Alter begins his introduction to the final book of the Torah, “The Book of Deuteronomy is the most sustained deployment of rhetoric in the Bible. It is presented, after all, as Moses’s valedictory address, which he delivers across the Jordan from the promised land just before his death.” Alter goes on to clarify, “If one tries to imagine, however, the actual audience for which Deuteronomy was first framed, it will begin to be evident that its impressive deployment of rhetoric serves another purpose. Rhetoric is an art of persuasion, and the rhetoric of Deuteronomy is meant to persuade audiences in the late First Commonwealth and exilic period of the palpable and authoritative reality of an event that never occurred, or at any rate surely did not occur as it is represented in this text—the national assembly in trans-Jordan that was a second covenant after the covenant at Sinai…. The midrashic notion that all future generations of Israel were already present as witnesses at Sinai is adumbrated, perhaps actually generated, by this rhetorical strategy of the evocation of witnessing in Deuteronomy.”
Alter relates some of the syntactical moves in Deuteronomy. He claims, “The role of stylistic indicators of temporal and spatial location and orientation—those “pointing words” that linguists refer to as deictics—is essential to the creation of this general effect.” Specifically, he points to Deuteronomy 3:12, “And this land we took hold of at that time. One of the earmarks of Deuteronomic style is the fondness it exhibits for demonstrative pronouns. Moses, recapitulating the recent history of the Israelites for the benefit of the people, likes to use what linguists call deictics—“pointing words”—to indicate what is before their eyes, the familiar objects of their collective experience.”
In Deuteronomy 5:12, Alter relates a midrash when explaining a slight variation of word choice in the Biblical text, “Keep the sabbath day. The Exodus version has “remember” (that is, be mindful of) rather than “keep.” The Midrash Mekhilta famously announced, “‘keep’ and ‘remember’ in a singular utterance,” and the two acts are, indeed, joined in a tight nexus: because we remember or are mindful of something, we keep it. But shamor, “keep,” “observe,” “watch,” is a recurrent term in the didactic rhetoric of Deuteronomy, and so it is hardly surprising that this verb would be favored here.”
Alter combines his knowledge of geography, superstition, and literary style in his exposition of Deuteronomy 11:29, “the blessing on Mount Gerizim and the curse on Mount Ebal…. In keeping with the orientation to the east, Gerizim is on the favored right hand and Ebal on the suspect left, and Gerizim is covered with vegetation whereas Ebal is desolate. The theology of Deuteronomy is beautifully concretized in the stark opposition of these two mountains, for the book repeatedly stresses the forking alternatives of prosperity and disaster.”
The Book of Deuteronomy is particularly harsh on the pagan practices that predated monotheism. In Deuteronomy 12:2, Alter relates, “You shall utterly destroy all the places…. There have been exhortations earlier in Deuteronomy to eradicate all vestiges of the local pagan cults, but here that imperative of iconoclasm is coupled with a revolutionary insistence on the centralization of the Israelite cult.… In point of historical fact, what the Israelite religion did was to take over places of Canaanite worship and adapt them for the worship of the God of Israel…. For the Deuteronomist, the very existence of such local places of worship carries with it the danger of syncretism—the mingling of pagan rituals and concepts with the worship of the one God, and, especially, a leakage of the adoration of natural deities (“on the high mountains and in the valleys and under every lush tree”) into the cult of YHWH. Thus, the whole apparatus of local cults must be utterly destroyed, and instead, one central, exclusive place is to be designated for the worship of Israel’s God.”
In Deuteronomy 17:18-19, Alter gets into issues of literacy, the primacy of the written word, and the political structure of early Israelite society, “he shall write for himself a copy of this teaching. The king is to be actively engaged in personally producing a text of the teaching…. The location of religious authority in a text, a revolutionary idea, is made dramatically clear…. Many commentators have cited this whole section as a demonstration that the government of ancient Israel was in essence a constitutional monarchy…. This does not make his regime a constitutional monarchy, but one founded on theocratic authority, the Torah or constitution to be expounded by the priests at the central sanctuary.”
Alter notes another aspect of word choice in Deuteronomy 19:1, “the lord your God … the Lord your God. It is a stylistic peculiarity of Deuteronomy that the Lord, YHWH, very rarely occurs without “your God,” and even the substitution of a pronoun, as here, is generally avoided. This linguistic oddity reflects the didactic emphasis of the book, tirelessly reminding Israel that YHWH is its God.”
In Deuteronomy 27:3, Alter relates a bit of historical context, “write on them the words of this teaching. The most plausible reference of this phrase is to the code of laws (chapters 12-26) that has just been enunciated, although it could refer to the whole Book of Deuteronomy. Jeffrey H. Tigay notes that two steles the size on which the Code of Hammurabi are inscribed could contain more than the entire text of Deuteronomy…. Inscribing “the words of this teaching [torah]” on stone is a powerfully concrete image of the idea of the text as the enduring source of authority, which is the central ideological innovation of Deuteronomy.”
Alter makes the case that the Book of Deuteronomy seeks to link the people of Israel for all times—past, present, and future. To that end, in Deuteronomy 29:14, he states, “but with him who is here standing with us this day … and with him who is not here with us this day. This idea is paramount for the whole theological-historical project of the Book of Deuteronomy. The awesome covenant, evoked through Moses’s strong rhetoric, whereby Israel binds itself to God, is a timeless model, to be reenacted scrupulously by all future generations. The force of the idea is nicely caught by the rabbinic notion that all unborn generations were already standing here at Sinai.” Finally, Alter concludes with Deuteronomy 34:4, “the land that I swore to Abraham. This final mention of the promise to the forefathers links the end of Deuteronomy with the beginning of the Patriarchal narrative in Genesis.”
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