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I finished John Van Seters' In Search of History. In this post, I'd like to talk about the Deuteronomist.
I'll start with something that Van Seters says on pages 357-358:
"Even though Herodotus was a great storyteller in his day, and his history is replete with tales and legends, his work is not just a collection of folk traditions. It has a design, a combination of disparate forms, a way of creating continuity, and a sense of unity and purpose throughout the whole, and these features do not derive from the stories themselves. In the same way Dtr makes use of many stories and popular traditions in his work, but he makes each fit his design for the whole. This is so clearly the case for so much of the material that indisputably belongs to him that if a story or episode does not fit, it must be suspected of not belonging to the original Dtr work."
This is a good quote because it mentions three important issues regarding the Deuteronomist: his use of sources, his creativity as an author, and the addition of material to the Deuteronomistic History.
First, let's consider the Deuteronomist's use of sources. On pages 254-255 and 258, Van Seters discusses the Deuteronomist's interaction with a folktale about Saul before he became king. In I Samuel 9-10, there is a story that has the "stylistic marks of a folktale." (This is not true of all of the chapter, according to Van Seters, but of much of it.) Van Seters calls it a "wonder story, with 'signs' but with very little theological interest." In this story, Saul loses his father's donkeys and finds them again under the direction of a seer, Samuel. But Samuel tells Saul about three episodes that Saul will experience on the way home, and the third episode explains a saying, "Is Saul also among the prophets?". This saying, according to Van Seters, expresses "a somewhat derogatory view of the" prophets.
But Van Seters thinks that the Deuteronomist added elements to this story that "radically changed its character and intention." The Deuteronomist transformed the folktale into a story about the prophet Samuel's anointing of Saul to the kingship, which was to address the Philistine oppression of Israel. For the Deuteronomist, the prophet Samuel knew where the donkeys were "as the result of divine revelation, so that the prophet is primarily the medium of the word of God." In the Books of Kings, we see the Deuteronomistic notions that the prophet communicates God's word and plays a role in the appointment of Israelite kings, so, for Van Seters, when we encounter these concepts in I Samuel 9-10, we can identify them as the hand of the Deuteronomist. The folktale lacked theological interest and manifested a derogatory attitude regarding the prophets, but the Deuteronomist's contributions fashioned out of the folktale a story that highlighted the prophet's significant role in God's activity within history.
Second, my impression in reading this book has been that Van Seters attributes to the Deuteronomist things that could be ascribed to other authors, which perhaps highlights the Deuteronomist's creativity in fashioning material. For example, on pages 350-351, Van Seters says that the departure of the Ark of the Covenant from Israel in I Samuel 4:3-5 is from the hand of the Deuteronomist. He says that "It is widely recognized the Dtr often referred to the Ark as the 'Ark of the Covenant of Yahweh/God' because he regarded it as the repository of the covenant laws of Deuteronomy." I Samuel 4:4 refers to Yahweh as being enthroned on the cherubim, and "According to the Dtr's description of the Temple, great cherubim were constructed in the holy of holies in such a way that the ark could be placed under the outstretched wings; together they were regarded as the seat of the deity." Moreover, Van Seters states that the Deuteronomist associates the glory, or kavod, "with the Ark, both in 1 Sam. 4:21-22 and in the description of the placing of the Ark in the Temple in 1 Kings 8:11."
Van Seters holds that the Deuteronomist viewed the Ark of the Covenant as the repository for the commandments and the seat of the deity, whereas some may contend that the Deuteronomist viewed the ark solely as the repository for the commandments. Moshe Weinfeld argues, for example, that the Deuteronomistic School was against an anthropomorphic depiction of God, which explains why Deuteronomy 12, 14, and 16 call the sanctuary the place where God places his name, indicating that the sanctuary is for God's name, not a home for God himself. Under this perspective,the Deuteronomist probably would not say that the Ark was a throne for God. Van Seters apparently attributes elements of I Kings 8 to the Deuteronomist that others may ascribe to other authors.
Van Seters also believes that there was only one Deuteronomist, an exilic one. On page 310, he says that the Deuteronomist is describing an unseen temple, one that has been destroyed, indicating that he is writing during the exile. On page 352, Van Seters states that the story of the Ark's departure in I Samuel 4 is the Deuteronomist addressing the question of "whether the deity was now subject to foreign gods or still in control of the affairs of men", an exilic sort of question.
Many have argued that there were two Deuteronomists: one writing during the reign of Josiah, and the other during the exile. A piece of evidence that they cite is I Kings 22-23, in which the prophetess Huldah says that Josiah will die in peace, and yet he perishes in battle. Their idea is that an earlier Deuteronomist wrote about Huldah's prophecy because he did not know that Josiah would die violently, since he was writing during the time of Josiah, but the part about Josiah's death was written later by an exilic Deuteronomist. But Van Seters thinks that both parts are by the exilic Deuteronomist. He states on pages 318-319:
"...the reference to being gathered to one's grave in peace does not preclude a violent death. It means only that the king would be buried in his own tomb (23:30), which in fact was the fulfillment of the Huldah prophecy. There are no grounds here for conjecturing more than one Dtr historian."
For Van Seters, the Deuteronomist was a creative historian writing during the exile, and his historiography is similar to that of the Greeks, who were developing histories at that time.
Third, Van Seters maintains that later authors added to the Deuteronomistic History. We have seen in my earlier post that he argues that the Court History of II Samuel was a post-exilic anti-Messianic piece that was added to DtrH. But there are other examples. For example, Van Seters contends that the Yahwist added the story of Rahab to Joshua, for it conflicts with its literary context. According to Van Seters, "The episode was contrived and added in order to articulate a more universalistic perspective on Israel's religion" (page 325). Van Seters also contends that the dividing of the land in Joshua is from P, for "The manner in which the assembly is convened at Shiloh and the procedures laid down for the land division are characteristic of the P style" (page 335).
Van Seters mediates between the positions of Gerhard Von Rad and Martin Noth. For Gerhard Von Rad, Genesis-Joshua constituted a Hexateuch, and J and P made contributions to the Book of Joshua. Martin Noth, however, considered Genesis-Numbers to be a Tetrateuch, and he associated the Book of Joshua more with Deuteronomy than the authors in the Tetrateuch, which included J and P. Van Seters agrees with Noth that there is a strong Deuteronomistic element in the Book of Joshua, but he also, like believers in the Hexateuch, acknowledges that J and P have contributed to Joshua. Van Seters holds that J and P supplemented the Deuteronomistic material in Joshua.
I'll stop here, but I'll probably revisit Van Seters' In Search of History in future posts. Stay tuned!
