Dr. Keith Essex · The Master's Seminary · 71 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Keith Essex, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
What kind of book is Deuteronomy? Dr. Essex lays the code of Hammurabi and the Hittite treaties beside the text, walks through the four main answers scholars have given, and lands where the church landed long before archaeology weighed in: these are the preached speeches of Moses. Listen for the two elements no ancient treaty ever contained, and for the question of one single verse, 29:1, on which the whole structure turns.
Essex opens with the commentaries he will lean on. Peter Craigie's 1976 volume is that rare thing, an evangelical Old Testament commentary that liberal scholars actually read, because Craigie had already earned his reputation translating the Ugaritic documents; invited to write on Deuteronomy, he stunned the critical world by arguing an early date and an essentially Mosaic book. Eugene Merrill's commentary gets the star as the first buy, with McConville, Christopher Wright, Daniel Block, and Raymond Brown's expositions filling out the shelf.
Long before the Torah, kings gave law codes to their subjects, and the most famous is the code of Hammurabi, from around 1750 BC, some three hundred years before Moses. Its shape is telling: a historical prologue claiming the king's laws carry divine sanction, the long list of laws themselves, blessings promised for obedience and curses for disobedience, and an epilogue. Read it and the similarities to the Torah's Sinai material are real, though Moses speaks for the true God whom Israel had actually seen act in their history, and far more historical narrative frames the Torah's law.
From roughly 1400 to 1150 BC the Hittites stormed out of Asia Minor, and to the peoples they conquered they gave treaties: not agreements between equals but the terms of a sovereign to his vassals. The recovered treaties share a structure: a preamble naming the parties, a historical prologue recounting the king's good dealings, basic stipulations followed by detailed ones, provision for storing the treaty and reading it publicly, blessings and curses, and the gods invoked as witnesses. Scholars debate whether Deuteronomy fits this second-millennium pattern or the simpler pattern of the later first-millennium treaties.
The parallels are striking. Deuteronomy 1:1 to 4 reads like a preamble, the parties Yahweh and Israel with Moses as mediator; 1:5 through chapter 3 is a historical prologue of Yahweh's faithfulness set against Israel's unfaithfulness; chapter 5 restates the ten words as basic stipulation, chapters 12 to 26 give the detailed statutes and judgments; chapters 27 and 28 pronounce blessings and curses, with the curse section nearly five times longer than the blessings; chapter 31 provides for the law's storage and public reading; and the song of chapter 32 opens by calling heaven and earth, the language of witnesses.
Then come the differences. Deuteronomy keeps pausing to plead. Chapter 4 is a whole exhortation built on the theology lesson of Horeb: you saw that Yahweh alone is God, so take it to heart and keep his commandments that it may go well with you. Another long exhortation runs from 5:22 to the end of chapter 11, and another gathers everything at 26:16 to 19. No Hittite vassal was ever exhorted like this, because no Hittite king ever loved his vassals; the pleading is the fingerprint of a preacher, not a treaty scribe.
Deuteronomy also legislates what Sinai never addressed. Chapter 20's laws of warfare, and the provisions for dividing and living in the land, are new commandments for the second generation about to cross the Jordan; the book is no mere restatement. And the Hittite treaties themselves were never renewed: the same document was simply reread on schedule. So to call Deuteronomy a renewal document patterned on the treaties is, Essex judges, to go beyond the evidence on both counts.
The positions line up. Craigie, following Meredith Kline, read Deuteronomy as a covenant renewal document structured on the Hittite treaty form. Merrill softens that to a covenant renewal framework with the exhortations added. The classical view, held by Jewish and Christian interpreters alike until the twentieth century, from Keil and Delitzsch back, heard the book as the recorded speeches of Moses explaining the covenant and calling for obedience. And McConville, in the last decade, reads the speeches as establishing a narrative pattern, Israel's failure met by God's grace, past, present, and future, reaching to the end of the days.
