Deuteronomy and the Pious-Fraud Charge

De Wette never called Deuteronomy a fraud, and nothing shows a scroll forged in 622 BC. Josiah most likely enforced an older law, since centralization predates him. But a later narrator framed the book and parts echo a 672 BC Assyrian treaty, so the evidence cannot show Moses wrote it all.

By AI (Claude Opus 5.5, thinking level unavailable) Draft:  October 2026

"I found the scroll of the law in the Lord’s temple." — Hilkiah the high priest, 2 Kings 22:8, NET1

"But I am far from wishing to raise this conjecture to certainty." — W. M. L. de Wette, on the idea that Hilkiah planted the scroll, 18062

Summary

In 622 BC, during repairs to the Jerusalem temple, the high priest Hilkiah handed King Josiah a scroll he said he had found there.  Josiah read it, tore his clothes, and launched a purge:  he wrecked the hill shrines across Judah, held a national Passover in Jerusalem, and made the people swear to the scroll's terms (2 Kings 22-23).  Since 1805 the leading critical view has been that the scroll was some form of Deuteronomy, written not long before it was "found."  The popular form of that view says the priests forged a book of Moses to push the king's reform:  a "pious fraud."

This article tests that charge against its own sources and against the evidence for Deuteronomy's date.  It finds the following.

  1. The man who started the theory did not make the charge. W. M. L. de Wette's 1805 dissertation offered the link between Josiah's scroll and Deuteronomy as "a not improbable conjecture," in a footnote.3 In 1806 he raised the idea that Hilkiah slipped the book into the temple, then refused to assert it: "history draws its curtain over that."2 In 1807 he called Deuteronomy "a collection of later laws, ascribed to Moses by a historical fiction," which he said was the custom of the time.4 He rejected the label "pious deceiver" as worse, not milder, than "deceiver."4 The phrase "pious fraud" entered the debate in English in the 1870s, mostly from the theory's opponents, and the claim that de Wette used it goes back to a popular book of 1987 that gives no source.5 6
  2. Identifying the scroll with Deuteronomy is not the controversial part. Church Fathers and Jewish commentators made the link long before de Wette; a medieval commentary on Chronicles printed under Rashi's name calls the scroll "Mishneh Torah," Deuteronomy.7 8 Deuteronomy is the Pentateuch's book of the one chosen place, and it alone moves the Passover from the family home (Exodus 12:7) to that place (Deuteronomy 16:5-6).1 Those are the two things Josiah enforced. The live question is when the scroll was written.
  3. Centralization did not start with Josiah. Kings has an Assyrian envoy in 701 BC mock Hezekiah for removing the hill shrines and telling Judah to "worship at this altar in Jerusalem."1 Where the excavated shrines at Arad, Beersheba and Lachish show deliberate closure at all, it points to the late eighth century rather than to Josiah, and their dates are disputed.9 10 Moshe Weinfeld, a leading critical commentator, concludes that "the main layout of the book existed long before" 622, in Hezekiah's time.11
  4. The book does not read like a tract written to make Jerusalem the only shrine. It names "the place the Lord your God chooses" in 21 verses and never names Jerusalem.12 It orders an altar and sacrifices on Mount Ebal, near Shechem (Deuteronomy 27:4-8).1 Its rule that country Levites may serve at the central altar (18:6-8) is the one rule Josiah did not keep (2 Kings 23:9).1
  5. The treaty evidence cuts both ways. Parts of Deuteronomy 13 and 28 share specific wording and an order of curses with the succession treaty Esarhaddon of Assyria imposed in 672 BC, a copy of which turned up in a temple in Turkey in 2009.13 If those verses were copied from it, they are no older than 672 BC. But the book's overall shape (history, laws, a deposit and public reading, blessings with curses) matches Hittite treaties of about 1400-1200 BC, and the Assyrian treaties lack most of it.14 Aaron Koller of Yeshiva University reviews the exchange and concludes that neither set of parallels dates the book.15
  6. The other dating tools are weak. The Ketef Hinnom amulets, the oldest objects quoting Pentateuchal wording, are dated by most specialists to around 600 BC or later, so they set no floor before 622.16 17 One measured marker of late Hebrew puts Deuteronomy with Samuel, Kings and Jeremiah and against the Persian period, but linguistic dating is contested,18 and on Kitchen's own model the text was re-copied in updated Hebrew, so its language dates the last copy, not the first.14 19
  7. The scroll story cannot be shown to be invented. Ancient kings did report finding old texts in temples: Nabonidus of Babylon claimed to find a deposit of Naram-Sin, and a Hittite king promised to "rediscover" the gods' written covenant.20 11 Such reports can describe real finds or legitimate new texts, so the genre settles nothing. Chronicles puts the start of Josiah's purge six years before the find (2 Chronicles 34:3, 8), which fits a reform that the book deepened rather than started.1
  8. Joshua through Kings is a compiled history, finished after 562 BC. Kings cites named royal records 34 times,21 and Assyrian and Moabite inscriptions confirm its kings' names and order.22 23 Its last event is dated to 562 BC,24 a date conservative scholars accept for the final form.14 Chronicles, written around 400 BC, rewrote Kings freely in places, but some of its differences come from a different text of Samuel rather than from invention.25
  9. What the evidence does not show. It does not show that Moses wrote Deuteronomy as it stands. The book's narrator speaks of Moses in the third person and reports his death. Daniel Block, a conservative scholar who defends Mosaic speeches, concedes that "we hear the voice of the final author/editor/narrator."26 No copy or quotation of Deuteronomy is securely dated before the end of the seventh century.

Verdict.  The charge that Deuteronomy was a pious fraud, forged in 622 BC to back Josiah's reform, fails on its own sources and on the evidence.  Its founder declined to make it, the centralizing program it was meant to explain is older than Josiah, and the book's own laws do not fit a Jerusalem forgery.  The most defensible reading is that Josiah enforced an older law.  How much older is open.  The treaty form supports a core reaching back to the second millennium, and the Assyrian echoes support seventh-century work on at least some passages.  Neither proves Moses wrote the book as we have it, and the narrator who frames it is plainly later.  The conservative position that Deuteronomy preserves Mosaic law and speeches, edited later, is consistent with the evidence.  It rests on the text's own claims and on the treaty form, not on any artifact.

Part 1: The charge, from its own sources

What de Wette actually wrote

Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette printed a Latin dissertation at Jena in 1805.  Its title states its thesis:  Deuteronomy differs from the earlier books of the Pentateuch and is "the work of some other, more recent author."3  The famous link to Josiah is not in the argument at all.  It is in a footnote about the place of sacrifice.

The note opens:  "Diversas diversorum temporum leges Pentateuchum complecti, ex hac de loco sacrificiorum doctrina monstrari potest," that is, the Pentateuch's teaching on the place of sacrifice shows that it contains laws from different times.3  Exodus 20:24 allows an altar "in every place where I cause my name to be honored," and de Wette observes that "Samuel, Saul, David, Solomon" sacrificed "on hills and wherever the occasion offered."3 1  Then comes the sentence on which two centuries of scholarship turned.

Hic in collibus sacra faciendi mos posteriori tempore nefas est habitus, sed adeo inveteraverat, ut Iosias demum, Deuteronomio, tunc in templo invento, admonitus (illum enim codicem legum ab Hilkia sacerdote inventum (2 Reg. XXII.) Deuteronomium nostrum fuisse haud improbabili coniectura assequi licet) penitus eum tollere posset (2 Reg. XXIII).3

In English:  "This custom of sacrificing on the hills was held to be wicked in a later time, but it had become so ingrained that only Josiah, prompted by Deuteronomy, which was then found in the temple, could abolish it completely.  For it can be reached by a not improbable conjecture that the law book found by the priest Hilkiah was our Deuteronomy."  The text is from de Wette's 1830 reprint, which he says he revised in wording;  the 1805 printing words the clause slightly differently and also calls it a not improbable conjecture.27

De Wette took the next step a year later, in German, and then stepped back from it.

It is possible that the priest Hilkiah slipped it in.  This opinion undeniably has much in its favour:  the whole way the book is introduced looks not unlike a prearranged affair, in which besides Hilkiah, Shaphan and the prophetess Huldah in particular could have had a part.  But I am far from wishing to raise this conjecture to certainty, since I would thereby break the laws of history.  Where the book came from, history draws its curtain over that.2

In 1807 he gave his settled view.  Deuteronomy is "a collection of later laws, ascribed to Moses by a historical fiction."  New laws had to be introduced, which "by custom was best done through the name of Moses," so that "nothing remained but the fiction that Moses, shortly before his death ... promulgated a law once more."4  In the same volume he defended Moses against the rationalists of his day, who explained the miracles of the Exodus as tricks:  "Mose war kein Betrüger!" ("Moses was no deceiver!").  In a footnote he refused the softer label:  "One usually tries to soften this word with the addition 'pious';  but a pious deceiver, that is, one who uses the holy as a means, is still worse than any other."4

So the founder of the theory made three claims.  Deuteronomy is later than Moses.  It is probably the book Josiah found.  Its Mosaic voice is a literary convention.  He raised the idea of a planted scroll and declined to assert it, and he called "pious deceiver" a worse charge, not a milder one.

Wellhausen

Julius Wellhausen made the identification the anchor of a full history of Israel's religion in his Prolegomena (1878, English 1885).  "About the origin of Deuteronomy there is still less dispute," he wrote;  "in all circles where appreciation of scientific results can be looked for at all, it is recognised that it was composed in the same age as that in which it was discovered."28  The book's discovery gave "occasion to King Josiah to destroy the local sanctuaries," and "this alone, at least, of all the books of the Pentateuch, gives so imperious an expression to the restriction of the sacrificial worship to the one chosen place."28  He described a joint effort:  "Prophets and priests appear to have made common cause."28  He did not use the word fraud.  He even contrasted Deuteronomy with the Priestly Code, which he said "tries hard to imitate the costume of the Mosaic period," while Deuteronomy "allows the real situation ... to reveal itself very plainly."28

Who said "pious fraud," and when

The phrase belongs mostly to the debate in English between 1878 and 1906, and mostly to the opponents of the theory.

  1. 1874, Abraham Kuenen, the Dutch critic, came closest among the critics. If Hilkiah wrote the book, "he pretended that he had found the book of the law," and "this deception is much more unjustifiable still than the introduction of Moses as speaking."29 He used "pretended" and "deception," not "pious fraud."
  2. 1878, the trial of William Robertson Smith. In the Free Church of Scotland's heresy case against Smith, a speaker said: "Dr. Kuenen calls it 'a pious fraud' — a fraud, because he holds it was given forth as genuine Mosaic history, which it was not; but a pious fraud, because done for a pious purpose. Professor Smith says, no, not a fraud, because the generation to whom it was communicated knew what it was."5
  3. 1878, Samuel Ives Curtiss, a conservative, turned the label into a dilemma: "The only consistent position is either to hold that Deuteronomy is from Moses, or that it is a pious fraud."30
  4. 1893, T. K. Cheyne, a critic, admitted that "no student of Oriental life and history could be surprised at a pious fraud originating among priests," but added: "I do not adopt that theory to account for 2 Kings xxii."31
  5. 1895, S. R. Driver, the leading English critic, rejected the word outright. He held that "the Mosaic nucleus was expanded and developed in various directions" over time, and that the attribution of Deuteronomy's laws to Moses "is no fraudulent invocation of the legislator's name: it is simply another application of an established custom." Its author "cannot ... be held guilty of dishonesty or literary fraud."32
  6. 1906, James Orr, a conservative, wrote that on the critical view "the book was a result of pious fraud, or of a deliberate intention to deceive," and named Reuss, Graf, Kuenen, Wellhausen, Stade, Cornill and Cheyne as holding it. He titled an appendix "Deuteronomy as Fraus Pia."33
  7. 1987, Richard Elliott Friedman, in the popular Who Wrote the Bible?: "De Wette referred to it as 'pious fraud.'"6 No source is given, and none of de Wette's texts read for this article says it. Friedman himself argues that the law code is older and "need not have been written as a pious fraud shortly before its discovery by Hilkiah."6
  8. 2005, Thomas Römer describes "the pia fraus ('pious lie') theory, as advocated by Wellhausen and others."7 As shown above, Wellhausen's own words do not include the phrase.

The pattern is clear.  The label was mostly a summary the theory's opponents wrote for it, and its most prominent English supporter refused it.  The common claim that de Wette called Deuteronomy a pious fraud is a modern error.

The modern forms of the theory

The theory did not stay with Deuteronomy.  In 1943 Martin Noth argued that Deuteronomy's law became the charter of a single history running from Deuteronomy 1 to 2 Kings 25, written soon after 562 BC (Part 4).  Frank Moore Cross argued in 1973 for two editions:  a first under Josiah, "a propaganda work of the Josianic reformation and imperial program," and a second in the exile.34  In Germany, Rudolf Smend, "himself a former assistant of Noth," founded what became the "Göttingen" school, which finds several exilic layers:  a first historian, a "prophetic" editor and a "nomistic" editor focused on the Law.7  Thomas Römer's The So-Called Deuteronomistic History (2005) spreads the work across three periods.  He divides Deuteronomy 12 itself into a law of the late seventh century (12:13-18), an exilic rereading (12:8-12) and a Persian-period layer (12:2-7).7

Dates outside the consensus run in both directions.  Weinfeld and Friedman place the core before Josiah, in Hezekiah's court or among northern priests.11 6  Römer grants that "we do not have primary evidence for a so-called Josianic reform," though he sees "some indicators" of change at the end of the seventh century, and he dates the story of the find to the exile.7 35  Conservative scholars place the core with Moses (Part 5).

