We start with a recent study by Paul Davidson, author of the "Is that in the Bible?" website.
"The 'Fire from Heshbon' and a censored King of Judah" proposes that seeming problems in the text of Numbers 21, a song about Mosaic-wandering Israel's battle with Sihon, king of Og, and Balaam's refusal to curse Israel on Sihon's behalf reflect something deeper. That's his Problem 1.
Namely, he ties them to seeming problems in 2 Kings with the regnal dates and heritage of Josiah. This is his Problem 2.
Davidson first notes, as do many lay and academic biblical scholars, that the total of Judahite regnal years vs the actual time span based on external calendrical anchors leaves a surplus. In Davidson's calculations, it's 8 years.
Second, Josiah is made king "by act of the people." And, other than the populace pushing Samuel to give them their first king (but even then, it was Samuel's act after consulting with Yahweh), nothing else like that is in the Bible.
Image: Josiah receiving the book of the law, something that, as we shall see below, almost certainly never happened.
It gets worse, with Josiah's own birth and progeny.
Furthermore, math dictates that Josiah was conceived when his father was only 15. Again, not a biological impossibility, but still quite unlikely.2 The problem is even worse for Josiah’s two oldest sons, who are conceived when Josiah is 13 and 15 years old! (Jehoiakim is 25 when he takes the throne in the same year as Josiah’s death. Josiah died at age 39, meaning Jehoiakim was born when Josiah was 14. By biological necessity, he would have been conceived 10 months earlier.)
There is also significant confusion about who Josiah’s sons were. According to 1 Chronicles 3:15, he had a son Johanan who was born even earlier than Jehoiakim (!), while Jehoahaz (his second-born in 2 Kings) is nowhere to be found. Meanwhile, 1 Esdras 1:32 (v. 34 in some versions) refers to Josiah’s second-born son as Jeconiah, and Jeremiah 22:11 gives his name as Shallum, which is the name of Josiah’s fourth-born son according to Chronicles.
Oy vey indeed!
Problem 3 is the Tower of Hananel.
His solution is the "censored king of Judah," building on previous scholarship.
In 2005, the late Orientalist historian Giovanni Garbini made the remarkable proposition that Judah was briefly ruled by an otherwise unknown Ammonite king named Hananel during the mid-600s BCE, and it was he who built the eponymous Tower of Hananel.
Innnteresting. Garbini goes on to propose that King Amon (note the similarity to Ammon) was that foreign king, eventually booted in a coup, and replaced by Josiah.
Davidson says that still leaves unanswered for certain details of Josiah's death, but it's a good idea.
OK?
I take off from there, courtesy Idan Dershowitz, an up-and-coming Tanakh scholar.
Years before, I had read, and reviewed, "The Lost Book of Moses," about Moses Wilhelm Shapira's 1880s reception of a possibly antique Hebrew scroll, referred to as the Shapira Scroll, covered with bits of bitumen and other things. If this had happened after 1947, or enough after 1947 for the Dead Sea Scrolls to have their antiquity and authenticity established and accepted, Shapira's find would have been glommed onto by scholars. Instead, he was accused of forgery, allegedly proven by cursory examination, and a few years later, committed suicide. Being a converted Jew from eastern Europe probably didn't help him.
But, hold on, says Dershowitz, who in a monograph called "The Valediction of Moses" (PDF) says that Shapira probably found either a direct or indirect predecessor of the canonical Deuteronomy, one that includes only the narrative, not the "book of the law" of modern Deuteronomy 12-26. (Wiki's piece on the scroll references Dershowitz; on Shapira itself, it does not.)
Hold on to that thought.
Relevant to Davidson, Dershowitz notes that "V," as he calls this scroll in shorthand (having done a strong attempt at reconstructing the now-lost original from Shapira's notes) has a different version of the battle with Sihon than canonical Deuteronomy 2. (To tie back to the top of this piece, Deuteronomy's version of the battle with Og king of Bashan, no Balaam, is in the next chapter.) In it, Yahweh has Moses provoke Sihon into war; in V, it's a straight-on attack by Israel. Note: Dershowitz says "Elohim"; in canonical Deuteronomy, it's "Yahweh." This is not "stickyness" over the divine name by Dershowitz, as he uses the consonants YHWH of the Tetragrammaton himself; rather, in passages that are directly parallel, Shapira doesn't have Yahweh. The bigger issue is that Yahweh, not Elohim, is who is the actor throughout canonical Deuteronomy.
