

Deuteronomy and Hittite Treaties







There has long been one very good reason to consider dating Deuteronomy far earlier than the seventh century, and to the second millennium BCE: certain core elements of the book seem to be based on treaty forms most similar to the Hittite treaties known from the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BCE. That Deuteronomy relies on the form of a treaty is another well-established consensus position in biblical scholarship.

See Also: Allusive Keywords

By Aaron Koller

Associate Professor of Bible

Yeshiva University

September 2014

A recent exchange of essays in the Journal of Ancient Judaism has highlighted an issue that has long festered in biblical studies, and which has recently been the subject of articles in the most prestigious journals in the field. Professor Joshua Berman has argued, in two papers in the Journal of Biblical Literature as well as in other writings, that comparative evidence supports a date for Deuteronomy in the second millennium BCE rather than in Neo-Assyrian times. This elicited a response from Professor Bernard Levinson and Professor Jeffrey Stackert, to which Berman responded; Levinson and Stackert have now written a detailed response to the response.

What makes this exchange especially interesting is that the dating of Deuteronomy has long been the linchpin on which much of the rest of the dates assigned to biblical literature hangs.

A word of background is important for understanding the significance of Berman’s claim and the responses. Biblical scholars have long been very interested in dating the alleged sources found within the Torah. There are two types of dating: relative dating, meaning sequencing the sources in order from earliest to latest, and absolute dating, meaning given a specific date – for example, the thirteenth century – for one or more of the sources. In order to arrive at any real historical scheme, both types of datings are needed.

Let us take an example from a different realm. Based on internal Egyptian sources, we can reconstruct the list of pharaohs from the various dynasties. This gives us only a relative dating, however: we may know that there was a king Amenemhat who ruled for 30 years, followed by Senwosret who ruled for 45, and so on, but we would have no way of situating these kings on a time line with actual dates. We need some other way of pinning this all on a time line, some data point that will enable absolute dating: we need something to enable us to say that Amenemhat came to the throne in 1991 BCE. Theoretically, only one data point is needed for this. With that in place, all the relative information can be used to situate everything else in an absolute scheme.

Scholars have often argued that the Torah is comprised of originally disparate sources. They have often disagreed about sequencing those sources on a timeline, however. What they have usually agreed on is the linchpin: the book of Deuteronomy is regularly dated to the seventh century BCE. If other sources are judged to be earlier than Deuteronomy, they are perforce earlier than the seventh century; if they are later than Deuteronomy, they are no earlier than the sixth century – namely, the period of the Babylonian Exile.

The view that Deuteronomy dates to the seventh century has been the prevalent one since at least Wilhelm M. L. de Wette, in the very beginning of the nineteenth century. De Wette’s argument was based primarily on a two-part argument: (1) Deuteronomy was the book found in Josiah’s eighteenth year (622 BCE), which provoked Josiah’s reforms; (2) the book was new at that time.

The first part of this argument goes back to long before De Wette, and he himself was apparently only reflecting what he took to be the conventional view. The early Church Fathers – Jerome, among others – held this view, as did the commentator printed as Rashi on Chronicles, as well as Hobbes in the late medieval period. The primary justification for this conclusion is the number of parallels between the narrative of Josiah’s reforms (2 Kings 22-23) and the book of Deuteronomy.

Scholars have repeatedly returned to this point, to fortify it against opposing views. In the 1920s there was a push to down-date Deuteronomy to the period after the Exile. In 1927, the Journal of Biblical Literature held a symposium on the date of Deuteronomy, in the face of a strong push to date it post-exilically. Lewis Bayles-Paton wrote a thorough article there entitled “The Case For the Post-Exilic Origin of Deuteronomy,” whose point was to destroy that case. Bayles-Paton listed 27 features of the Kings narrative that were explicable only by assuming that the book found was Deuteronomy. Other scholars pointed out that the same later author who wrote Deuteronomy could have rewritten the account of Josiah’s reforms to make it correspond to the laws he was legislating.

The great Biblicist S. R. Driver fought hard against the opposite view: that Deuteronomy was composed before the seventh century. He was willing to allow a date as early Manasseh or the early years of Josiah, but no earlier, and for this he lists ten reasons. These reasons basically boiled down to the fact that Josiah is the first king who is said to have fulfilled the precepts of Deuteronomy, thus making an earlier existence for the book doubtful.

