Reshaping History

Chapter 7 of Friedman’s Who Wrote the Bible? gives us a very interesting method for interpreting the Bible, specifically the Deuteronomy. Friedman talks about how there are two versions of this book, one version coming before and one coming after the fall of Judah, and how the book had to be reshaped to allow the fall of Judah to make sense in the context of the Bible. I believe that Friedman’s arguments and evidence demonstrate just how fickle literature can be, that the addition of a few passages, sentences, or even words can completely change the entire theme or meaning of a literary work.

In the original Deuteronomy, Josiah and Judah were built up to be perennial lords and land of the Lord respectively. However, not too long after the book was published, the Babylonians had destroyed the “eternal kingdom” (Friedman, 137). This fact now made the original Deuteronomy look as if it had no merit and so an unknown author, whom Friedman suspects to be the original author due to the incredibly similar style and grammar, had to go back and change the original work so that the fall of Judah seemed plausible. The author was able to do this successfully by laying more stress on the Mosaic Covenant over the Davidic, thereby explaining the fall of Judah as a loss in faith and the bad deeds of past kings. What this means to us is that a single man could basically change the foundation of any kind of faith as he see fit by changing the emphasis and adding some well placed lines. To me, this is simply further evidence that the authenticity of religious texts is questionable at best.