The case in its strongest form

The case for linking the scroll to Deuteronomy is strong, and it should be stated at its strongest before it is tested.  Kings says Josiah acted "in accordance with the whole law of Moses" and kept the Passover "as prescribed in this scroll of the covenant."1  His recorded acts line up with Deuteronomy's laws, and three of them with Deuteronomy alone.

Josiah's act (2 Kings 23) Deuteronomy Elsewhere in the Pentateuch
Ruins the high places "from Geba to Beer Sheba," brings their priests to Jerusalem (23:8) One chosen place for sacrifice (12:5-14) Exodus 20:24 allows an altar "in every place"; Leviticus 17:3-4 requires sacrifice at the tent of meeting
Holds the Passover at the temple "as prescribed in this scroll" (23:21-23) Passover only "in the place where he chooses" (16:5-6) Exodus 12:7: in the home, with blood on the doorframe
Removes worship of "the sun god, the moon god, the constellations" (23:5, 11) Forbids worship of "the sun, moon, or any other heavenly bodies" (17:3; 4:19) Not named
Smashes the sacred pillars and cuts down the Asherah poles (23:14) Forbids any Asherah or pillar beside the Lord's altar (16:21-22) Exodus 34:13: destroy Canaanite poles
Removes the mediums and spiritists (23:24) Forbids them (18:10-11) Leviticus 19:31
Fears the scroll's curses (22:13, 19) Curses of chapter 28 Leviticus 26
Leads a covenant ceremony with a public reading (23:1-3) Public reading every seventh year (31:10-13) Exodus 24:7

The first three rows are distinctive to Deuteronomy in the form Josiah enforced them:  one chosen place in the land rather than a tent in the camp, a Passover held there rather than at home, and a ban on worship of the sun and moon.  The last four are shared with Exodus and Leviticus, which is Kitchen's point:  the reform "could have been sparked off as easily by one version of the Sinai covenant (the older, Exodus-Leviticus) as the other."14  He is right about those four rows and wrong about the first two.  Kitchen also calls the claim for centralization in Josiah's reform "incredibly shaky."14  Kings says the opposite in plain words (2 Kings 23:8-9), and this article does not follow him there.

The scroll's size fits too.  Shaphan "read it out loud before the king" at one audience, and Josiah "read aloud all the words of the scroll of the covenant" to the assembly at one ceremony.1  At the pace of a recorded reading of the King James Version, the whole Pentateuch takes about 16 hours to read aloud, Deuteronomy about 3, and its law code (chapters 12-26) about an hour.36  A scroll the size of Deuteronomy, or of its core, fits the story.  The whole Pentateuch does not.

So the identification of the scroll with some form of Deuteronomy is sound.  It was made long before de Wette.  Römer notes that "early Jewish commentators, as well as some Church Fathers, already identified the book mentioned in 2 Kgs 22-23 as the book of Deuteronomy."7  A medieval commentary on Chronicles printed under Rashi's name glosses the scroll as "Mishneh Torah," the Hebrew name of Deuteronomy.8  What de Wette added was the claim that the book was new when it was found.  That is the claim Part 2 tests.

Part 2: The evidence on the date, item by item

Each item below is asked the same question:  does it favour a book written in 622 BC, a book that existed before 622, or a book from Moses?  An item can support one of those and leave the others untouched.

The reform's targets were older than Josiah

The strongest form of the charge needs centralization to be new in 622, so that a new book was needed to justify it.  Kings itself says otherwise.  It credits Hezekiah, eighty to a hundred years earlier, with removing "the high places" (2 Kings 18:4).  In the siege of 701 BC it has the Assyrian envoy taunt Jerusalem:  "Hezekiah is the one who eliminated his high places and altars and then told the people of Judah and Jerusalem, ‘You must worship at this altar in Jerusalem.’"1  Weinfeld calls Hezekiah "the first to centralize worship in Israel."11

Archaeology can test this, and the result is mixed.  The companion article Israelite Religion on the Ground covers the sites.  In short:

  1. At Arad, a small Judahite temple went out of use without being burned, its altars and standing stones carefully buried. Its re-excavator Ze'ev Herzog dates the end to the late eighth century and calls it "one of the neatest correlations between the biblical account and the archaeological record," crediting Hezekiah.37 David Ussishkin dates the same shrine later, and concludes that its building and destruction "can hardly be related in any way to the religious reforms conducted in Judah by Hezekiah and Josiah."38
  2. At Beersheba the stones and horns of a large altar were found built into a building of the late eighth century, so the altar was taken apart before that building went up. At Lachish a shrine in the city gate was sealed, with a toilet seat set on its remains, before Sennacherib destroyed the city in 701 BC.9 Two scholars read the Lachish rooms as destroyed or secular rather than desecrated. Avraham Faust counts Lachish, Arad and Beersheba as "broadly accepted material evidence of the historicity of Hezekiah's reform."9
  3. Nadav Na'aman reviewed the same sites and concluded that "there is, as yet, no clear archaeological evidence for any of the cultic reforms mentioned in the Bible," and that "the Bible is our only source for both Hezekiah’s and Josiah’s reforms."10

Either way, the dirt does not show a Josianic reform.  If the eighth-century closures were a reform, the centralizing program is older than Josiah by about a century.  If they were not, archaeology says nothing about Josiah's reform at all.  On neither reading does it support a book first written in 622.  Weinfeld, who dates Deuteronomy to the Hezekiah-Josiah era and does not think Moses wrote it, draws the obvious conclusion:  "As the book of Deuteronomy was discovered in the days of Josiah (622 b.c.e.) we must suppose that the main layout of the book existed long before that time — that is, at the time of Hezekiah."11

The book's own laws do not fit a Jerusalem tract

If priests in 622 had written a law to close every shrine but the temple, one would expect them to name the temple.  Deuteronomy never does.  The phrase "the place the Lord your God chooses" occurs in 21 verses, from 12:5 to 31:11, and Jerusalem appears nowhere in the book.12  Kings is the book that identifies the chosen place:  "Jerusalem, the city the Lord chose from all the tribes of Israel."1  Gordon Wenham pressed this point in 1985:  "Nowhere does the book specify what place is meant by 'the place which the Lord your God will choose'.  It is just a guess that Jerusalem is intended."39  The critical reply is that a writer posing as Moses could not name a city Israel would not take for three centuries, so silence is what a skilled forger would write.40  That reply is fair.  The point is a draw.

Two other features are harder to explain as Josianic invention.

  1. The altar on Mount Ebal. Deuteronomy 27:4-8 orders Israel, once across the Jordan, to set up plastered stones and "build an altar there to the Lord your God" on Mount Ebal, near Shechem in the north, and to offer burnt offerings on it.1 A Jerusalem priest of 622 writing to close every altar but his own had no reason to add a command for a second altar in the north. Wenham: the Ebal directive "makes it most unlikely that it should be regarded as a tract whose main purpose is to encourage or justify centralization of worship in Jerusalem."39 Critical scholars answer that chapter 27 is a later insertion. That may be so, but it is a claim made to save the theory, and the reader should weigh it as one.
  2. The country priests. Deuteronomy 18:6-8 lets any Levite who comes from the towns to "the place the Lord chooses" serve there and "eat the same share" as the resident priests.1 Josiah did the opposite: "the priests of the high places did not go up to the altar of the Lord in Jerusalem" (2 Kings 23:9).1 A book written by the Jerusalem priesthood to back this reform would be expected to match it here, where the priests' own income was at stake. It does not.

Neither feature proves that the book is old.  Both are evidence that whoever wrote it was not writing the program Josiah actually carried out.

Deuteronomy 13 and 28 and the treaty of Esarhaddon

In 672 BC Esarhaddon of Assyria made his subjects and vassals swear to accept his son Ashurbanipal as heir.41  Copies of this oath were found in the temple of Nabû at Calah (Nimrud), and in 2009 another turned up, one of eleven tablets in the inner sanctum of a temple at Tell Tayinat in southern Turkey, capital of an Assyrian province.42  In Hans Ulrich Steymans's words the find "confirms the Assyrian application of this text on western vassals."13  Judah under Manasseh was such a vassal.  Two parts of Deuteronomy share specific content with it.

  1. Deuteronomy 13 requires an Israelite to report and not to shield anyone, "a prophet or one who foretells by dreams," or "your own full brother, your son, your daughter, your beloved wife," who urges the worship of other gods.1 The treaty requires its sworn subjects to report any disloyal word "from the mouth of your brothers, your sons, your daughters, or from the mouth of a prophet, an ecstatic, an inquirer of oracles."41
  2. Deuteronomy 28 threatens that "the sky above your heads will be bronze and the earth beneath you iron."1 The treaty curses: "May they make your ground like iron" and "just as rain does not fall from a brazen heaven."41 Leviticus 26:19 has the same image the other way round, "your sky like iron and your land like bronze."1 Deuteronomy agrees with the Assyrian text against Leviticus. Deuteronomy 28:26-30 also runs through the treaty's curses of four gods, carcasses for the birds, skin disease, blindness at noon, and another man taking one's wife and house, nearly in the treaty's order.41 1

Steymans argues from these and other parallels that Deuteronomy 28:20-44 was copied from the treaty's longest curse, so that "these Hebrew verses came to existence between 672 BC and 622 BC."13  He holds that "the sequence of motifs is identical," with two items moved on purpose.13  Bernard Levinson and Jeffrey Stackert argue that Deuteronomy 13 was composed in the seventh century by reworking both Exodus's older law code and the Esarhaddon treaty.13

Three objections come from different directions.

  1. The order is not identical. Kenneth Kitchen, the leading conservative Egyptologist, points out that verse 26 would have to move to keep the treaty's order, and he counts "only seven ill-organized items out of seventy-five curses/curse paragraphs" in the Assyrian text.14 He prefers a "broad pool of traditional curse topics and formulae" behind both texts.14
  2. Copying would have been clumsy. Carly Crouch, who is not a conservative, accepts that the relationship is real but finds it "indistinct, erratic, and directed toward no apparent purpose."43 She concludes that Deuteronomy 13 and 28 contain "no more such material than that which might be expected of any Hebrew text."43 Her target is the claim that Deuteronomy deliberately answers the Assyrian oath; she does not deny contact, and she does not date the book.
  3. The Hittite parallels are as good or better. Joshua Berman argued in 2011 that "the Hittite parallels are closer in content and in form to the laws of Deuteronomy 13 than are the parallels from the Neo-Assyrian tradition."44 His main witness is CTH 133, a fifteenth-century treaty between a Hittite king and the men of Ismerika, which also orders a rebel city to be attacked.44 He grants one exception: "Only the concern that divination could be employed for seditious purposes stands out as an element common to VTE and to Deuteronomy but absent from the earlier traditions." His conclusion is "a Late Bronze Age Hittite background for Deuteronomy 13," though "the mechanism and the timing are unclear."44 Levinson and Stackert replied, in Koller's summary, that the Assyrian parallels are too strong to dismiss and that no route is known by which Hittite texts reached Israel. Koller answers that "until 2009 it was not known that copies of the VTE were brought to the west, either."15

Pricing the argument.  If Deuteronomy 28:20-44 copies the treaty, those 25 verses are no older than 672 BC.  That is under 3 percent of Deuteronomy's 959 verses.  A dependent Deuteronomy 13 adds 18 more, for a total under 5 percent.  The copying claim therefore dates part of the book, not the whole, and it is consistent with two models:  a seventh-century book written with the treaty in view, or an older covenant text whose curse list and loyalty law were brought up to date in the century of Assyrian rule.  It cannot make the book later than 672, and on any version it puts these chapters before the scroll was found in 622.45

The shape of the book and the Hittite treaties

The second treaty argument is about the whole book, not its wording.  Hittite vassal treaties of about 1400-1200 BC follow a set order:  title, a history of the two parties, stipulations, a clause for depositing the text and reading it aloud, divine witnesses, and blessings and curses.  Kitchen's survey of treaty forms across two thousand years finds that the Assyrian treaties of the 600s lack most of this:  "In VI there is no historical prologue, no blessings to match with curses, no deposition, no reading arrangements.  But all these are common to phase V and Sinai."14  Deuteronomy has every one of them.

Element Deuteronomy Hittite treaties, c. 1400-1200 BC Assyrian treaties, 700s-600s BC
History of the parties' past 1:6-3:29 Yes No, with one possible exception (below)
Stipulations 5-26 Yes Yes
Text deposited and read aloud 31:9-13, 24-26 Yes No
Witnesses 4:26, 30:19, 31:28 (heaven and earth) Yes (gods) Yes (gods)
Blessings as well as curses 28:1-14 and 28:15-68 Yes Curses only, or brief blessings

The table follows Kitchen and Koller.14 15  Two cautions keep it honest.  Koller notes that an Assyrian treaty with the king of Qedar "apparently had a historical prologue, which weakens the need to appeal to the Hittite treaties."15  And Kitchen and Paul Lawrence's own catalogue of 2012 classes Deuteronomy's historical passages as asides inside the stipulations, not as a prologue in the Hittite position.46  The match is real but not exact.

Koller teaches Bible at Yeshiva University and says so:  "My religious position in life, and my work teaching at Yeshiva University, certainly encourage certain biases."15  He weighs the whole exchange.  On Deuteronomy 13 he finds "no “smoking guns” that reveal the influence of either the Vassal Treaties of the seventh century, or the Hittite treaties of the thirteenth century."15  His verdict:  "That Deuteronomy, at least in some form, dates back to the second millennium BCE appears to be a more tenable scholarly position than it did earlier."15  "At least in some form" is doing real work in that sentence, and it should be quoted with it.

