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366 - Deuteronomy |
Deuteronomy
By Patrick D. Miller
Louisville, Westminster/John Knox, 1990. 253 Pp. $21.95.
Princeton Seminary Professor Patrick Miller has provided a lucid, well-written comment on the current state of Deuteronomy studies in this volume of the Interpretation series. In terms of the various debates on the nature and shape of Deuteronomy in the last thirty years, Miller takes an eclectic, centrist position that reflects some of the best thinking on the disparate positions in the field.
With Nicholson, he sees in Deuteronomy the decisive impact of the great eighth-century prophets, especially Hosea. With von Rad, he sees the hand and work of levitical priests and the religious establishment that had learned its lessons from the prophets' view of history about their own role in the surviving remnants of Judah and then Judaism. With Weinfeld, he sees a pervasive influence of wisdom and wisdom thinking that gives Deuteronomy its lasting impact. Acknowledgment of debt to those three positions yields, in the course of the book, to considerable reflection on his own more recent work, as well as to that of Norbert Lohfink and Dean McBride.
The formation of Deuteronomy took place over a two-century period which, ultimately, saw its place as the climax of the Torah (Pentateuch) and the beginning of a theology of history that spun itself out in the books of the Early Prophets. The book itself was eclectic in formation, being born of the shock of defeat of the northern kingdom of Israel and the lessons learned by surviving theologians in Judah who were forced to ask essential questions that the trauma induced in the light of belief in the divine promises of progeny and land. In this way,
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368 - Deuteronomy |
Deuteronomy provided the vehicle for the revival of Mosaic authority in the last decades of the kingdom of Judah. This, in turn, provided the vehicle for the critical paradigm of recapitulation and transcendence which would become the hallmark of Judaism as it has moved, reformed and reforming, through history ever since. Thus, the book grew in formation, and, so, its review of Israel's history would provide, ever and again, the renewal necessary for facing whatever lay ahead in either the seductions of "success" or the threat of "failure."
Deuteronomy gave lasting impetus, begun in earlier reflections on the experiment called "Israel," to the monotheizing process. Deuteronomy's theology is consciously theocentric in its review of that experiment. The book is, until its final chapter, a speech of Moses, but most of its words are God's words as reported by Moses. Picking up on earlier themes, Deuteronomy underscores the belief that God is the God of risings and fallings, so-called successes and so-called failures, indeed, the God of both life and death: God is One Lord. Armed with that belief, Deuteronomy transforms theodicy into theological history, so that experiences of suffering and discontinuity induce not doubt about the power of God to fulfill promises but faith in the purposes of the One God of All to shape continually the people called out of Egypt into instruments and witnesses of God's purposes. "The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the revealed things belong to us and to our children forever" (Deuteronomy 29:29).
The Decalogue, already known in Exodus 20, in the context of Deuteronomy 5, takes on new meaning in the prohibition of (1) polytheism, (2) idolatry, and (3) taking the name of God in vain. Israel now rightly sees itself as utterly dependent on the One God: (1) who cannot in any sense be manipulated; (2) whose gifts, including life and land, are seen as trusts and not possessions; and (3) who cannot be called upon to sponsor only one point of view whether expressed in a court of law or within the polity of life that Deuteronomy itself engenders. By its very model, Deuteronomy provides a paradigm for how to continue the monotheizing process in ever-changing situations when new circumstances provide new data and material for review, recapitulation, and transcendence.
The very fact of the giving of more laws forty years after the Sinai (Horeb) experience, and the establishing anew of the covenant (a new covenant? Heb 28:69; Eng 29:1), provides the paradigm for how to continue the traditioning process. The Septuagint translation of Deuteronomy 17:18, in setting the limits and parameters of the power and conduct of the king (Heb; "ruler" in Greek), states: "When the ruler has been seated in power then he shall write for himselfthrough the priests and levites-this deuteronomy (mishneh-Torah in Hebrew; second Torah in Greek) in a scroll which he shall read all the days of his life that he may learn." Nearly all modern translations translate the Hebrew as "copy of the law," but, as Miller well points out, the Greek had a point. Not only did it thus provide the Western
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cultural name for the book, Deuteronomy, it recognized, in the Hebrew expression, something of the paradigmatic structure of the book: Torah is adaptable to future situations (see Mishnah and Talmud for Jews, New Testament for Christians); Moses himself already provided the paradigm. As Miller rightly says, Deuteronomy is not a legal document but, rather, a book of instruction, and the story it tells is still going on, not only in Judaism but, also, in Christianity.
While Miller's is a book designed for preachers and teachers in churches and schools, it reflects, in a balanced way, the solid results of most (if not all) recent scholarship on Deuteronomy. And while it is not the last word on Deuteronomy, it recognizes that no book about it can be. More important, Miller has caught the spirit of Deuteronomy and the hermeneutical tour de force it has provided through the ages for the Bible as a whole. What the ruler/king would learn as he continued to read Deuteronomy, as circumstances constantly changed, was "to fear the Lord his God, diligently observing all the words of this law and these statutes" (Deuteronomy 17:19).
JAMES A. SANDERS
Claremont School of Theology
Claremont, California