The author of the law code in Deuteronomy

The Bible often seems like something that is not to be questioned, so it is interesting to look at it from a political perspective. Many of the arguments in Chapter 6 of Friedman do not focus on historical events or writing style. Instead, they focus on political power struggles. One of the rejected ideas was the "pious fraud" in which a king wrote the law code in Deuteronomy to serve his own purposes. It goes onto say that the priests of Shiloh must have "believed in centralization of worship, because Shiloh had once been the national religious center" (122). The priests wrote this part not for spiritual reasons but because they wanted to regain their power. Since the priests were Levites, they often mentioned the importance of caring for the Levites in the law code. When the researchers were looking at the law code, they seem to have looked at people in a pessimistic but realistic way, as self-serving and power-hungry. I think it makes sense to look at the writers this way because they probably were not above this, just like other people.