 19–20). The extent of literacy presumed by the book (Deuteronomy 6:8; 11:20; 17:18–19; 24:1) and the frequent references to city walls and gates (Deuteronomy 5:14; 12:12; 17:5; 21:19; 22:15, 24; 25:7) likewise reflect the monarchic period, and the law restricting sacrifice to a single sanctuary dates to the latter part of that period (late eighth–seventh century BCE), the likely date of the core of Deuteronomy.