The form argument is the best evidence for a second-millennium core.  It is not proof.  A seventh-century scribe could have inherited an old covenant pattern without inheriting an old text, and no Hittite-era copy of anything in Deuteronomy exists.

The Ketef Hinnom amulets

Two small rolled silver plaques from a burial cave at Ketef Hinnom, in Jerusalem, are the oldest objects known to carry wording found in the Pentateuch.  Both end with the priestly blessing of Numbers 6:24-26.  The larger one also has a line that Nadav Na'aman translates "Who keeps the covenant and steadfast love with those who love him (and) keep his commandments," which he calls "an exact parallel" to Deuteronomy 7:9.17

Their date is disputed.

  1. Gabriel Barkay's team, in their 2004 re-edition, date them "from the horizon of the end of the Judaean monarchy—or a palaeographic date of the late seventh century B.C.E. to early sixth century B.C.E." They add that any such date "must be considered accurate only to + 40 years."47
  2. Na'aman argues from their spelling that "the pre-exilic date for the plaques, originally suggested by Barkay and Yardeni and supported by the majority of scholars, cannot be maintained." He prefers "the late sixth or early fifth century BCE."17
  3. Erik Waaler, writing in 2002, argued for 725-650 BC, while noting that "most scholars have dated the two amulets to the late seventh or early sixth century BC."16

On the majority date, the amulets show that wording like Deuteronomy 7:9 was in use in Jerusalem within a generation of 622, before or after.  That fits a book written just before Josiah's reform and a book written long before it equally well.  Na'aman draws the right limit:  because each amulet is a patchwork of phrases, "the amulets cannot indicate the stage of composition of the biblical text at the time of their engraving."17  The amulets matter more for the date of the Priestly material, which is discussed in Moses and the Composition of the Pentateuch.  For Deuteronomy they set no floor before 622.

The Hebrew of Deuteronomy

Biblical Hebrew changed over time, and the change can be measured.  Avi Hurvitz, the leading advocate of linguistic dating, holds that "the fifth century BCE was a critical turning point in the history of the Hebrew language," after which texts show features "entirely absent in the earlier sources," many due to the influence of Imperial Aramaic.48  One of his markers is the word for "kingdom."  His lexicon quotes E. Y. Kutscher:  "Instead of sBH ממלכה or מלוכה ‘kingdom, LBH prefers מלכוּת," that is, late Hebrew prefers malkut to the standard mamlakah.48

A count of that one marker in the Hebrew text gives a clear result.18

Book malkut mamlakah or melukhah
Deuteronomy 0 7
Samuel and Kings 2 44
Jeremiah 3 18
Chronicles 28 23
Esther, Ezra and Nehemiah 34 2

Deuteronomy uses the old word every time.  If its author had written like the authors of Chronicles, where malkut is 55 percent of the kingdom words, the chance of seven old words and no new one would be 0.45 to the seventh power, about 0.4 percent.  On Esther-Ezra-Nehemiah's rate it would be far smaller.  On Jeremiah's rate it is about 34 percent.  So this marker sets Deuteronomy's Hebrew with Samuel, Kings and Jeremiah, and against a Persian-period composition.  It cannot tell 622 BC from 1200 BC, because classical Hebrew covers the whole monarchy.49

Two cautions limit even that.  First, one word is one marker, and the method itself is disputed.  Ian Young, Robert Rezetko and Martin Ehrensvärd argue that "'Early' BH and 'Late' BH, so-called, represent co-existing styles of Hebrew throughout the biblical period."19  Second, on Kitchen's own model the text was "recopied, modernizing outdated grammatical forms and spellings," so its language would date the last thorough copying, not the first writing.14  Language can help rule out a very late Deuteronomy.  It cannot prove an early one.

Part 3: Is "fraud" the right category?

Three claims that travel together

The charge bundles three separate claims.  They rest on different evidence and should be judged one at a time.

  1. Claim (a): Deuteronomy, or its core, existed before 622 BC.
  2. Claim (b): Deuteronomy comes from Moses.
  3. Claim (c): The story of finding the scroll was invented, either by Hilkiah at the time or by a later writer.

A "pious fraud" in the strict sense needs (c), plus a scroll written shortly before 622 and passed off as Mosaic.  Rejecting (b) does not prove (c).  Accepting (a) does not prove (b).

Claim Evidence for Evidence against Assessment
(a) Core existed before 622 Centralization under Hezekiah (2 Kings 18:22) and eighth-century shrine closures, if they were reforms; the Ebal altar and the country-priest rule, which do not fit Josiah's program; the treaty form; even Steymans dates the Assyrian-style curses to 672-622, before the find None that dates the core after 622; the archaeology of the reforms is disputed Probable
(b) From Moses The book says Moses wrote "this law" (31:9, 24); its shape matches treaties of Moses' era; conservative scholars find nothing in the speeches that reads like a later forgery A narrator frames the speeches and reports Moses' death; parts of chapters 13 and 28 echo a treaty of 672 BC; no copy or quotation before the eighth century Possible for a core of speeches and laws; not shown for the book as it stands
(c) Scroll story invented Ancient "found book" stories often legitimated new texts; Römer reads 2 Kings 22-23 as an exilic literary construct; de Wette thought a set-up "not unlikely" Such stories also report real finds made during temple repairs; Chronicles has the reform start before the find; the story keeps an oracle that its own sequel seems to contradict; de Wette himself declined to assert it Not shown either way

Found books in the ancient world

Kings were reporting finds of old writings long before Josiah, and long after.

  1. Babylon. Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon (556-539 BC), boasted that while rebuilding the sun-god's temple at Sippar he dug down eighteen cubits and found "the foundation deposit of Naram-Sin, son of Sargon, which no king among my predecessors had found in three thousand and two hundred years."20 His biographer Paul-Alain Beaulieu reads this as the work of an antiquarian king and marks the figure with an exclamation point.50 On the modern dates for Naram-Sin the gap is about 1,700 years, so the king roughly doubled it.51 The find itself, a buried foundation deposit uncovered during temple repairs, is the kind of object Mesopotamian kings really did bury and later dig up.
  2. The Hittites. King Muwatalli, in the 1300s or 1200s BC, confessed neglect of the gods' written covenant and promised: "I shall follow the (covenantal) bond (ishiul) of the gods that I am rediscovering."11 Weinfeld calls the discovery of ancient sacred documents in a temple "always a thrilling event."11
  3. Egypt. A rubric of the Book of the Dead, spell 64, says the spell "was found at Khmun (Hermopolis) on an alabaster plaque, under the feet of the Majesty of this venerable god (Thoth) ... in the time of the Majesty of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Mycerinus," by the prince Hordjedef.52 About 710 BC King Shabaka of Egypt had a theological text carved in stone because "his majesty found it to be a work of the ancestors which was worm-eaten."53

What the genre shows depends on who reads it.  Wolfgang Speyer's 1970 study of book-finds in ancient religious propaganda concluded, in Thomas Römer's summary, that the motif was "mostly used" to give "a just-made work the appearance of greater age and great holiness."35  Römer also traces the motif to a real practice:  "the deposit of foundation tablets in Mesopotamian sanctuaries that are often »rediscovered« by later kings undertaking restoration works."35  Josiah's scroll turned up during exactly such a restoration (2 Kings 22:3-8).1  The genre therefore contains both real finds and fictions.  A story's membership in it does not tell which kind it is.

The rediscovery reading

Every ancient reader who comments on the find took it as the recovery of an old book.  Josephus, in the first century AD, says Hilkiah "lighted upon the holy books of Moses that were laid up in the temple."54  Medieval Jewish commentators explained the loss.  David Kimchi (Radak, about 1200) reports a rabbinic tradition that a scroll was hidden from King Ahaz, but he calls it unlikely, since Hezekiah would have brought it out.  He blames Manasseh instead:  in Manasseh's fifty-five years "the Torah was forgotten," until Hilkiah found a scroll "lying in its place beside the Ark."8  Deuteronomy itself orders the scroll kept "beside the ark of the covenant" (31:26).1

The gap the rediscovery reading needs is not long.  Manasseh reigned 55 years and Amon 2 (2 Kings 21:1, 19), and the find came in Josiah's eighteenth year.1  The Bible's reign lengths therefore put up to 74 years between Hezekiah's death and the find, two generations under kings who promoted other gods.  A scroll unread for that long is not hard to imagine.  Kitchen puts it this way:  Josiah's reform was "partly stimulated by recovery of a book of the covenant long lost in some dusty cupboard during the half-century reign of Manasseh plus Amon."14

Critical scholars can hold the same view.  Weinfeld, as quoted in Part 2, holds that the book existed in Hezekiah's time and was rediscovered.  Gordon Wenham notes that "the fact that the temple was being repaired when the law book was found surely implies that certain reforms preceded the law book's discovery," and that Chronicles places Josiah's purge "in his twelfth year, six years before the discovery."39

The critical reading

The opposite view does not depend on a fraud by Hilkiah.  Römer argues that the find is a literary device and cannot be used to reconstruct events:  "a positivist historical reading of the book-finding event does not help much to understand the text."35  He dates 2 Kings 22-23 to the exile and treats it as "a literary and theological construct," while adding:  "This does not mean that no »reform« under Josiah ever existed."35  On this view no one in 622 forged anything.  A later writer told the story of Josiah's reform around a book that his own community held sacred.

That view has a cost the reader should see.  The story contains the prophetess Huldah's promise that Josiah would "die and be buried in peace,"1 and the sequel has him killed in battle at Megiddo (2 Kings 23:29).1  Robert Chisholm, a conservative, grants that if the oracle was unconditional it is, in Cogan and Tadmor's words, "a striking example of unfulfilled prophecy."55  A writer inventing the scene after 609 had little reason to compose an oracle that looked false.  The easier explanation is that the oracle was written down before Josiah's death, within thirteen years of the find.  That is an inference, not a proof.  Some readers take "in peace" to mean only that Josiah was buried before the disaster fell on Jerusalem, and on that reading a later writer could have kept it.  The test is discussed in How to Test a Fulfilled Prophecy.

What "fraud" would have meant

De Wette's own explanation was not fraud but convention.  New laws, he wrote in 1807, were introduced "by custom" in the name of Moses, so that "nothing remained but the fiction that Moses, shortly before his death, ... promulgated a law once more."4  Modern critical accounts such as Römer's treat the find as a literary convention, not a crime, and the book's Mosaic voice as pseudepigraphy, the ancient practice of writing in the name of a founding figure.  Conservatives answer that the comparison fails.  Block:  "Nothing about the book of Deuteronomy or the speeches embedded therein points to a pseudepigraphic work."56  Wenham states the stake plainly:  "a late date clearly implies its pseudonymity."39

The honest summary is this.  If Deuteronomy was written in the seventh century and presented as Moses' words, that is pseudonymous authorship, whatever one calls it.  Whether it was meant to deceive is a separate question that no evidence answers.  The specific charge, that the scroll was manufactured for the reform of 622, is the weakest of the three claims, because the reform's main idea was older than the scroll and the scroll's laws do not match the reform where it mattered most to the priests.

Part 4: Joshua through Kings, and Chronicles

The charge against Deuteronomy grew into a theory about the next six books, and that theory now has its own article:  How Were Joshua to Kings Put Together, and How Freely Did Chronicles Rewrite Them?  Its findings, in short:

  1. The History is anonymous and late in its final form, and makes no claim to be otherwise. Its last event is Jehoiachin's release in 562 BC. Noth dated his Deuteronomist just after it,24 and Kitchen's own model has an exilic prophet add that closing paragraph.14
  2. It was built from older written records. Kings cites named royal annals 34 times, and the citations stop when each court did.21 Its synchronisms between the two kingdoms, some left contradicting each other, and "until this day" notes written while the temple stood point the same way. Assyrian and Moabite inscriptions confirm its kings' names, order and dates at most points where they can be tested.22 23
  3. Chronicles copies closely where it copies, and chooses freely what to copy. It omits David's sins and the northern prophets, adds Manasseh's repentance, and changes the cause of David's census, yet some of its differences come from a Samuel text like the Qumran scroll 4QSama rather than from invention.25

The lesson for the fraud question cuts both ways.  Israel's historians reshaped older material openly, and two versions of the same reigns stand side by side in the canon.  A culture that kept both did not treat retelling as forgery, which is a reason to doubt that "fraud" is the right category for Deuteronomy.  It is not a reason to think Deuteronomy was not reshaped.

Part 5: Conservative models, and what each side rests on

The conservative models in their own words

Conservative scholars do not defend one model.  Four are current.

  1. Mosaic speeches, later narrator (Daniel Block). Block, an evangelical Old Testament scholar, argues that Moses' addresses were written down in stages, beginning in Moses' lifetime, and that a later narrator framed them. He counts the narrator's own voice in "only 64 verses."26 His summary: "Later expressions like “Book of Moses” and “Torah of Moses” do not demand that Moses’ own hand produced the book in its final form. We do not doubt the historicity of Moses, nor the authenticity of his speeches." The editor, he says, "was himself a prophet in the Mosaic tradition."56 Block gives no date for the editor.
  2. Mosaic text, modernized in copying (Kenneth Kitchen). Kitchen holds that Moses wrote in "alphabetic late Canaanite," and that "copies of older works such as Deuteronomy or Joshua would be recopied, modernizing outdated grammatical forms and spellings."14 His case for the date rests on the treaty form, which he says puts Deuteronomy "squarely within" the Hittite-era group "and at no other date."14
  3. Covenant renewal (Meredith Kline). In 1963 Kline argued that "Deuteronomy is a covenant renewal document which in its total structure exhibits the classic legal form of the suzerainty treaties of the Mosaic age."57 The book is the record of a ceremony on the plains of Moab, renewing the Sinai covenant for a new generation.
  4. A theology of place, not a date (Gordon McConville, Gordon Wenham). McConville reads the unnamed "place" as deliberate: "Deuteronomy's decision to refrain from naming a place is in keeping with its fundamental understanding of divine presence."58 He leaves the date open, and allows that "an earlier dating fits with the belief that a 'reform movement' was in place well before Josiah's time."59 Wenham's argument, given in Part 2, is from the Ebal altar and from Chronicles' order of events.

