James Alexander Paterson

“ This book was long the storm-centre of Pentateuchal criticism, orthodox scholars boldly asserting that any who questioned its Mosaic authorship reduced it to the level of a pious fraud. But Biblical facts have at last triumphed over tradition, and the non-Mosaic authorship of Deuteronomy is now a commonplace of criticism. ”

“ The only other single chapter of the Bible which is responsible for having brought about a somewhat similar revolution in critical opinion is Ezek. xliv. From this chapter, some seventy years after de Wette’s discovery, Wellhausen with equal acumen inferred that Leviticus was not known to Ezekiel, the priest, and therefore could not have been in existence in his day; for had Leviticus been the recognized Law-book of his nation Ezekiel could not have represented as a degradation the very position which that Law-book described as a special honour conferred on the Levites by Yahweh himself. ”

“ Deuteronomy is not the work of any single writer but the result of a long process of development. The fact that it is legislative as well as hortatory is enough to prove this, for most of the laws it contains are found elsewhere in the Pentateuch, sometimes in less developed, sometimes in more developed forms, a fact which is conclusive proof of prolonged historical development. ”

“ Some of the curses refer to laws given not in D but in Lev. xxx., so that the date of this chapter must be later than Leviticus or at any rate than the laws codified in the Law of Holiness (Lev. xvii.–xxvi.) . (2) The second appendix, chaps, xxix.–xxxi. 29, xxxii. 45-47, gives us the farewell address of Moses and is certainly later than D. Moses is represented as speaking not with any hope of preventing Israel’s apostasy but because he knows that the people will eventually prove apostate (xxxi. 29) , a point of view very different from D's. (3) The Song of Moses, chap. xxxii. ”

“ The Hebrew really means “and he [the king] shall write out for himself a copy of this law,” where there is not the slightest suggestion that the author intended to describe “this law” delivered on the plains of Moab as a second code in contradistinction to the first code given on Sinai thirty-eight years earlier. ”