In Tents 60 How Scriptural Texts Behave–and Don’t Behave–Rhetorically Part VI

Who wrote the last chapter of Deuteronomy? Moses surely couldn’t have written the chapter recording his death, could he?

And he buried him in a valley in the land of Moab, over against Beth-peor: but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.
–Deuteronomy 34:6

Commenting on this verse in The Five Books of Moses Robert Alter notes a poignant answer from the Talmudic tractate Baba Batra (14:B) “that God dictated it and Moses wrote it down, weeping” (p. 1058). But Alter also notes that phrase “unto this day,” which is a common biblical formula for denoting an event that happened many generations before writer wrote or reader read.

For Alter many generations after means the Seventh century, the time when Hilkiah brought the book forth, the time when Israel and Judah were surrounded by great warring nations who could tear them apart and send them into exile, the kind of exile threatened throughout Deuteronomy.

Alter calls Deuteronomy “the most sustained deployment of rhetoric in the Bible,” rhetoric designed to allow people in “the late First Commonwealth and exilic period” to participate in Moses’ final discourses to the camp of Israel, “an event that never occurred, or at any rate surely did not occur as it is represented in this text (p. 869)

Typing this out it I thought about the handcart treks our stake does every four years at Martin’s Cove, a place so popular for people wanting to participate in the sacrifices of handcart pioneers that the Department of Interior (or whatever branch administers the area) has set strict rules about where trekkers can go and what they can do.

But my first thought was of King Benjamin’s valedictory address in Mosiah 2-6. The account gives considerable detail about how to assemble the people, and how to get the words out to those not in earshot of the speaker’s voice. Indeed, if Benjamin’s practice of having scribes record and distribute his words descends from Moses’ practice, that could explain how Deuteronomy, or the Deutoronomic core, got written down, since Moses may have had scant time for writing between delivering the discourses and getting himself up into the mountain to die.

A more interesting question might be, Why does it matter if Moses wrote Chapter 34, or any of the chapter of Deuteronomy, or the other four books of the Torah?

Because of an ancient tradition that Moses wrote the Torah? Where did the tradition come from? Does the scriptural character of the Books of Moses depend on their having been written by him?

Does the fact that Deuteronomy fits the political situation of the Seventh century mean it was a production of that century? Can it be both of the Seventh century and of Moses’ time? A Seventh  century translation of an ancient document, as Marilyn Brown suggests in The Fires of Jerusalem?

(A related question, Can the Book of Mormom be a literary production both of Nineteenth century frontier America and of Fifth century Nephite prophets? Does it have to be one or the other?)

But how do we know Deuteronomy fits the political and social situation of the Seventh century? Two contrasting answers occur to me. At one point in his introduction to the Jewish Publication Society (JPS) translation of Isaiah, H. L. Ginsberg explains why the dominant view of scholars is no longer that Chapters 40-48 “[date] from the period 547-539 B.C.E., i.e., from between the fall of Sardis, the capital of Lydia before King Cyrus of Persia . . . and Cyrus’ actual entry into Babylon, . . . while the succeeding chapters [date] from the years following the latter event.”

That view doesn’t hold up because, “whereas there is no record of a Hebrew prophecy that could claim to have been fulfilled by Cyrus’ capture of Sardis, there are two or three which could be pointed to with every prospect of being accepted as evidence of foreknowledge of Cyrus’ conquest of Babylon” (18).

The implication is that when scholars are trying to date a prophetic document they look at events which could claim to be fulfilled by the prophecy and date it from those events. As I read somewhere, the more detailed the prophecy the more likely it is to have been written after the fact. That’s why (or one reason why) scholars date Matthew in the late first century C.E., because they see Matthew 24:2

And Jesus said unto them, See ye not all these things? verily I say unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.

as referring to the destruction of the temple in 70 C.E.

But there’s a danger in dating documents from the events we can fit to them. Such dating may lead us to think there’s only one fulfillment to a prophecy, or one correct interpretation of a scripture.

In Rube Goldberg Machines Adam S. Miller’s essay “Messianic History: Walter Benjamin and the Book of Mormon” suggests a different approach, that we learn to recognize events as fulfillments to prophecy because we understand the pattern in the prophecy. For example, in Acts 2,  where Jews from many countries all hear the Gospel in their own tongues–the anti-Babel–Peter says:

16 But this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel;
17 And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams:
18 And on my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my Spirit; and they shall prophesy:
19 And I will shew wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath; blood, and fire, and vapour of smoke:
20 The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before that great and notable day of the Lord come:
21 And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved.

 

And in Joseph Smith — History  the prophet says

[Moroni] also quoted the second chapter of Joel, from the twenty-eighth verse to the last. He also said that this was not yet fulfilled, but was soon to be.

Two fulfillments of the same prophecy, two different prophets recognizing that the pattern in Joel’s words fit the situation surrounding them.

Similarly, we might recognize Moses and Isaiah’s threats of exile and their promise of return as fitting the Assyrian or Babylonian exile and return from exile, and also see something like the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 as also fulfilling prophecies by Isaiah and Moses.

We see this typological reading of scripture throughout Matthew and other gospels when we hear phrases like, “Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet.” 

Miller says anachrony is a characteristic of scripture, or at least of messianic history, because messianic history doesn’t see an event as stuck in a particular time and place. Rather it sees events as typological.

This has possibilities for rethinking things like why the Book of Mormon quotes parts of Isaiah that scholars date from after Lehi left Jerusalem.

In The Apocalyptic Book of Isaiah Avraham Gileadi sets out the idea that historical events and characters in Isaiah are also types of events and people in later and last days. Or in Walter Benjamin’s terms, Isaiah was a messianic historian, and so were the prophets and priests who transmitted his book.

It’s entirely possible that recognizing events of their time as fitting Isaiah’s pattern they inserted a few words to fit the text to their time, like Cyrus’s name in Isaiah 45:1  and 44:28.

Prophets gloss other prophets, as in Matthew’s gloss of Jeremy above. I came across another example on this morning’s commute, where I’ve been working through JPS Isaiah for several months. Every page except the prose interlude from 36:1-37:21 contains at least one phrase noted with some variant of “meaning of Heb uncertain.” Many passages also have suggested emendations.

So Isaiah 48:1

Listen to this, O House of Jacob,
Who call yourselves Israel
And have issued from the waters of Judah

suggests loins as an emendation for waters

Ah, isn’t that the passage Oliver Cowdery, or was it Joseph Smith, emended in the 2nd edition of the Book of Mormon as “or out of the waters of baptism” (I Nephi 20:1)?

I’ve glanced at several ideas in this post that beg for a deeper look. All the comments I’ve made imply that sacred texts don’t behave the way we think they do. They are far richer than are our models for understanding them.

I believe that is what Jesus was telling the Sadducees and Pharisees and others he debated: The Word is much more expansive than you think, the whole world can’t contain it. Nor can any number of blog posts, but I do look forward to exploring “the shapes a bright container can contain,” to borrow a phrase from Theodore Roethke.

In the meantime, your turn, and here’s the Finnish greeting for this time of the year:

Hyvää joulua ja onnellista uutta vuotta!