Joshua Berman's legal-historical reading belongs here too.  He finds "a Late Bronze Age Hittite background for Deuteronomy 13" (Part 2), and he has argued that Hittite treaty practice explains why Deuteronomy 1-3 retells the wilderness years differently from Numbers, without dividing the text into sources.15  Berman does not claim that this fixes a date:  "the mechanism and the timing are unclear."44  His 2017 book Inconsistency in the Torah was not available for this article.

What each side's case rests on

Both cases mix evidence with assumption.  The table separates them.

Rests on evidence Rests on assumption
Conservative case The treaty form (contested but real); the unnamed place, the Ebal altar and the country-priest rule (facts of the text); the Assyrian envoy's report of Hezekiah's centralization (a text); the eighth-century shrine closures (disputed) That the speeches preserve Moses' own words, for which there is no evidence outside the book; that a second-millennium form proves a second-millennium text rather than an inherited pattern; that the later narrator transmitted faithfully
Critical case The match between Josiah's acts and Deuteronomy's laws; specific echoes of Esarhaddon's treaty of 672 BC in chapters 13 and 28; the narrator's later viewpoint That centralization was new in 622, against Kings' own report of Hezekiah; that the find story is fiction, for which there is no evidence; that shared motifs mean copying rather than common tradition; that chapter 27's altar is a later insertion

The strongest evidence on the critical side, the Assyrian echoes, dates part of the book to between 672 and 622.  That is before the find, so it supports the existence of a Deuteronomic text before Josiah's reform rather than a scroll forged for it.  The strongest evidence on the conservative side, the treaty form, shows that the book's covenant pattern is old.  It does not show that the words are.

Objections and responses

  1. "The scroll matches Deuteronomy so closely that it must have been written for the reform." The match shows that Josiah enforced Deuteronomy, not when Deuteronomy was written. The two features that are distinctive to Deuteronomy, one altar and a central Passover, are the two that Kings already credits to Hezekiah's program, and the book's rule for country priests is the one Josiah broke. A book written for the reform would fit it best where it fits it worst.
  2. "Kings' report of Hezekiah's centralization is itself late propaganda." That is Na'aman's position, and it may be right. But Kings is also "our only source for both Hezekiah’s and Josiah’s reforms."10 A reader who rejects Kings for Hezekiah has no stronger ground to accept it for Josiah, and without Josiah's reform the "fraud to back a reform" has no occasion. The eighth-century shrine closures at Beersheba and Lachish, if they were acts of reform, are evidence outside the text.
  3. "The Assyrian treaty parallels prove a seventh-century date." If Deuteronomy 28:20-44 copies Esarhaddon's treaty, those verses were written after 672 BC. Steymans himself puts them before 622, the year of the find.13 The parallels therefore support the existence of a Deuteronomic text before Josiah's reform, and they date under 5 percent of the book. Crouch and Berman, from opposite directions, both doubt that the copying is as direct as Steymans claims.
  4. "The treaty form proves a Mosaic date." This is the conservative overstatement. Kitchen says the Late Bronze match puts Deuteronomy in that period "and at no other date," and that the evidence "sets this matter beyond any further dispute."14 It does not. A form can be inherited. Koller concedes an Assyrian treaty that "apparently had a historical prologue,"15 and Kitchen and Lawrence's own catalogue does not class Deuteronomy's history as a prologue in the Hittite position.46 The most a careful reviewer says is that a second-millennium origin "at least in some form" is "more tenable" than it was.15
  5. "Deuteronomy does not even mention centralized worship." This claim circulates in creationist writing. A review in the Journal of Creation summarises the point: "Josiah was very interested in promoting centralized worship, yet Deuteronomy does not mention centralized worship, much less does it describe a Temple or mention that it ought to be in Jerusalem!"60 The first half is wrong. Deuteronomy demands one chosen place in 21 verses. The defensible point is the second half: the book never names Jerusalem or describes a temple.
  6. "If Deuteronomy is not from Moses, it is a fraud and the Bible cannot be trusted." Curtiss put it that way in 1878, and Wenham agrees that "a late date clearly implies its pseudonymity."30 39 But the book does not claim that Moses wrote all of it. Its narrator speaks of Moses in the third person and reports his death and burial, and conservative scholars such as Block accept a later narrator.26 What the book claims is that Moses spoke these words and wrote "this law" (31:9, 24). That claim concerns a core, and the evidence leaves it open. Whether a later edition presented in Moses' name counts as deception is a question about ancient conventions. Driver, who accepted a late date, denied it,32 and Israel kept Kings and Chronicles side by side.
  7. "Archaeology has confirmed Josiah's reform." It has not. The best-documented closures are dated to the late eighth century, and Römer grants that "we do not have primary evidence for a so-called Josianic reform."7 This cuts against both sides: it removes the archaeological prop from the critical story of 622, and it gives the conservative no confirmation of Kings' account of Josiah either.
  8. "The language proves an early date." One measured marker separates Deuteronomy from the Hebrew of the Persian period and nothing more. It cannot separate the time of Josiah from the time of Moses, and the method is disputed.
  9. "De Wette called it a pious fraud." He did not. He called the identification "a not improbable conjecture," declined to assert that Hilkiah planted the scroll, and called "pious deceiver" a worse charge than "deceiver." The attribution in Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible? has no source.6

Issues and unanswered questions

  1. Levinson and Stackert were not read directly. Their 2012 article and their 2013 rejoinder to Berman are known here only through Steymans, Koller and Crouch. Their case for seventh-century composition of Deuteronomy 13 deserves to be quoted in their own words.
  2. Berman's later work was not read. His 2013 article on Deuteronomy 1-3 and his 2017 book Inconsistency in the Torah are given only through a reviewer's summary.
  3. The linguistic case rests on one marker. Ronald Hendel and Jan Joosten's How Old Is the Hebrew Bible? (2018), which addresses Deuteronomy's language at length, and Hurvitz's own statements on Deuteronomy were not obtained. A fuller count would test several late features, not one.
  4. The Aramaic curse tradition was not tested. Laura Quick's Deuteronomy 28 and the Aramaic Curse Tradition (2017) argues for a West Semitic source for some of the curses. If she is right, the case for direct copying from Esarhaddon's treaty weakens.
  5. The Ketef Hinnom dates remain disputed, from about 650 BC to the fifth century. No reply by Barkay's team to Na'aman's 2011 argument was found.
  6. The country-priest mismatch has a counter-reading. Friedman reads Deuteronomy 18:6-8 as stopping short of letting rural Levites preside at the central altar.6 On that reading Josiah's treatment of the priests fits the book better, and objection 1 loses some force.
  7. Chronicles' order of events may be theology rather than record. Wenham and Robinson take the purge in Josiah's twelfth year as history; others read it as the Chronicler's wish to show a king pious from youth. The standard commentaries on Chronicles by Japhet and Williamson were not obtained.
  8. The Ebal altar is answered by critics with a later-insertion theory. No critical treatment of Deuteronomy 27 was read for this article.
  9. The early identifications are second-hand. Römer reports that Church Fathers identified the scroll with Deuteronomy; the patristic texts themselves (Jerome, Chrysostom) were not checked.
  10. The page of the 1805 printing of de Wette's note could not be confirmed; the article quotes the 1830 reprint.

Verdict

The pious-fraud charge, in the form usually told, fails.  Its founder did not make it:  de Wette offered the Josiah link as "a not improbable conjecture" and refused to say that Hilkiah planted the scroll.  The phrase "pious fraud" was attached to the theory later, mostly by its opponents, and its best-known English supporter, Driver, rejected it.

The evidence favours an older law enforced by Josiah over a scroll written for him.  Centralization was already the program of Hezekiah's reign by Kings' own account, and some archaeologists find it in shrine closures of the late eighth century.  Deuteronomy never names Jerusalem, orders an altar on Mount Ebal, and gives country priests a right that Josiah denied them.  Even the strongest critical argument from Assyrian treaties dates the borrowed verses to between 672 and 622, before the find.  A leading critical commentator, Weinfeld, concludes that the book's main layout existed in Hezekiah's time.

The evidence does not show that Moses wrote Deuteronomy as it stands.  A later narrator frames the speeches and reports Moses' death.  Parts of chapters 13 and 28 share specific wording with a treaty of 672 BC, and one of them shares a concern that the Hittite treaties lack.  No copy or quotation of Deuteronomy is securely dated before the end of the seventh century.  The case for a second-millennium core rests on the treaty form, which is real evidence but is not proof, and on the book's own claim that Moses spoke and wrote its law.

Joshua through Kings is a history compiled from older records and finished in the exile.  Conservative and critical scholars agree on that much.  It names its sources, and inscriptions confirm its kings.  Chronicles shows that later writers reworked the same history openly, which is the best ancient evidence that "fraud" is the wrong category for such work.

The conservative model, a Mosaic core of speeches and laws transmitted and edited by later prophets and scribes, is consistent with all of this evidence.  It is not proven by it.

Sources

  1. 1.

    NET Bible.  Biblical Studies Press.  n.d.  A modern English translation with extensive translators' notes.  The article quotes it for every biblical passage.

    1. 1a.

      Verse 2 Kings 22:8:  “Hilkiah the high priest informed Shaphan the scribe, “I found the scroll of the law in the Lord’s temple.” Hilkiah gave the scroll to Shaphan and he read it.” ↩ ↩

    2. 1b.

      Verse Exodus 12:7:  “They will take some of the blood and put it on the two side posts and top of the doorframe of the houses where they will eat it.”  Verse Deuteronomy 16:5–6:  “You may not sacrifice the Passover in just any of your villages that the Lord your God is giving you, but you must sacrifice it in the evening in the place where he chooses to locate his name”. ↩

    3. 1c.

      Verse 2 Kings 22:10:  “Shaphan read it out loud before the king.”  Verse 2 Kings 23:2:  “He read aloud all the words of the scroll of the covenant that had been discovered in the Lord’s temple.” ↩

    4. 1d.

      Verse 2 Kings 18:22:  “Perhaps you will tell me, ‘We are trusting in the Lord our God.’ But Hezekiah is the one who eliminated his high places and altars and then told the people of Judah and Jerusalem, ‘You must worship at this altar in Jerusalem.’” ↩ ↩

    5. 1e.

      Verse Deuteronomy 27:4–6:  “So when you cross the Jordan you must erect on Mount Ebal these stones about which I am commanding you today, and you must cover them with plaster. Then you must build an altar there to the Lord your God, an altar of stones—do not use an iron tool on them. You must build the altar of the Lord your God with whole stones and offer burnt offerings on it to the Lord your God.” ↩ ↩

    6. 1f.

      Verse Deuteronomy 18:6–8:  “Suppose a Levite comes by his own free will from one of your villages, from any part of Israel where he is living, to the place the Lord chooses and serves in the name of the Lord his God like his fellow Levites who stand there before the Lord. He must eat the same share they do”. ↩ ↩

    7. 1g.

      Verse 2 Kings 23:9:  “(Now the priests of the high places did not go up to the altar of the Lord in Jerusalem, but they did eat unleavened cakes among their fellow priests.)” ↩

    8. 1h.

      Verse 2 Chronicles 34:3:  “In the eighth year of his reign, while he was still young, he began to seek the God of his ancestor David. In his twelfth year he began ridding Judah and Jerusalem of the high places, Asherah poles, idols, and images.”  Verse 2 Chronicles 34:8:  “In the eighteenth year of his reign, he continued his policy of purifying the land and the temple.” ↩

    9. 1i.

      Verse Exodus 20:24:  “In every place where I cause my name to be honored I will come to you and I will bless you.” ↩

    10. 1j.

      Verse 2 Kings 23:21:  “The king ordered all the people, “Observe the Passover of the Lord your God, as prescribed in this scroll of the covenant.””  Verse 2 Kings 23:25:  “No king before or after repented before the Lord as he did, with his whole heart, soul, and being in accordance with the whole law of Moses.” ↩

    11. 1k.

      Verse 1 Kings 14:21:  “he ruled for 17 years in Jerusalem, the city the Lord chose from all the tribes of Israel to be his home.” ↩

    12. 1l.

      Verse Deuteronomy 13:1:  “Suppose a prophet or one who foretells by dreams should appear among you and show you a sign or wonder”.  Verse Deuteronomy 13:6:  “Suppose your own full brother, your son, your daughter, your beloved wife, or your closest friend should seduce you secretly and encourage you to go and serve other gods”.  English verse numbers;  the Hebrew text numbers these verses 13:2 and 13:7. ↩

    13. 1m.

      Verse Deuteronomy 28:23:  “The sky above your heads will be bronze and the earth beneath you iron.” ↩

    14. 1n.

      Verse Leviticus 26:19:  “I will break your strong pride and make your sky like iron and your land like bronze.” ↩

    15. 1o.

