Thursday, July 25, 2024

William M. Schniedewind on the problems with connecting Deuteronomy with the Reforms of Josiah

  

There has always been something unsettling to me about connecting Deuteronomy with the Josianic Reforms. First of all, the Book of Deuteronomy does not present itself as a “scroll” but rather is quite dramatically presented as an oral speech of Moses. The book begins, “These are the words that Moses spoke” (Deut 1:1). More than this, Deuteronomy focuses on the figure of Moses as the lawgiver. The book begins and ends with Moses. It starts with Moses giving a farewell speech as Israel is about to cross over the Jordan into the Promised Land. Moses’ speech concludes in chapter 27, and then the book as a whole concludes with the story of Moses’ death. The Book of Deuteronomy is all about the figure of Moses, but the scroll that is found by Hilkiah is not associated with Moses at all. This seems like a huge omission—that is, if the scribes telling the story intended us to think that this scroll was related to the Book of Deuteronomy in its final form. In fact, the later priestly scribes who compiled the Book of Chronicles (probably in the fourth century BCE) thought the omission of Moses from the story of Josiah’s Reform had to be remedied. So in their account written during the Persian period, they make the connection quite clearly: “the priest Hilkiah found the scroll of the Torah of the Lord given through Moses” (2 Chr 34:14). But that note is not in the Book of Kings. Kings never attributes the scroll that was found to Moses. It is called “the scroll of the Torah” and “the scroll of the Covenant,” but it is never suggested that Moses was in any way responsible for the scroll. The critical figure in the finding of the scroll is only the priest Hilkiah and then the scribe Shaphan, who gets the scroll from Hilkiah and reads it. This alone should suggest that we should look for priestly influences for the Josianic Reform, and this is just what Monroe found in her analysis. More specifically, the Josianic Reform addresses issues of defilement as articulated in the “Holiness Code,” a section of the Book of Leviticus (chs. 17–26).

 

concerned with centralization of worship in Jerusalem. This idea is perhaps part of the legacy of reading Josiah’s Reforms through the lens of Deuteronomy, and in this case, Deuteronomy 12 (or “the Law of Centralization”). However, centralization is not really central to the Josianic Reforms. Rather, centralization was likely an aspect of the earlier reform under King Hezekiah, which was mentioned in just one biblical verse stating that Hezekiah “removed the high places” (2 Kgs 18:4). Archaeological excavations support this understanding of Hezekiah’s Reform. Several Judean temples and shrines outside of Jerusalem come to an abrupt end in the archaeological record in the late eighth century BCE. The late eighth century was about the centralization of Jerusalem—demographically, politically, and religiously. There likely continued to be a push toward centralization of Jerusalem in the seventh century, but that was not when it began.

 

Josiah’s Reform was more concerned with a religious ideology about purity. For example, there is an interesting tension between the priests in the countryside whose shrines are defiled and the Jerusalem priestly hierarchy. But in the end the priests from various towns were allowed a place in religious worship: “The priests from the high places did not sacrifice at the altar of the Lord in Jerusalem, but still ate unleavened bread with their fellow priests” (2 Kgs 23:9). The Am Ha’aretz scribal community was allied with the rural priests and Levites. An alliance between the rural priestly community, the Levites, and the elders comes together to support the young king Josiah. The scribal community updates the Book of Kings as well as the Book of Deuteronomy, and they collect the priestly traditions known as the “Holiness Code.” (William M. Schniedewind, Who Really Wrote the Bible: The Story of the Scribes [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024], 146-47)

 

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