The standard view was defended again in the 1960s by H. H. Rowley. There have been some modifications and alternatives propounded, which remain within the same fundamental perspective. Thus, Moshe Weinfeld argued that the book developed from the late eighth century through the later seventh, and others have argued for an early seventh-century date. Broadly, this approach remains the mainstream position, notwithstanding minimalistic attacks on the view that Deuteronomy – or any part of the Bible – was textualized before the Exile. In 1985, Norbert Lohfink commented, “Hardly any new perspective seems to have appeared…. The consensus continues to identify Deuteronomy [as the found book of 2 Kings 22] in some form or another.”

There has long been one very good reason to consider dating Deuteronomy far earlier than the seventh century, and to the second millennium BCE: certain core elements of the book seem to be based on treaty forms most similar to the Hittite treaties known from the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BCE. That Deuteronomy relies on the form of a treaty is another well-established consensus position in biblical scholarship. The book has seven parts:

Preamble: 1:1-5

Historical prologue: 1:6-4:40

Basic stipulation of allegiance: 5-11

Covenantal clauses: 12-26

Invocation of witnesses: 4:26; 30:19; 31:28

Blessings and curses: 28

Oath-imprecation: 29:9-28

These seven parts find their parallels in the second millennium Hittite treaties. There are also treaties known from the seventh century; these are Neo-Assyrian treaties, and they are somewhat different in form from the Hittite examples. In particular, there is no historical prologue, and the blessings for loyalty, if they exist at all, are much shorter than the curses for disloyalty.

Because of this, conservative scholars such as Kenneth Kitchen have long argued that Deuteronomy most naturally finds its home in the second millennium, rather than the first millennium. As mentioned above, this has regularly been rejected. The arguments mustered for a later date lie in the details.

In both Deuteronomy 13 and 28, scholars have pointed to specific passages that are supposed to show direct dependence on the Vassal Treaties of Esarhaddon, composed in the early seventh century BCE. If such dependence could be indisputably shown, Deuteronomy in its current form could not antedate that time. The best argument regarding Deuteronomy 28 is in the comparison of Deuteronomy 28:26-33 and lines 419-430 of the Vassal Treaty of Esarhaddon (VTE). Weinfeld outlined the following chart:

Deuteronomy Curse VTE Curse 27 boils and scurvy 419-420 leprosy (Sin) 28-29 darkness → robbery 422-424 darkness (Šamaš) 26 animals eat flesh 425-427 animals eat flesh (Ninurta) 30a wife sleeps with 428-429 wife sleeps with the enemy another (Venus) 30b; 32 house taken by other; sons and daughters to other people 429-430a sons not masters of the house 33 other nations eat fruit 430b foreign enemy takes goods

There is no obvious connection between the boils and scurvy of v. 27 and the darkness and unlawfulness in v. 28 within the Bible. In the Mesopotamian text, on the other hand, where the same conjunction exists, it is easily explainable: it is based on the hierarchy of the Assyrian pantheon. The plague of leprosy is always associated with Sin, and the curse of darkness, symbolizing unlawfulness, is of course associated with Šamaš, whose inheritance is kittum. This shows, then, that the borrowing can only be one way: these verses in Deuteronomy seem to have been “incorporated as an independent literary unit,” “which in substance was borrowed from Assyrian treaty forms.”

Regarding Deuteronomy 13, the conventional understanding is that political regulations have been translated into the religious sphere, or, to put it differently, religion has been conceptualized politically. This feature of Deuteronomy has been studied often, including a series of penetrating studies by Professor Bernard Levinson, and the political text most often appealed to as background for Deuteronomy are the Vassal Treaties of Esarhaddon once again. Professor Berman published an article in the Journal of Biblical Literature arguing, however, that although there are similarities between Deuteronomy and the VTE, there are closer parallels to Hittite treaties of the second millennium BCE. This article focused on the so-called “sedition clause.” In VTE, the text mandates that any individual who hears seditious thoughts from a close friend or family member turn that person in to the Assyrian authorities. In Deuteronomy, the same principle is applied to one whose friend or family member encourages the worship of gods other than the God of Israel. Berman claims, however, that there are equally relevant parallels in Hittite treaties, which establish very similar rules: “If anyone utters a malicious word before you [whether it is a border lord], or a commoner, or a Hittite or a Kizzuwatner, or his people, his own father, his mother, his brother, his sister or his son, his relative by marriage – whoever says such a word, no one is to h[id]e him, but shall rather seize him and expose him!”