      Verse Deuteronomy 28:26–30:  “Your carcasses will be food for every bird of the sky and wild animal of the earth ... The Lord will afflict you with the boils of Egypt and with tumors, eczema, and scabies ... The Lord will also subject you to madness, blindness, and confusion of mind. You will feel your way along at noon like the blind person does in darkness ... You will be engaged to a woman, and another man will rape her. You will build a house but not live in it.” ↩

    16. 1p.

      Verse Deuteronomy 31:26:  “Take this scroll of the law and place it beside the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God.” ↩

    17. 1q.

      Verse 2 Kings 21:1:  “Manasseh was twelve years old when he became king, and he reigned for fifty-five years in Jerusalem.”  Verse 2 Kings 21:19:  “Amon was twenty-two years old when he became king, and he reigned for two years in Jerusalem.” ↩

    18. 1r.

      Verse 2 Kings 22:20:  “Therefore I will allow you to die and be buried in peace. You will not have to witness all the disaster I will bring on this place.” ↩

    19. 1s.

      Verse 2 Kings 23:29:  “King Josiah marched out to fight him, but Necho killed him at Megiddo when he saw him.” ↩

  2. 2.

    Wette, Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de.  Beiträge zur Einleitung in das Alte Testament, vol. 1.  Halle: Schimmelpfennig.  1806.  The first volume of de Wette's German "Contributions," mostly a critical essay on the reliability of Chronicles, with a preface by J. J. Griesbach.  Its pages on Josiah's scroll are the fullest statement of his view on the find.

    1. 2a.

      Page 179:  “daß wir nicht wissen können, wenn und wie dieses Buch in den Tempel gekommen, ja daß es möglich ist, daß es der Priester Hilkia untergeschoben hat. — Diese Meinung hat nun ohnstreitig vieles für sich: die ganze Art wie das Buch eingeführt wird, sieht einem angelegten Handel nicht unähnlich, woran, außer Hilkia, besonders Saphan und die Prophetin Hulda Theil gehabt haben könnten. Doch bin ich weit entfernt, diese Vermuthung zur Gewißheit erheben zu wollen, da ich dadurch die Gesetze der Geschichte übertreten würde. Woher das Buch gekommen sey, darüber zieht die Geschichte ihren Vorhang”.  Translation in the text is this article's. ↩ ↩ ↩

  3. 3.

    Wette, Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de.  “Dissertatio critica qua a prioribus Deuteronomium Pentateuchi libris diversum, alius cuiusdam recentioris auctoris opus esse monstratur.”  Opuscula theologica, 149–168.  Berlin: G. Reimer.  1830.  De Wette's 1805 Jena dissertation, reprinted in his collected Latin essays with the wording revised.  It argues from vocabulary, laws and history that Deuteronomy is by a later author than Genesis to Numbers.  The link to Josiah's scroll is made only in its fifth footnote.

    1. 3a.

      Page 149:  “Dissertatio critica qua a prioribus Deuteronomium Pentateuchi libris diversum, alius cuiusdam recentioris auctoris opus esse monstratur”.  The title:  "in which Deuteronomy, differing from the earlier books of the Pentateuch, is shown to be the work of some other, more recent author." ↩

    2. 3b.

      Pages 164–165, footnote 5:  “Diversas diversorum temporum leges Pentateuchum complecti, ex hac de loco sacrificiorum doctrina monstrari potest. ... Hic in collibus sacra faciendi mos posteriori tempore nefas est habitus, sed adeo inveteraverat, ut Iosias demum, Deuteronomio, tunc in templo invento, admonitus (illum enim codicem legum ab Hilkia sacerdote inventum (2 Reg. XXII.) Deuteronomium nostrum fuisse haud improbabili coniectura assequi licet) penitus eum tollere posset (2 Reg. XXIII).”  Translation in the text is this article's. ↩ ↩ ↩

    3. 3c.

      Page 164, footnote 5:  “Atque fuisse apud Hebraeos tempus, quo Graecorum Homericorum more, ubicunque placebat, Deo suo altaria exstruere sacrificiaque offerre solebant, historia clare docet. Samuel, Saulus, Davides, Salomo in collibus et ubicunque occasio data est, sacra faciunt”.  "History clearly teaches that there was a time among the Hebrews when, in the manner of Homer's Greeks, they built altars to their God and offered sacrifices wherever they pleased.  Samuel, Saul, David, Solomon sacrifice on hills and wherever the occasion offered." ↩

  4. 4.

    Wette, Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de.  Beiträge zur Einleitung in das Alte Testament, vol. 2.  Halle: Schimmelpfennig.  1807.  The second volume, a "mythical" reading of the Pentateuch's narratives and a chapter on Deuteronomy.  It gives de Wette's settled view of how Deuteronomy came to bear Moses' name.

    1. 4a.

      Pages 389–390:  “Diesem allen zufolge können wir das Deuteronomium für nichts weiter halten, als für eine Sammlung späterer Gesetze, durch eine historische Fiktion Mose zugeschrieben. ... und als doch eine Menge neuer Gesetze einzuführen und zu sanctioniren war, welches nach der Sitte am besten durch den Namen Mose geschah, ... so blieb nichts weiter übrig, als die Fiktion, daß Mose noch kurz vor seinem Tode, an der Grenze des bald einzunehmenden Landes, unter neuen Umständen und Verhältnissen, nochmals eine Gesetzgebung promulgirt habe”.  Translations in the text are this article's. ↩ ↩ ↩

    2. 4b.

      Page 239:  “Mose war kein Betrüger*)!”  Footnote:  “Man sucht dieses Wort gewöhnlich durch den Beisatz: fromm zu mildern; allein ein frommer Betrüger, d.h. ein solcher, der das Heilige als Mittel gebraucht, ist noch schlimmer als jeder andere.”  The main text answers Woltmann, Eichhorn and Bauer, who explained the Exodus miracles as stagecraft by Moses. ↩ ↩

  5. 5.

    Free Church of Scotland, Presbytery of Aberdeen.  The Libel against Professor William Robertson Smith:  Report of Proceedings.  Aberdeen.  1878.  The record of the presbytery hearing in the heresy case against Robertson Smith, whose encyclopaedia article had dated Deuteronomy late.  It shows how both sides used the phrase "pious fraud" in 1878.

    1. 5a.

      Page 14:  “Dr. Kuenen calls it " a pious fraud " — a fraud, because he holds it was given forth as genuine Mosaic history, which it was not ; but a pious fraud, because done for a pious purpose. Professor Smith says, no, not a fraud, because the generation to whom it was communicated knew what it was”. ↩ ↩

  6. 6.

    Friedman, Richard Elliott.  Who Wrote the Bible?  New York: Summit Books.  1987.  A popular account of the documentary hypothesis by a critical scholar.  Friedman argues that Deuteronomy's law code came from the priests of Shiloh before Josiah and that Jeremiah's circle wrote the history.

    1. 6a.

      Page 102:  “From the law of centralization and other matters, De Wette concluded that the book of Deuteronomy was not a long-lost document, but rather was written not long before its “discovery” by Hilkiah. Though it may have been written for legitimate purposes, it was nevertheless falsely attributed to Moses. De Wette referred to it as “pious fraud.””  Friedman gives no source for the phrase. ↩ ↩ ↩

    2. 6b.

      Page 122:  “At least the law code of Deuteronomy, then, was probably written by someone connected to the priests of Shiloh. It need not have been written as a pious fraud shortly before its discovery by Hilkiah.” ↩ ↩

    3. 6c.

      Page 121:  “The Deuteronomic law code shows concern for such Levites; it instructs the people to care for them. But it does not enfranchise them. That is, it does not allow them to be official priests, presiding over the sacrifices at the central place of worship.” ↩

  7. 7.

    Römer, Thomas.  The So-Called Deuteronomistic History:  A Sociological, Historical and Literary Introduction.  London: T&T Clark.  2005.  A survey of the Deuteronomistic History hypothesis since Noth and a new model by a leading European critic, who spreads the History's composition over the Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian periods.

    1. 7a.

      Pages 29–30:  “R. Smend, himself a former assistant of Noth, laid out the foundations of what would become the Smend (or ‘Gottingen’) school.”  Römer describes Smend's "nomistic" layer (DtrN), Walter Dietrich's "prophetic Deuteronomist" (DtrP), and Timo Veijola's studies of 1975 and 1977. ↩

    2. 7b.

      Page 50:  “Early Jewish commentators, as well as some Church Fathers, already identified the book mentioned in 2 Kgs 22-23 as the book of Deuteronomy”. ↩ ↩

    3. 7c.

      Page 50:  “According to the pia fraus (‘pious lie’) theory, as advocated by Wellhausen and others”. ↩

    4. 7d.

      Page 53:  “True, we do not have primary evidence for a so-called Josianic reform! ... Nevertheless, there are some indicators that point to cultic and political changes in Judah at the end of the seventh century BCE.” ↩ ↩

    5. 7e.

      Pages 56–63:  Römer's section headings:  "Deut. 12.13-18: Practical Consequences of the Centralization at the End of the Seventh Century BCE" (p. 58);  "Deut. 12.8-12: An Exilic Reinterpretation of the Concept of Centralization" (p. 61);  "Deut. 12.2-7: Cult Centralization and the Rejection of ‘Illegitimate’ Cults in the Persian Period" (p. 63). ↩

  8. 8.

    Sefaria.  2 Kings 22:8 and 2 Chronicles 34:14, with the commentaries of Radak and of the Rashi commentary on Chronicles.  2026.  The Hebrew texts of two medieval Jewish commentaries on the finding of the scroll:  David Kimchi (Radak, about 1200) on Kings, and the commentary on Chronicles printed under Rashi's name.  Translations in the article are its own.

    1. 8a.

      Section commentary printed as Rashi on 2 Chronicles 34:14:  “אֶת סֵפֶר תּוֹרַת ה׳ בְּיַד מֹשֶׁה. מִשְׁנֵה תּוֹרָה (דברים)”.  "The book of the law of the Lord by the hand of Moses:  Mishneh Torah (Deuteronomy)." ↩ ↩

    2. 8b.

      Section Radak on 2 Kings 22:8:  “ורחוק הוא זה שחזקיהו שבא אחריו שרבץ תורה בישראל איך לא הוציאו ... אלא מנשה מלך זמן רב שהרי מלך נ"ה שנה ... ובנ"ה שנה נשתכחה התורה ... מצא ס"ת שהיה מונח במקומו מצד הארון”.  "But this is far-fetched:  Hezekiah, who came after him and spread Torah in Israel, how did he not bring it out? ... Rather, Manasseh reigned a long time, for he reigned fifty-five years ... and in fifty-five years the Torah was forgotten ... [Hilkiah] found a Torah scroll that was lying in its place beside the Ark." ↩

  9. 9.

    Faust, Avraham.  “Hezekiah's Reform?  A View from Tel 'Eton on the Religious Development in Judah.”  Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology 9:31–60.  2026.  An excavator's report of a standing stone deliberately buried in a house at Tel 'Eton before the Assyrian destruction, with a review of Arad, Beersheba and Lachish.  Faust argues that the eighth-century shrines show deliberate cancellation and so support a Hezekian reform.

    1. 9a.

      Page 47:  “The altar’s ashlar stones and horns were found embedded in a Stratum II building, indicating that the dismantling occurred before this stratum was established ... Stratum II was probably destroyed by Sennacherib during his 701 BCE campaign ... They noted that a toilet seat was placed on top of the remains, and although soil analyses indicate that the toilet was never used, the operation apparently sought to desecrate the place, which was later destroyed by Sennacherib in 701 BCE.”  The second sentence concerns the Lachish gate chamber published by Ganor and Kreimerman in 2019.  On the same page Faust reports that Kleiman (2020) reads the rooms as destroyed by the Assyrians and Ussishkin (2021) as secular. ↩

    2. 9b.

      Page 48:  “Thus, the Lachish gate cult joins Arad and Beersheba as broadly accepted material evidence of the historicity of Hezekiah’s reform.” ↩ ↩

  10. 10.

    Na'aman, Nadav.  “The Debated Historicity of Hezekiah's Reform in Light of Historical and Archaeological Research.”  Ancient Israel's History and Historiography:  The First Temple Period, 274–289.  Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns.  1995 (edition of 2006).  A review of the textual and archaeological case for Hezekiah's reform by a Tel Aviv historian, first published in Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 107 (1995): 179-195 and reprinted in his collected essays.  He finds the evidence at Arad and Beersheba too contested to establish any reform.  Pages are those of the reprint.

    1. 10a.

      Page 282:  “In conclusion, there is, as yet, no clear archaeological evidence for any of the cultic reforms mentioned in the Bible. Although lack of positive evidence does not indicate that reforms did not take place, we must remember that the Bible is our only source for both Hezekiah’s and Josiah’s reforms”. ↩ ↩ ↩

  11. 11.

    Weinfeld, Moshe.  “Deuteronomy 1–11:  A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary.”  Anchor Bible 5.  New York: Doubleday.  1991.  A major critical commentary by the Hebrew University scholar whose Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School (1972) tied the book to court scribes of the Hezekiah-Josiah era.  Weinfeld does not think Moses wrote it, but he holds that its core predates Josiah's find.

    1. 11a.

      Page 16:  “The one who supplied the clue was W. M. L. de Wette in his work of 1805. Trying to trace the historical circumstances underlying the book of Deuteronomy, de Wette found a correspondence between the reforms of Hezekiah and Josiah (see below) and the legislation of Deuteronomy. Hezekiah was the first to centralize worship in Israel (2 Kgs 18:4, 22).” ↩

    2. 11b.

      Page 18:  “Discovery of ancient sacred documents in a temple, like that which happened in the time of Josiah (see below), was always a thrilling event.” ↩

    3. 11c.