As I see it, there are four possibilities, off the top of my head:
- V is indeed a precursor, whether direct or indirectly, to canonical Deuteronomy and Elohim is who it is.
- Shapira, as a converted Jew, wouldn't write out the Tetragrammaton in his notes to a legit book.
- Shapira or whomever, as forger, wouldn't write out the Tetragrammaton.
- This is indeed ancient, but it's not a precursor to Deuteronomy. Contra Dershowitz, call it a targum or whatever, written by a Jew to clear up confusions in Deuteronomy before that text became too finalized, maybe.
How likely are each of these?
I'll dismiss 3 right away. Writing out the name is not a problem on Torah scrolls, and besides, a forger wouldn't have scruples.
No. 2? I don't know enough about Shapira's religiosity to offer any "Bayesian probability." Take that, Richard Carrier. I don't think that's highly likely, though, especially given further background, in the following paragraph.
So 1 vs. 4 is where we're at. Without explaining why V uses Elohim, Dershowitz does say that, in canonical Deuteronomy, the insertion of the law code would have meant rewriting Deuteronomy 2 into current form so that Moses doesn't violate the laws of war in Deuteronomy 20. Otherwise, on the name, he says that "V" shows no use of P or P-like material.
How likely is Dershowitz's claim, by the way? At academia-lite, Biblical Archaeology Review, Jonathan Klawans, without calling Shapira the forger, says it's possible he was, and if not, somebody else, indicates that "V" is too Christianizing, and thus can't be authentic. BAR's founder, lawyer and James Ossuary grifter Hershel Shanks, stated this more firmly, jumping with both feet 20 years ago, long before Dershowitz. (Being a converted Jew probably didn't help Shapira again.)
Dershowitz goes on from the Sihon pericope to note that the incipit V has of Dt. 1, far shorter than canonical Deuteronomy, reflects a reconstructed proto-Deuteronomy broached by other scholars, but not in today's version until decades after Shapira got the scrolls and not at all until a few years later.
Next, he directly addresses Klawans' and Shanks' complaints about V's version of the Decalogue, the Divarim. He notes that there are several places with "intertexts" of the Commandments that parallel at least in part V's version. The closest is Leviticus 19, and it totally blows up the objections.
So, as a working hypothesis, let us assume Dershowitz is correct.
This ties back to Davidson.
Under this theory, the narrative sections, Deuteronomy 1-11 and 27-32, are the original, and the priestly-like law code of Dt. 12-26, a later, and intrusive, insertion. (It interrupts the Ebal and Gerizim narrative.)
For traditional critical scholarship, per this piece,* this means that Dt 12-26 almost certainly could not have been "the book of the law" magically uncovered soon after "an act of the people" put Josiah on the throne. Under the Dershowitz timeline, Dt 12-26 is certainly exilic and possibly to probably post-exilic. (He promises a future book on Dt's composition.)
He wraps up with comparing V and canonical Dt on the Ebal-Gerizim narrative and finds a few interesting differences.
This does leave one item up in the air. And, that is, why does Shapira's proto-Dt. end with Deuteronomy 11 and not the second half of the narrative material, the Former Prophets material if you will. I hope it's something he tackles in his promised book on Deuteronomy.
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* Piece at this link is cited only for illustrative purposes. I think Russell Gmirkin's idea that the Greek LXX and Hebrew Torah in the current form were written simultaneously in Alexandria, with a core of history behind Aristeas' letter, is laughable. It's based on a strawmanning version of the documentary hypothesis, first, and second, even if Gmirkin IS right on that, his solution is not one. A whole series at Vridar devoted to Gmirkin leaves me no more convinced. Some of his ideas are easily dealt with.
Why is their no attestation earlier in Greek sources of the Torah? No Jewish diaspora, for starters. And, as a JTS review of his book notes, he simply ignores apparent references in Isaiah and elsewhere to the Torah. Weirdly, per this savaging Amazon review, Gmirkin at the same time, via Manetho etc., seems to believe there was a literal Exodus. Another 1-star review suggests an earlier translation into Greek of an earlier extant Torah addresses many of Gnirkin's claims.
And, this may expand into a separate post.
