Bookshelf: Deuteronomy

We've talked in class about the theory that Deuteronomy is a document created late in the Monarchy by assembling earlier sources and writing new material in the (fictitious) name of Moses, in order to define and propagandize a revolutionary movement that centralized religious authority and changed the nature of official Israelite religion, writing over the stories of the patriarchs and claiming that the things they did (building their own altars, performing their own sacrifices, worshipping at high places and sacred trees, entering into sacred places, and above all, seeing God) were pagan Canaanite acts.

This theory (in multiple variants) is at the bedrock bottom of modern biblical criticism.  That doesn't mean it's right, but it's also consistent with Nephi's horrible account of the rewriting of the Israelite record (the revisionists remove plain and precious things from the record; the tree that is the city Jerusalem and also the Virgin mother is the most precious thing), so we should take it seriously.

To date, this understanding has had approximately zero impact on Mormon Sunday Schools.  If you want to explore it, your on your own; so here are some books to start with:

• Moshe Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School.  This is a classic -- out of print, but still available secondhand.
• Moshe Weinfeld, Deuteronomy 1-11 (The Anchor Yale Bible).  Weinfeld's commentary on Deuteronomy is being republished posthumously.  The 85-page introductory essay alone is worth the price of admission.
• Bernard Levinson, Deuteronomy and the Hermeneutics of Legal Innovation.  Should win some kind of prize for its title, but this is a terrific book about the way Deuteronomy rewrites earlier legal sources for its centralizing ends.

Again, there are many more books on this key topic.  These are just the ones I own.  A good introduction to the Old Testament (by "good" I really mean not tied to any church, but especially not Evangelical) will also give you some background.

The Reformers and the Rest

From today's lesson:

Bookshelf: The Septuagint

The ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament is important.  Since it's likely to come up in class and will definitely come up in your study, I want to make sure you know a few things about it, and point you to where you can find an English version.

It's called the Septuagint (sep-TOO-uh-jint), from the Greek word for "seventy," and is therefore also identified by the Roman numeral for 70: LXX.  The number 70 is an old Hebrew stereotype meaning the whole world, or sometimes the world outside Israel (the idea being that there are seventy nations).  You can see this idea in both the Old Testament and the New.  The LXX is the earliest known translation of the Old Testament into another language -- some parts of it are pre-Jesus, even as early as 200 B.C.

The really interesting thing about this old Greek translation is that it's often very different from the Hebrew, in two ways: First, it contains books or parts of books that aren't preserved in Hebrew, but were considered by the ancient Jewish translators part of scripture (for instance, the Wisdom of Jesus Ben Sirach or the extra chapters of Daniel and Jeremiah).

Second, the LXX contains some very different readings from the traditional Hebrew text of the Bible (the Masoretic text, or MT).  For instance, Deuteronomy 32:8 in the MT says that God divided the world up according to the sons of Israel, but in the LXX the same verse says that God divided the world according to the sons of God... these are radically different ideas.

To really come to grips with the differences between the LXX and the MT and why they matter, you'll need some Greek and Hebrew (there's my little pitch, again).  But for starters, you can find the New English Translation of the Septuagint in its entirety online, here (I know, the web-page looks a little hokey, but the LXX translation itself is good, and downloadable in .pdf).  You can also buy a physical copy of the book.

Let All the Angels of God Worship

Liturgical quotations continue.  Who worships the Son?  In Hebrews and the Greek of Psalm 97, the angeloi, angels.  In the Hebrew of Psalm 97, it's the "Gods," elohim.  In the Greek of Deuteronomy 32:43, the huioi theou, sons of God.  (This line is missing from the English translation and the Masoretic Hebrew, but it appears in Deuteronomy as discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls.)

These are all the same thing.  The Worship of the Shalems ordinance is how one becomes the light, which is to say, the Son, and a teleios / shalem, like the Father.

The "angels" in verse 7 are parallel and equivalent to the "ministers," which in Greek are leitourgoi, priests who perform ordinances.  So we see for the umpteenth time that angels are priests.