Berman’s article received a a thoroughly critical response from Prof. Bernard Levinson and Prof. Jeffrey Stackert. Levinson and Stackert argue that Berman’s argument cannot carry the weight assigned to it: the parallels between Deuteronomy and VTE are too strong to be dismissed; the parallels between Deuteronomy and the Hittite treaties are weak enough that they can be dismissed; there is no known historical way that the Hittite treaties could have made their way into Israelite consciousness, so although these are two ancient Near Eastern cultures, no dependence is possible.

I am not persuaded by many of Levinson’s and Stackert’s arguments. The third one raises weighty questions. It is worth noting that until 2009 it was not known that copies of the VTE were brought to the west, either, and yet scholars were prepared to accept that the Neo-Assyrian treates had influenced Deuteronomy. The difference is that here there is massive evidence for the diffusion of Assyrian influence on the Levant already in the eighth century. More to the point is that there are clear examples where we just don't know how texts and ideas were transmitted, but there is no real doubt that they were. Within biblical studies, one of the most striking examples is the book of Lamentations, which is modeled on city laments known from Sumerian exemplars nearly a millennium and a half earlier (and 500 miles away). Perhaps these texts were part of what the great Assyriologist Leo Oppenheim called the “stream of tradition”; perhaps some of this material was actually Amorite or Canaanite originally, and was “borrowed” into Mesopotamia, where we happen to encounter it first; perhaps we will never know precisely how texts and knowledge circulated around the ancient world, but we will be able to watch them move through the traces they leave.

To my mind, then, the real question is whether the parallels are judged to be compelling. If they are, then the “how” of the transmission can be left as a question, rather than a necessary pre-condition for analysis. In the case of Deuteronomy 13 in particular, there seem to be no “smoking guns” that reveal the influence of either the Vassal Treaties of the seventh century, or the Hittite treaties of the thirteenth century, on Deuteronomy. It is not clear that the biblical command, “do not add to it and do not subtract from it” is equivalent to the prohibition in the Vassal Treaties not to “remove it, consign it to the fire, throw it into the water, bury it in the earth or destroy it by any cunning device, annihilate it or deface it,” but the formulaic injunction “not to alter” a text is attested throughout Mesopotamian and other Near Eastern literature. On the other hand, the Hittite text cited by Berman as parallel to the sedition clause later in Deuteronomy 13 is also very similar to clauses attested elsewhere in the treaty record, from both the second and first millennia. So nothing in this chapter appears to help us date the composition of the book based on comparative evidence.

On the other hand, it should be recalled that the basic structure of Deuteronomy is more similar to Hittite treaties than to the Neo-Assyrian treaties. It is true that there is a Neo-Assyrian treaty with the king of Qedar which apparently had a historical prologue, which weakens the need to appeal to the Hittite treaties for Deuteronomy’s context. This strengthens Berman’s position in another way, though: somehow the form of the Hittite treaty was transmitted down to Neo-Assyrian times, although we have no idea what the mode of transmission was, which in turn raises the question of what else could have been transmitted through time in ways presently invisible to us.

The central question issue, of course, is whether there is in fact sufficient evidence to have confidence in the “traditional” 7th-century date of Deuteronomy. I am not convinced. Like everyone else, I am acutely aware of the inability I have to fully free myself of my own biases. My religious position in life, and my work teaching at Yeshiva University, certainly encourage certain biases. On the other hand, and more positively, such a position forces me to think carefully even about “consensus positions,” which I personally do not adopt simply because they represent the scholarly consensus. The evidence has to be examined carefully, since the stakes are quite high. There does not seem to be strong evidence that Deuteronomy dates to the 7th-century. On the contrary, whether or not the Hittite parallels are the closest ones, the point is that there are parallels to many of the features in Deuteronomy from literature from Old Babylonian through Neo-Babylonian times. These parallels are not helpful for dating purposes, therefore.

To me it appears that the debate reflects the high stakes involved in this issue. If Berman is correct, and there are closer – or just as close, or even just more-or-less-equally-close – parallels between Deuteronomy and second-millennium Mesopotamian literature, then the single linchpin for absolute dating of all of the Torah falls apart. That Deuteronomy, at least in some form, dates back to the second millennium BCE appears to be a more tenable scholarly position than it did earlier.

Notes