      Pages 18–19:  “King Muwatalli presents a prayer of confession for negligence in observing the laws of divinity as written in the law of covenant (ishiul) in the ancient scripture and promises to do his utmost to rediscover the written covenant of the gods, and to fulfill it”.  Page 19:  “I shall follow the (covenantal) bond (ishiul) of the gods that I am rediscovering, and it shall be henceforth carried on. (KBO 11.1)”. ↩ ↩

    4. 11d.

      Page 51:  “I refer to the Hezekianic or Josianic period because it is very hard to date the various layers of Deuteronomic literature. As the book of Deuteronomy was discovered in the days of Josiah (622 b.c.e.) we must suppose that the main layout of the book existed long before that time — that is, at the time of Hezekiah.” ↩ ↩ ↩

  12. 12.

    The phrase "the place that the Lord your God will choose" was counted in the Hebrew text of Deuteronomy (the Westminster Leningrad Codex as tagged by the OpenScriptures morphhb project) by finding every verse that contains both the word for "place" (maqom) and the verb "choose" (bachar).  Twenty-two verses do.  Twenty-one are the sanctuary formula:  12:5, 11, 14, 18, 21, 26;  14:23, 24, 25;  15:20;  16:2, 6, 7, 11, 15, 16;  17:8, 10;  18:6;  26:2;  31:11.  The twenty-second, 23:17 in Hebrew numbering (23:16 in English), is a runaway slave's own choice of town.  The name Jerusalem does not occur in the book. ↩ ↩

  13. 13.

    Steymans, Hans Ulrich.  “Deuteronomy 28 and Tell Tayinat.”  Verbum et Ecclesia 34(2).  2013.  An article by the scholar whose 1995 thesis argued that Deuteronomy 28:20-44 copies Esarhaddon's treaty, restating the case in light of the Tayinat copy.  It is the strongest published form of the direct-borrowing argument.

    1. 13a.

      Page 1:  “The finding of the Tell Tayinat tablet and its elaborate curses of §§ 53–55 that invoke deities from Palestine, back up the claim of the 1995 doctoral thesis of the author of this article that the impressive similarities between Deuteronomy 28:20–44 and curses from § 56 of the EST are due to direct borrowing from the EST. This implies that these Hebrew verses came to existence between 672 BC and 622 BC”. ↩ ↩ ↩

    2. 13b.

      Page 1:  “The discovery of Esarhaddon’s Succession Treaty (EST) at Tell Tayinat confirms the Assyrian application of this text on western vassals”. ↩

    3. 13c.

      Page 5:  “In Deuteronomy 28:20–44 and EST § 56, however, the sequence of motifs is identical. In only two cases does a topic appear at a slightly different position, and in both these cases one can explain the difference as a deliberate scribal arrangement.” ↩

    4. 13d.

      Page 12:  “Levinson argues for Deuteronomy being a 7th century BC composition that revises both the Covenant Code and Esarhaddon’s Succession Treaty.”  Steymans's summary of Levinson and Stackert, "Between the Covenant Code and Esarhaddon's Succession Treaty," Journal of Ancient Judaism 3 (2012): 123-140, which was not available for this article. ↩

  14. 14.

    Kitchen, Kenneth A.  On the Reliability of the Old Testament.  Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.  2003.  A survey of the Old Testament against the ancient Near Eastern evidence by a Liverpool Egyptologist, the most-cited scholarly defence of a Mosaic-era Deuteronomy.  Its sixth chapter rests the date on the form of Hittite treaties.

    1. 14a.

      Page 400:  “In short, the reform could have been sparked off as easily by one version of the Sinai covenant (the older, Exodus-Leviticus) as the other (later by forty years only: Deuteronomy).” ↩

    2. 14b.

      Page 400:  “The claim for centralization is incredibly shaky. It fails to appear in the Chronicles account at all (2 Chron. 34:33)”. ↩

    3. 14c.

      Page 287:  “In VI there is no historical prologue, no blessings to match with curses, no deposition, no reading arrangements. But all these are common to phase V and Sinai”.  Kitchen's "phase V" is the Hittite treaties of the late second millennium;  "phase VI" is the Assyrian and Aramaic treaties of the first. ↩ ↩ ↩

    4. 14d.

      Page 287:  “Sinai and its two renewals — especially the version in Deuteronomy— belong squarely within phase V”.  Page 288:  “and at no other date.” ↩ ↩

    5. 14e.

      Page 293:  “verse 26 (and 25?) would have to come between verses 29/30 to keep the same topic sequence as VTE. ... Correlation of only seven ill-organized items out of seventy-five curses/curse paragraphs (in two separated sections of twenty-six and forty-nine curses) in the Assyrian text and the forty-eight verses/twenty-five curses/curse paragraphs of Deut. 28 is not a very impressive linkup.” ↩

    6. 14f.

      Page 294:  “It is easier simply to attribute both the Deuteronomy verses and curses and the VTE examples to origins in the broad pool of traditional curse topics and formulae that had long existed and grown up through many centuries, of which we now see only glimpses.” ↩

    7. 14g.

      Page 305:  “Thus we should consider a Moses or a Joshua writing on papyrus, skins, or even waxed tablets in alphabetic late Canaanite. ... Copies of older works such as Deuteronomy or Joshua would be recopied, modernizing outdated grammatical forms and spellings”. ↩ ↩ ↩

    8. 14h.

      Page 306:  “What happened in the late eighth century (Hezekiah) and then in the late seventh century (Josiah) was a reversion to older origins, a “purification,” in the latter case, partly stimulated by recovery of a book of the covenant long lost in some dusty cupboard during the half-century reign of Manasseh plus Amon.” ↩

    9. 14i.

      Pages 306–307:  “A first book of Kings may have encompassed the period from David's death to the end of Samaria in Ahaz's and Hezekiah's time ... Finally, a generation later, the closing paragraph on the release of Jehoiachin was added by an exilic prophet, ending the whole.” ↩ ↩

  15. 15.

    Koller, Aaron.  “Deuteronomy and Hittite Treaties.”  Bible and Interpretation.  Sep 2014.  A short review of the Berman versus Levinson-Stackert exchange by a Yeshiva University Bible scholar.  Koller finds that neither set of treaty parallels dates Deuteronomy and that the seventh-century consensus is weaker than it looks.  The paragraph numbers below count from the article's first paragraph.

    1. 15a.

      Paragraph 19:  “There are also treaties known from the seventh century; these are Neo-Assyrian treaties, and they are somewhat different in form from the Hittite examples. In particular, there is no historical prologue, and the blessings for loyalty, if they exist at all, are much shorter than the curses for disloyalty.” ↩

    2. 15b.

      Paragraph 25:  “It is worth noting that until 2009 it was not known that copies of the VTE were brought to the west, either, and yet scholars were prepared to accept that the Neo-Assyrian treates had influenced Deuteronomy.”  Koller's paragraph 24 summarises Levinson and Stackert's reply.  "Treates" is Koller's spelling. ↩

    3. 15c.

      Paragraph 26:  “In the case of Deuteronomy 13 in particular, there seem to be no “smoking guns” that reveal the influence of either the Vassal Treaties of the seventh century, or the Hittite treaties of the thirteenth century, on Deuteronomy.” ↩ ↩

    4. 15d.

      Paragraph 27:  “It is true that there is a Neo-Assyrian treaty with the king of Qedar which apparently had a historical prologue, which weakens the need to appeal to the Hittite treaties for Deuteronomy’s context.” ↩ ↩

    5. 15e.

      Paragraph 28:  “My religious position in life, and my work teaching at Yeshiva University, certainly encourage certain biases.” ↩

    6. 15f.

      Paragraph 29:  “That Deuteronomy, at least in some form, dates back to the second millennium BCE appears to be a more tenable scholarly position than it did earlier.” ↩ ↩

    7. 15g.

      Note 19:  “Prof. Berman later argued in another JBL article (“Histories Twice Told: Deuteronomy 1-3 and the Hittite Treaty Prologue Tradition”) that the Hittite treaties obviate the need for a source-critical approach to the contradictions between the narratives at the very beginning of Deuteronomy and other texts within the Torah.” ↩

  16. 16.

    Waaler, Erik.  “A Revised Date for Pentateuchal Texts?  Evidence from Ketef Hinnom.”  Tyndale Bulletin 53(1):29–55.  2002.  An argument, in an evangelical journal, that the plaques date to 725-650 BC and so show Priestly and Deuteronomic wording combined before Josiah.  It is the earliest date proposed for them.

    1. 16a.

      Page 33:  “Most scholars have dated the two amulets to the late seventh or early sixth century BC, but Renz dates them to the early post-exilic period or to one of the two centuries leading up to the Christian era.”  Page 29:  “Based on archaeological and palaeographic studies, the amulets are dated between 725 and 650 BC.” ↩ ↩

  17. 17.

    Na'aman, Nadav.  “A New Appraisal of the Silver Amulets from Ketef Hinnom.”  Israel Exploration Journal 61(2):184–195.  2011.  A response to the 2004 edition by a Tel Aviv historian, who dates the plaques from four spelling features rather than from letter shapes or tomb pottery, and puts them after the exile.

    1. 17a.

      Page 188:  “In my opinion, the pre-exilic date for the plaques, originally suggested by Barkay and Yardeni and supported by the majority of scholars, cannot be maintained. Dating the plaques to the late sixth or early fifth century BCE is preferable, and is in keeping with all the available data.” ↩ ↩

    2. 17b.

      Page 192:  “The text in lines 3-7 ... (“Who keeps the covenant and steadfast love with those who love him (and) keep his commandments’) has an exact parallel in Deut. 7:9”. ↩

    3. 17c.

      Page 192:  “Since the two inscriptions are pastiches of fragments selected by their respective authors, the amulets cannot indicate the stage of composition of the biblical text at the time of their engraving.” ↩

  18. 18.

    Counted in the OpenScriptures morphhb tagging of the Westminster Leningrad Codex by Strong's number:  4438 malkut, 4467 mamlakah, 4410 melukhah.  The script and its output are in this article's research folder, research/kingdom-words.ts and research/kingdom-words.out.  Book by book:  Deuteronomy 0, 7, 0;  1 Samuel 1, 6, 5;  2 Samuel 0, 6, 2;  1 Kings 1, 12, 7;  2 Kings 0, 5, 1;  Jeremiah 3, 17, 1;  Esther 26, 0, 0;  Ezra 6, 1, 0;  Nehemiah 2, 1, 0;  1 Chronicles 11, 3, 1;  2 Chronicles 17, 19, 0.  For comparison, Genesis 0, 2, 0;  Exodus 0, 1, 0;  Numbers 1, 2, 0. ↩ ↩

  19. 19.

    Young, Ian et al.  Summary of Linguistic Dating of Biblical Texts.  2008.  The three authors' own summary of their two-volume book (London:  Equinox, 2008), which argues that early and late Biblical Hebrew are styles that existed side by side rather than stages, so that language cannot date a biblical text.

    1. 19a.

      Section 1, Introduction:  “On the contrary we will argue that the best model for comprehending the evidence is that 'Early' BH and 'Late' BH, so-called, represent co-existing styles of Hebrew throughout the biblical period.” ↩ ↩

  20. 20.

    Beaulieu, Paul-Alain.  “Nabonidus Cylinder from Sippar.”  Livius.org.  Edited by Jona Lendering.  n.d.  An English translation of Nabonidus's building inscription for the sun-god's temple at Sippar, by the historian of his reign.

    1. 20a.

      Paragraph beginning "While I led Šamaš out of its midst":  “dug to a depth of eighteen cubits into the ground and then Šamaš, the great lord, revealed to me the original foundations of Ebabbar, the temple which is his favorite dwelling, by disclosing the foundation deposit of Naram-Sin, son of Sargon, which no king among my predecessors had found in three thousand and two hundred years.” ↩ ↩

  21. 21.

    Counted in the King James text of 1 and 2 Kings.  "The book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel" is cited in 18 verses:  1 Kings 14:19;  15:31;  16:5, 14, 20, 27;  22:39;  2 Kings 1:18;  10:34;  13:8, 12;  14:15, 28;  15:11, 15, 21, 26, 31.  "The book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah" is cited in 15:  1 Kings 14:29;  15:7, 23;  22:45;  2 Kings 8:23;  12:19;  14:18;  15:6, 36;  16:19;  20:20;  21:17, 25;  23:28;  24:5.  "The book of the acts of Solomon" is cited once, 1 Kings 11:41.  The last Israelite king cited is Pekah;  the last Judahite king cited is Jehoiakim. ↩ ↩

  22. 22.

    Grayson, A. Kirk.  “Assyrian Rulers of the Early First Millennium BC II (858–745 BC).”  The Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia, Assyrian Periods 3.  Toronto: University of Toronto Press.  1996.  The standard edition and translation of the inscriptions of Shalmaneser III and his successors.  Texts are cited by the edition's own numbers.

    1. 22a.

      Section A.0.102.2 (Kurkh Monolith), lines ii 91–92:  “2,000 chariots (and) 10,000 troops of Ahab (Ahabbu) the Israelite”. ↩ ↩

  23. 23.

    Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament.  Princeton: Princeton University Press.  3rd edition.  Edited by James B. Pritchard.  1969.  The standard English anthology of ancient Near Eastern texts bearing on the Old Testament.  W. F. Albright translated the Moabite Stone.

    1. 23a.

      Page 320:  “As for Omri, (5) king of Israel, he humbled Moab many years (lit., days), for Chemosh was angry at his land. And his son followed him and he also said, "I will humble Moab." ... (Now) Omri had occupied the land of Medeba, and (Israel) had dwelt there in his time and half the time of his son (Ahab), forty years”.  Albright dates the stone "perhaps about 830 B.C. in round numbers" on the same page. ↩ ↩

  24. 24.