Essex takes the classical view with one addition: the speeches do not only exhort, they foretell. Already at 5:29 Yahweh sighs, oh that they had such a heart in them to fear me and keep my commandments always, and that note trails through the book like a shadow. Chapters 29 to 31 make it explicit: Israel will go in under Joshua, Israel will disobey, the covenant curses will fall, and the judgment will drive Israel to a repentance that God will meet with blessing at the end of the days. The book exhorts obedience while prophesying disobedience, and shows how God will handle it.
Track the phrase Moses said and the structure emerges: five distinct speeches, each set in a narrative frame. Speech one, introduced at 1:5, gives the historical review and the exhortation of chapter 4. Speech two, from chapter 5, restates the ten words, exhorts at length, delivers the statutes of 12 to 26, and pronounces the blessings and curses. Speech three, in chapters 29 and 30, makes another covenant in Moab. Speech four is the song of Moses, speech five his blessing on the tribes, and the narratives around them record his replacement and his death.
The most debated structural question is one verse. The Masoretic tradition read 29:1, these are the words of the covenant made in Moab besides the covenant at Horeb, as the conclusion of chapter 28. Essex sides with the majority of commentators against it, for two reasons: the phrase these are the words opens the book at 1:1 as a narrative introduction, never a conclusion; and without 29:1 as its heading, the third speech would have no setting at all. Speeches two and three are deliberately open ended, a to-be-continued whose answer waits in the Former and Latter Prophets.
The closing chapters record a double succession. Moses' leadership of the people passes to a man, Joshua, whom God has raised up. But Moses' instruction of the people passes not to a man at all: from now on the written Torah itself takes the place of Moses as Israel's teacher. The prophet dies; the words remain, stored beside the ark and read to all Israel.
A student's question draws out a conviction. The treaty parallels made a powerful apologetic, and for thirty years, from the sixties to the eighties, conservatives had the upper hand in Old Testament studies; skeptics who had once denied the Hittites existed now debated Hittite influence on Deuteronomy. But the pendulum swings, and today's biblical minimalism claims archaeology counters the Bible. Essex's rule holds either way: extra-biblical discovery may enhance what Spirit-led readers have seen in the text, but it never determines the text's meaning. God did not bury the key to understanding Scripture under the sands of the Middle East.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all twelve are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. Why did liberal scholars read Craigie's Deuteronomy commentary when they ignored most evangelical work?
2. What is the shape of the code of Hammurabi?
3. What were the Hittite treaties?
4. Which feature of Deuteronomy 27 and 28 does the lecture point out?
5. What does Deuteronomy contain that no ancient law code or treaty ever contained?
6. Why is Deuteronomy not a mere restatement of Sinai?
7. What was the classical understanding of Deuteronomy before the twentieth century?
8. What does Essex add to the classical view?
9. How many distinct speeches of Moses structure the book?
10. Why does Essex read 29:1 as an introduction rather than a conclusion?
11. Who or what replaces Moses at the end of Deuteronomy?
12. What is the standing rule about archaeology and Scripture?
All twelve correct. Lecture 23 is complete.
The exhortations are what set Deuteronomy apart from every treaty of its world: the covenant Lord pleads with his people. What does it change about your reading of the Old Testament law to hear pleading in it rather than mere legislation?
Essex holds that God did not bury the key to Scripture under the sands of the Middle East: background enhances, but the text itself teaches. How does that conviction guard an ordinary reader who will never study Hittite treaties?
Speeches two and three end open ended: would Israel obey or not? The answer unfolds across the rest of the Old Testament. Where in your own life has God left something open ended, and what would faithfulness look like while the answer waits?
The culmination of the theology lesson in Deuteronomy 4: know today and take it to your heart that Yahweh, he is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other.
The lecture's own shelf: Eugene Merrill's Deuteronomy commentary, the starred first buy; Peter Craigie's 1976 volume, the century's most important commentary on the book and the one every side still answers; McConville, Christopher Wright, and Daniel Block for the current evangelical discussion; and Raymond Brown's The Message of Deuteronomy for exposition. Kenneth Kitchen's Ancient Orient and Old Testament stands behind the treaty debate.