The Formula ‘Yahweh,
Your God’ (יהוה אלהיך). It is
very easy, given the common translation of יהוה אלהך as ‘the Lord your God’, to
overlook the fact that repetition of this phrase in Deuteronomy 5-11 served the
role of emphasizing the personal name of the deity, Yahweh, and his claim to Israel’s
sole allegiance. In this respect, the traditional translation does grave
injustice to the intent of the Deuteronomistic legislation, since the central
issue in Deuteronomy, as it was in Hosea, was the competition between the God
Yahweh and other deities, such as Baal (We should note the work of B. Halpern,
who concludes, correctly, I think, that in the seventh century the term Baal served a collective function and
referred, polemically speaking, to all foreign deities [“The Baal [and the
Asherah] in seventh-century Judah: Yhwh’s Retainers Retired,” in Konsequente Traditionsgeschichte:
Festschrift für Klaus Baltzer zum 65. Geburtsag [ed. R. Bartelmus: OBO 126;
Gōttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993], 115-54). The Deuteronomic
movement was attempting to place any expressions of what it viewed as religious
pluralism with mono-Yahwism, and many themes in Deuteronomy turn out to be
ancillary to this main theme. So, for instance, although it is common to focus
on the notion of covenant and its importance in Deuteronomy—and it was, no
doubt important—the primary function of the covenant was to promote the
Deuteronomic preference for an exclusive relationship with Yahweh. And many
phrases used in the book, such as the concept of Israel as a “holy people” and
the claim that the people were “set apart” by Yahweh from among “all the
peoples on the ace of the earth,” were designed to emphasize this special and
therefore exclusive kind of relationship Israel ought to have with its deity.
This is not to overlook the obvious fact that beyond the struggle of Yahwism
against non-Yahwism there was also a struggle between “pure” Yahwism . . . (Kenton
L. Sparks, Ethnicity and Identity in
Ancient Israel: Prolegomena to the Study of Ethnic Sentiments and their
Expression in the Hebrew Bible [Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1998], 229-30)