    Noth, Martin.  “The Deuteronomistic History.”  Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 15.  Sheffield: JSOT Press.  1981.  The English translation of the first part of Noth's Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien (1943), which first argued that Deuteronomy to Kings is a single history by one exilic author.

    1. 24a.

      Page 12:  “this concluding observation concerns an event of 562 B.C., and this gives us a definite terminus a quo for the date of Dtr.'s work. We have no reason to put Dtr. much later than this terminus a quo.” ↩ ↩

  25. 25.

    Cross, Frank Moore.  “The History of the Biblical Text in the Light of Discoveries in the Judaean Desert.”  Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, 177–195.  Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.  Edited by Frank Moore Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon.  1964 (edition of 1975).  First published in Harvard Theological Review 57 (1964): 281-299.  Cross's account of the Dead Sea Scrolls of Samuel, which showed that the Chronicler worked from a Hebrew text of Samuel close to the scroll 4QSama rather than to the standard text.

    1. 25a.

      Page 190:  “The agreement between the text of Chronicles and 4Q Sam is most significant. It makes clear now that the text of the Deuteronomic history used by the Chronicler toward 400 B.C. was by no means identical with the received text.”  Footnote:  “The usual picture painted of the Chronicler violently or willfully distorting Samuel and Kings to suit his fancy must be radically revised.”  Page 294 in the original journal printing. ↩ ↩

  26. 26.

    Block, Daniel I.  “Recovering the Voice of Moses:  The Genesis of Deuteronomy.”  Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 44(3):385–408.  2001.  An evangelical Old Testament scholar's model of how Deuteronomy was composed:  Moses' speeches written down in stages, then framed by a later narrator.

    1. 26a.

      Page 392:  “However, in the book that has come down to us, that is in the selection, arrangement, and shaping of the materials, we hear the voice of the final author/editor/narrator. ... the narrator’s voice is heard directly in only 64 verses.” ↩ ↩ ↩

  27. 27.

    Wette, Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de.  Dissertatio critica-exegetica qua Deuteronomium a prioribus Pentateuchi libris diversum, alius cuiusdam recentioris auctoris opus esse monstratur.  Jena.  1805.  The original printing of the dissertation, submitted at Jena for the right to lecture.  Its footnote on Josiah's scroll matches the 1830 reprint in sense.

    1. 27a.

      Footnote on the place of sacrifice:  “Deuteronomium noftrum fuisse haud improbabili conjectura judicari potest”.  The long s of the original is printed as f.  The 1805 "judicari potest" ("can be judged") reads "assequi licet" ("can be reached") in 1830. ↩

  28. 28.

    Wellhausen, Julius.  Prolegomena to the History of Israel.  Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black.  Translated by J. Sutherland Black and Allan Menzies.  1885.  The English translation of the 1883 second edition of the book that made the order law-after-prophets the standard critical history of Israel's religion.  Its first chapter, on the place of worship, rests the whole scheme on dating Deuteronomy to Josiah.

    1. 28a.

      Page 9:  “About the origin of Deuteronomy there is still less dispute; in all circles where appreciation of scientific results can be looked for at all, it is recognised that it was composed in the same age as that in which it was discovered ... It is only in the case of the Priestly Code that opinions differ widely; for it tries hard to imitate the costume of the Mosaic period, and, with whatever success, to disguise its own. This is not nearly so much the case with Deuteronomy, which, in fact, allows the real situation ... to reveal itself very plainly”. ↩ ↩

    2. 28b.

      Page 33:  “From this the step is easy to the belief that the work whose discovery gave occasion to King Josiah to destroy the local sanctuaries was this very Book of Deuteronomy, which originally must have had an independent existence, and a shorter form than at present. This alone, at least, of all the books of the Pentateuch, gives so imperious an expression to the restriction of the sacrificial worship to the one chosen place”. ↩

    3. 28c.

      Page 26:  “Prophets and priests appear to have made common cause in the prosecution of the work.” ↩

  29. 29.

    Kuenen, Abraham.  The Religion of Israel to the Fall of the Jewish State, vol. 2.  London: Williams and Norgate.  Translated by Alfred Heath May.  1874.  A history of Israel's religion by the Leiden critic whose work, with Graf's, Wellhausen built on.  Kuenen states the "deception" reading of the find more bluntly than any other critic read for this article.

    1. 29a.

      Page 19:  “Or else Hilkiah himself was of their number, and in that case he pretended that he had found the book of the law. ... It is true, this deception is much more unjustifiable still than the introduction of Moses as speaking.” ↩

  30. 30.

    Curtiss, Samuel Ives.  Moses and Deuteronomy.  Chicago.  1878.  A short American defence of the Mosaic authorship of Deuteronomy.  Its fifth chapter argues that critics who date the book late but deny fraud are inconsistent.

    1. 30a.

      Page 30:  “Now, when Kuenen implies that this book is a pious fraud, he is consistent with himself ... The only consistent position is either to hold that Deuteronomy is from Moses, or that it is a pious fraud.” ↩ ↩

  31. 31.

    Cheyne, T. K.  Founders of Old Testament Criticism.  London: Methuen.  1893.  Biographical and critical essays on the critics from Eichhorn to Driver, by an Oxford critic who accepted their conclusions.

    1. 31a.

      Page 271, footnote:  “I quite enter into the dislike of reverent Bible-readers for the theory of " pious fraud." ... No student of Oriental life and history could be surprised at a pious fraud originating among priests. But I do not adopt that theory to account for 2 Kings xxii.” ↩

  32. 32.

    Driver, S. R.  A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Deuteronomy.  Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.  1895.  The International Critical Commentary volume by the Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, the leading English critic of his day.  Its introduction dates Deuteronomy after Moses and then argues at length that the book is not a forgery.

    1. 32a.

      Page lvii:  “the Mosaic nucleus was expanded and developed in various directions, as national life became more complex, and religious ideas matured. ... It is no fraudulent invocation of the legislator's name : it is simply another application of an established custom.”  Page lxii:  “he cannot, in the light of the considerations that have been adduced, be held guilty of dishonesty or literary fraud.” ↩ ↩

  33. 33.

    Orr, James.  The Problem of the Old Testament Considered with Reference to Recent Criticism.  New York: Scribner's.  1906.  A full-length conservative reply to the Wellhausen school by a Scottish theologian.  It argues that the critical date for Deuteronomy implies deliberate deception.

    1. 33a.

      Page 258:  “the book was a result of pious fraud, or of a deliberate intention to deceive. It was a " pseudograph " ; in popular speech, a " forgery." This, without any disguise, is the view taken of the matter by Reuss, Graf, Kuenen, Wellhausen, Stade, Cornill, Cheyne, etc.”  The same page refers the reader to an appendix, "Note C on Deuteronomy as Fraus Pia." ↩

  34. 34.

    Cross, Frank Moore.  Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic:  Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel.  Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.  1973.  Essays by the Harvard Semitist whose tenth chapter proposed that the Deuteronomistic History had a first edition under Josiah and a second in the exile, the "double redaction" model followed by most American scholars.

    1. 34a.

      Page 279:  “We shall argue that they belong properly to a Josianic edition of the Deuteronomistic history.”  Page 284:  “The Deuteronomistic history, insofar as these themes reflect its central concerns, may be described as a propaganda work of the Josianic reformation and imperial program.” ↩

  35. 35.

    Römer, Thomas C.  “Transformations in Deuteronomistic and Biblical Historiography:  On "Book-Finding" and Other Literary Strategies.”  Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 109:1–11.  1997.  An essay that reads the finding of the scroll in 2 Kings 22 as a literary motif common in the ancient world, and dates the story to the exile.

    1. 35a.

      Page 7:  “Scholars have often used II Reg 22 to reconstruct the »historical circumstances« of the Josianic reform. But a positivist historical reading of the book-finding event does not help much to understand the text.” ↩

    2. 35b.

      Page 7:  “Speyer has demonstrated that the motive of book findings in temples or holy places is a quite common literary motive in Antiquity which is mostly used »um einem gerade angefertigten Werk den Schein höheren Alters und großer Heiligkeit zu verleihen«”.  Citing Wolfgang Speyer, Bücherfunde in der Glaubenswerbung der Antike (1970).  The German means "to give a newly made work the appearance of greater age and great holiness." ↩

    3. 35c.

      Page 7:  “The origin of this motive is probably to be found in the deposit of foundation tablets in Mesopota-mian santcuaries that are often »rediscovered« by later kings under-taking restoration works.”  Hyphens and the misprint "santcuaries" as printed. ↩

    4. 35d.

      Page 10:  “We should follow scholars like Würthwein, Davies and others and consider II Reg 22—23 above all äs a literary and theological construct. This does not mean that no »reform« under Josiah ever existed ... II Reg 22—23 should be dated from the exilic period.”  "äs" is the scan's reading of "as." ↩ ↩

  36. 36.

    The yardstick is the LibriVox volunteer recordings of the King James Version (librivox.org catalogue, retrieved October 2026):  Genesis to Leviticus 35,108 seconds, Numbers 12,828, Deuteronomy 10,942.  The Pentateuch totals 58,878 seconds, 16.4 hours;  Deuteronomy is 3.0 hours.  Chapters 12-26 are 345 of Deuteronomy's 959 verses, so about 66 minutes pro rata.  This is an English reading pace, used only for scale. ↩

  37. 37.

    Herzog, Ze'ev.  “The Date of the Temple at Arad:  Reassessment of the Stratigraphy and the Implications for the History of Religion in Judah.”  Studies in the Archaeology of the Iron Age in Israel and Jordan, 156–178.  Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press.  Edited by Amihai Mazar.  2001.  The re-excavator's reassessment of the Arad temple's layers.  Herzog shortens the temple's life to two strata and dates its careful dismantling to the late eighth century, which he credits to Hezekiah.

    1. 37a.

      Page 170:  “The dismantling of the temple and the complete burial of its holiest parts (the stelae, incense altars and the sacrificial altar) must be considered as an act of religious reform. The dating of the pottery assemblage from Stratum 8 to late eighth century BCE leaves little doubt that this reform should therefore be attributed to King Hezekiah and provides us with one of the neatest correlations between the biblical account and the archaeological record”. ↩

  38. 38.

    Ussishkin, David.  “The Date of the Judaean Shrine at Arad.”  Israel Exploration Journal 38:142–157.  1988.  A re-dating of the Arad shrine from the excavation reports by a Tel Aviv archaeologist.  He argues the shrine was built in the seventh century and burned in the early sixth, which would leave it in use through Josiah's reign.

    1. 38a.

      Page 156:  “The dating of the shrine as suggested above means that its construction and destruction can hardly be related in any way to the religious reforms conducted in Judah by Hezekiah and Josiah.” ↩

  39. 39.

    Wenham, Gordon J.  “The Date of Deuteronomy:  Linch-Pin of Old Testament Criticism, Part 2.”  Themelios 11(1):15–18.  Sep 1985.  Part 2 tests the critical case against the text, chiefly the unnamed place and the altar on Mount Ebal, and concludes that a seventh-century Jerusalem origin is unlikely.

    1. 39a.

      Page 15:  “Secondly, the usual critical contention that Deuteronomy limits all worship to Jerusalem is demonstrably false. Nowhere does the book specify what place is meant by ‘the place which the LORD your God will choose’. It is just a guess that Jerusalem is intended.” ↩

    2. 39b.

      Page 16:  “Robinson relied on 2 Chronicles 34, which places Josiah’s centralization measures in his twelfth year, six years before the discovery of the law book in his eighteenth year (2 Ch. 34:3-18). There is certainly nothing in 2 Kings to refute this chronology. Indeed the fact that the temple was being repaired when the law book was found surely implies that certain reforms preceded the law book’s discovery.” ↩

    3. 39c.

      Page 17:  “However Deuteronomy’s directive that sacrifice should be offered on Mount Ebal makes it most unlikely that it should be regarded as a tract whose main purpose is to encourage or justify centralization of worship in Jerusalem.” ↩

    4. 39d.

      Page 17:  “For it is not just our understanding of history that is affected by our view of Deuteronomy’s date, but our view of the inspiration of Scripture, since a late date clearly implies its pseudonymity.” ↩ ↩

  40. 40.

    Wenham, Gordon J.  “The Date of Deuteronomy:  Linch-Pin of Old Testament Criticism, Part 1.”  Themelios 10(3):15–20.  Apr 1985.  A two-part survey for theology students by an evangelical Old Testament scholar.  Part 1 sets out the critical case, which Wenham says rests on two arguments, the book's style and its law of the central sanctuary.

    1. 40a.

      Page 17:  “This, it is argued, is quite understandable: the author of Deuteronomy realized that it would be anachronistic to have Moses specify Jerusalem as the central shrine when it was not captured by Israel till the time of David. He preferred to use the discreet code name ‘the place which the LORD will choose’, which was perfectly clear to the men of Josiah’s time”.  Wenham is stating the critical view, not his own. ↩

  41. 41.

    Parpola, Simo, and Kazuko Watanabe.  “Neo-Assyrian Treaties and Loyalty Oaths.”  State Archives of Assyria 2.  Helsinki: Helsinki University Press.  1988.  The standard edition and translation of the Assyrian treaties, used here in its online form.  No. 6 is Esarhaddon's succession treaty of 672 BC, rebuilt from fragments of eight copies found at Calah (Nimrud).

    1. 41a.

      Section The Treaty Corpus, on No. 6:  “No. 6 is the composite text of a treaty of Esarhaddon concerning the succession of his son Assurbanipal, concluded in Iyyar, 672 B.C.” ↩

    2. 41b.

