Samuel Schultz - Deuteronomy- Everymans Bible Commentary

In current scholarship two basic viewpoints prevail concerning the authorship of Deuteronomy. According to some scholars this book was written during the seventh century B.C.; many others recognize Moses as the author, thus placing it much earlier.

As early as 1805 a German scholar by the name of De Wette proposed the theory that the book of Deuteronomy was written shortly before the time of Josiah and used as the law-book for religious reforms. Wellhausen gave classic expression to this idea by proposing that a prophet compiled Deuteronomy 12-26 about 630 B.C. with the intention of centralizing worship in Jerusalem. According to this theory this book was deposited in the temple and then discovered by Hilkiah the high priest.

The book of Deuteronomy in part, if not the whole, was identified as the D document. About 200 B.C. this document was combined with two narrative documents known as J and E (dated respectively about 950-850 and 750 B.C.) and the priestly document known as P (dated about 450 B.C.) to form the present Pentateuch. From the standpoint of literary partition, J was so designated because of its use of the divine name of Yahweh (Jahveh in German) for God, whereas E was identified by the use of the term Elohim. The D document was hortatory, and the P document was primarily concerned with worship.

The J document, according to this theory, was written in the wake of the great Hebrew kingdom that flourished in the Solomonic era. Geographically it was associated with Judah, which continued to be dominated by the Davidic dynasty after the secession of the Northern tribes in 931 B.C. The E document emerged as written literature during the peak of economic and political prosperity in the reign of Jeroboam II about 800-750 B.C. Recently scholars favor the tenth century as the preferable date for the J and E documents, J being written shortly before the death of Solomon and E at the beginning of the Northern Kingdom.

This theory has been modified so that Deuteronomic traditions began with the sacred and cultic festivals during the premonarchical era and were adapted and modified later by the prophetic circles. The basic book of Deuteronomy was written during the seventh century when Manasseh ruled in Jerusalem, and was completed after 586 B.C. when it became the introduction to the Deuteronomy-2 Kings corpus of Israelite history. Subsequently it was expanded editorially when it was added to the Genesis-Numbers corpus to form the Pentateuch. Moses had nothing to do with what is reported in Deuteronomy, nor did he have any part in the literary composition of the book.

Modern scholars such as E. J. Young, Gleason L. Archer, and R. K. Harrison, who recognize the Old Testament in its unreconstructed form as a reliable and trustworthy record, hold with the older Christian and Jewish tradition that the book of Deuteronomy offers an accurate record of Moses' addresses to the Israelites on the Plains of Moab. Although he may have had scribes writing for him who may have provided geographical explanations and the account of his death, Moses was essentially responsible for its writing, so that he is the author of this book as well as the rest of the Pentateuch.

Internal claims within Deuteronomy indicate that these speeches were delivered orally in the last month of the forty-year period of Moses' leadership (1:3) and preserved in written copies (31:9, 24; cf. 31:24-26).