For many decades, scholarship has been almost unanimous in its appraisal of the laws of Deuteronomy. Many commentators see these laws as simply having been thrown together over the course of time; Deuteronomy is a veritable trough of laws with little rhyme of reason. The reason that the book is poorly structured is because it is the consequence of many hundreds of years of writing, editing, and literary evolution. A few recent studies, however, have gone against the main-stream. Some have attempted to demonstrate that the ...
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For many decades, scholarship has been almost unanimous in its appraisal of the laws of Deuteronomy. Many commentators see these laws as simply having been thrown together over the course of time; Deuteronomy is a veritable trough of laws with little rhyme of reason. The reason that the book is poorly structured is because it is the consequence of many hundreds of years of writing, editing, and literary evolution. A few recent studies, however, have gone against the main-stream. Some have attempted to demonstrate that the Book of Deuteronomy is not a literary mishmash of various laws haphazardly thrown together. To the contrary, Deuteronomy is a highly structured, well-formulated, and symmetrical piece of work. The basic view is this: the laws of Deuteronomy are an expansion of the Ten Commandments with the intent of demonstrating the application of the Decalogue to the nation of Israel.
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