      Section § 10, line obverse 108:  “either from the mouth of his enemy or from the mouth of his ally, or from the mouth of his brothers or from the mouth of his uncles, his cousins, his family, members of his father's line, or from the mouth of your brothers, your sons, your daughters, or from the mouth of a prophet, an ecstatic, an inquirer of oracles, or from the mouth of any human being at all, you shall not conceal it but come and report it”. ↩

    3. 41c.

      Section § 63, line obverse 526:  “May they make your ground like iron (so that) nothing can sprout from it.”  Section § 64, line obverse 530:  “Just as rain does not fall from a brazen heaven so may rain and dew not come upon your fields and your meadows”. ↩

    4. 41d.

      Section §§ 39–42, lines obverse 419–428:  “May Sin, the brightness of heaven and earth, clothe you with leprosy ... May Šamaš, the light of heaven and earth, not judge you justly. May he remove your eyesight. Walk about in darkness! ... feed your flesh to the eagle and the vulture ... make your wives lie in the lap of your enemy; may your sons not take possession of your house”. ↩

  42. 42.

    Lauinger, Jacob.  “Esarhaddon's Succession Treaty at Tell Tayinat:  Text and Commentary.”  Journal of Cuneiform Studies 64:87–123.  2012.  The edition of the copy of Esarhaddon's treaty found at Tell Tayinat in 2009.  It is a text edition and does not discuss Deuteronomy.

    1. 42a.

      Page 90:  “the discovery in 2009 of a new exemplar of the oath (ms T) by the Tayinat Archaeological Project as one of eleven tablets and fragments found in the inner sanctum of Building XVI, a Neo-Assyrian temple at Tell Tayinat, ancient Ungi, capital of the Neo-Assyrian province of Kullania”. ↩

  43. 43.

    Crouch, Carly L.  “Israel and the Assyrians:  Deuteronomy, the Succession Treaty of Esarhaddon, and the Nature of Subversion.”  Ancient Near East Monographs 8.  Atlanta: SBL Press.  2014.  A monograph that tests the claim that Deuteronomy 13 and 28 deliberately answer Esarhaddon's treaty.  Crouch finds the links real but too loose to signal anything, and so rejects the "subversion" reading without dating the book.

    1. 43a.

      Page 50:  “The relationships between the two texts are indistinct, erratic, and directed toward no apparent purpose.” ↩

    2. 43b.

      Page 183:  “Fatally, examination of the contents of Deut 13 and 28 reveals a near total failure to employ material that might be traced to the Assyrians: it contains no more such material than that which might be expected of any Hebrew text.” ↩

  44. 44.

    Berman, Joshua A.  “CTH 133 and the Hittite Provenance of Deuteronomy 13.”  Journal of Biblical Literature 130(1):25–44.  2011.  A comparison of Deuteronomy 13 with a fifteenth-century Hittite treaty by a Bar-Ilan University scholar.  Berman argues the Hittite parallels are closer than the Assyrian ones in content and form, but he does not assign the chapter a date.

    1. 44a.

      Page 26:  “My aim will be to demonstrate that in case after case we may see that the Hittite parallels are closer in content and in form to the laws of Deuteronomy 13 than are the parallels from the Neo-Assyrian tradition.” ↩

    2. 44b.

      Page 28:  “CTH 133, the treaty between Aruwanda I of Hatti (fifteenth century B.C.E.) and the Men of Ismerika.” ↩

    3. 44c.

      Page 43:  “Only the concern that divination could be employed for seditious purposes stands out as an element common to VTE and to Deuteronomy but absent from the earlier traditions. ... The overwhelming preponderance of evidence, however, suggests a Late Bronze Age Hittite background for Deuteronomy 13 rather than a Neo-Assyrian one.”  Page 44:  “Although the mechanism and the timing are unclear, the evidence of correlation between the apostasy laws of Deuteronomy 13 and the sedition laws of the Hittite empire should lead us to revise the long-held view that Deuteronomy 13 is a deliberate imitation of Neo-Assyrian forms.” ↩ ↩

  45. 45.

    Deuteronomy 28:20-44 is 25 verses and Deuteronomy 13 is 18 verses (English numbering), out of 959 verses in the book.  25/959 is 2.6 percent;  43/959 is 4.5 percent.  The 672 BC date of the treaty and the 622 BC date of the find bound the window Steymans proposes for the copied verses. ↩

  46. 46.

    Kitchen, Kenneth A., and Paul J. N. Lawrence.  Treaty, Law and Covenant in the Ancient Near East.  Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.  2012.  A three-volume edition of ancient Near Eastern treaties, law collections and covenants, Deuteronomy among them, by two conservative scholars.  Its introduction sets out the parts the authors use to compare the documents.

    1. 46a.

      Section Volume 1, Introduction, component 12:  “These "HRAFs" are NOT to be confused with the Historical Prologues of the late 2nd millennium, as they can actually be used within -preambles or prologues (as we might use footnotes or endnotes!), as in No. 84 (Deuteronomy). They crop up in the course of the Stipulations”.  HRAF is their abbreviation for historical remarks inserted within a document's other parts. ↩ ↩

  47. 47.

    Barkay, Gabriel et al.  “The Amulets from Ketef Hinnom:  A New Edition and Evaluation.”  Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 334:41–71.  2004.  The excavator and an imaging team re-read both silver plaques from new photographs and defend a date at the end of the Judaean monarchy against a Hellenistic dating.  It is the standard edition of the texts.

    1. 47a.

      Page 42:  “our conclusion is that they date from the horizon of the end of the Judaean monarchy—or a palaeographic date of the late seventh century B.C.E. to early sixth century B.C.E.”  Note 4:  “any “palaeographic” date is only approximate and must be considered accurate only to + 40 years.”  The plus sign stands for a plus-or-minus sign in the print. ↩

  48. 48.

    Hurvitz, Avi.  A Concise Lexicon of Late Biblical Hebrew:  Linguistic Innovations in the Writings of the Second Temple Period.  Leiden: Brill.  2014.  A dictionary of words and usages that appear first in Hebrew written after the exile, by the Hebrew University linguist who built the method of dating biblical texts by their language.

    1. 48a.

      Section Introduction, section 2:  “The fifth century BCE was a critical turning point in the history of the Hebrew language; texts written from this point on reveal unique linguistic features that are entirely absent in the earlier sources. Many of these innovations are first attested in texts dating to the Persian period and are widely ascribed to the influence of contemporary Imperial Aramaic”. ↩

    2. 48b.

      Section entry מַלְכוּת:  “Instead of sBH ממלכה‎ or מלוכה‎ ‘kingdom, LBH prefers מלכוּת‎ which is used about 30 times in Chronicles and also in Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther and Daniel”.  Hurvitz quoting E. Y. Kutscher, A History of the Hebrew Language (1982).  "sBH" is standard (classical) Biblical Hebrew;  "LBH" is late Biblical Hebrew. ↩

  49. 49.

    The odds treat each of Deuteronomy's seven uses as an independent choice made at the comparison book's rate, which is a simplification:  an author's habits are not coin tosses.  Chronicles:  28 of 51 kingdom words are malkut, so the chance of none in seven is (23/51) to the seventh power, 0.0038.  Jeremiah:  3 of 21, so (18/21) to the seventh power, 0.34.  Esther, Ezra and Nehemiah:  34 of 36, so (2/36) to the seventh power, about 2 in a billion. ↩

  50. 50.

    Beaulieu, Paul-Alain.  The Reign of Nabonidus, King of Babylon 556–539 B.C.  New Haven: Yale University Press.  1989.  A study of Nabonidus's reign from his inscriptions and archives, including his excavations of old temple foundations.

    1. 50a.

      Page 140:  “Nabonidus’ antiquarian interest was also stronger than that of his predecessors ... In three instances he attempts to date these kings”.  The third instance on the page is Naram-Sin, "3200 years (!) before himself." ↩

  51. 51.

    Scale only;  no source in this article states this figure.  Livius.org's note on the cylinder puts Naram-Sin's reign at 2255-2218 BC on the Middle Chronology.  Nabonidus reigned 556-539 BC.  The gap is therefore about 1,660 to 1,700 years, a little over half of Nabonidus's 3,200. ↩

  52. 52.

    Naville, Édouard.  The Discovery of the Book of the Law under King Josiah:  An Egyptian Interpretation of the Biblical Account.  London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.  1911.  A short book by a Swiss Egyptologist who argued from Egyptian practice that Josiah's scroll was a foundation deposit, not a forgery.  Its Egyptian evidence is old and is used here only for the text of the Book of the Dead rubric.

    1. 52a.

      Page 4:  “This chapter was found at Khmun (Hermopolis) on an alabaster plaque, under the feet of the Majesty of this venerable god (Thoth), in the writing of the god himself, in the time of the Majesty of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Mycerinus. The royal son Hordudef found it”.  Naville's translation of the rubric of Book of the Dead, spell 64.  Römer (1997) notes that this form of the rubric was standardized in the seventh to sixth centuries BC. ↩

  53. 53.

    Lichtheim, Miriam.  Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. 1:  The Old and Middle Kingdoms.  Berkeley: University of California Press.  1973.  A standard anthology of Egyptian texts in translation.  Its introduction to the Shabaka Stone reports the king's claim to have copied a worm-eaten original.

    1. 53a.

      Page 52:  “This writing was copied out anew by his majesty in the House of his father Ptah-South-of-his-Wall, for his majesty found it to be a work of the ancestors which was worm-eaten”.  Page 51:  “The text is a work of the Old Kingdom, but its precise date is not known.” ↩

  54. 54.

    Josephus, Flavius.  Antiquities of the Jews.  Translated by William Whiston.  1737.  Josephus's history of the Jews, written about AD 93-94, in Whiston's translation.  His retelling of Josiah's reign is the earliest surviving commentary on the find.

    1. 54a.

      Book 10, chapter 4, section 2:  “as the high priest was bringing out the gold, he lighted upon the holy books of Moses that were laid up in the temple”. ↩

  55. 55.

    Chisholm, Robert B.  “When Prophecy Appears to Fail, Check Your Hermeneutic.”  Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 53(3):561–577.  2010.  An evangelical scholar's treatment of prophecies that seem to have failed, arguing that many were conditional.

    1. 55a.

      Pages 569–570:  “If one views Huldah’s prophecy as unconditional, we are faced with a problem and probably forced to conclude, with Cogan and Tadmor, “these words of Huldah remain a striking example of unfulfilled prophecy.”” ↩

  56. 56.

    Block, Daniel I.  “Deuteronomy.”  NIV Application Commentary.  Grand Rapids: Zondervan.  2012.  Block's commentary on Deuteronomy, whose introduction restates his 2001 model and answers recent late-dating theories.

    1. 56a.

      Page 29:  “But this reconstruction of the origins and provenance of Deuteronomy is diametrically opposed to the internal evidence of the book. Nothing about the book of Deuteronomy or the speeches embedded therein points to a pseudepigraphic work.” ↩

    2. 56b.

      Page 33:  “Later expressions like “Book of Moses” and “Torah of Moses” do not demand that Moses’ own hand produced the book in its final form. We do not doubt the historicity of Moses, nor the authenticity of his speeches ... The editor of Moses’ final speeches and the biographer who preserved for us the account of Moses’ final days was himself a prophet in the Mosaic tradition.” ↩

  57. 57.

    Kline, Meredith G.  Treaty of the Great King:  The Covenant Structure of Deuteronomy.  Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.  1963.  A short study by a Reformed Old Testament scholar that reads the whole of Deuteronomy as a Hittite-style vassal treaty.

    1. 57a.

      Page 28:  “The position to be advocated here is that Deuteronomy is a covenant renewal document which in its total structure exhibits the classic legal form of the suzerainty treaties of the Mosaic age.” ↩

  58. 58.

    McConville, J. Gordon, and J. Gary Millar.  “Time and Place in Deuteronomy.”  Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 179.  Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press.  1994.  Two essays on Deuteronomy's ideas of time and place.  McConville's argues that the unnamed "place" expresses a theology of divine presence, not a coded Jerusalem.

    1. 58a.

      Page 139:  “It seems to me that Deuteronomy’s decision to refrain from naming a place is in keeping with its fundamental understanding of divine presence, which it consistently advocates.” ↩

  59. 59.

    McConville, J. Gordon.  Grace in the End:  A Study in Deuteronomic Theology.  Grand Rapids: Zondervan.  1993.  A study of the theology of Deuteronomy and the books that follow it, by an evangelical scholar, with a survey of the dating debate.

    1. 59a.

      Page 18:  “While it is still widely dated to the seventh century, the question has become more open as to its occasion and milieu, and consequently its original purpose. The Josianic dating, admittedly, continues to be defended by some. On the other hand, an earlier dating fits with the belief that a 'reform movement' was in place well before Josiah's time”. ↩

  60. 60.

    Patrick, James.  “Debunking the Documentary Hypothesis.”  Journal of Creation 19(3):37–40.  Nov 2005.  A favourable review of M. W. J. Phelan's The Inspiration of the Pentateuch (2005) in a creationist journal.  It repeats Phelan's arguments against a Josianic Deuteronomy, including the treaty form.

    1. 60a.

      Paragraph on Deuteronomy:  “Phelan also notes several ways in which Deuteronomy would have been ill-equipped to serve as a validation for Josiah’s reforms, as JEDP theorists suggest; for example, Josiah was very interested in promoting centralized worship, yet Deuteronomy does not mention centralized worship, much less does it describe a Temple or mention that it ought to be in Jerusalem!” ↩