Barrick, The Authorship of Deuteronomy 34
ETS Annual Meeting, November 14-16, 2001
15
Deuteronomy beyond most evangelicals' comfort zone--placing us more in the critical
camp by exploding the Torah into innumerable fragments that had been somehow
brought together by a series of redactors. Instead of focusing on Moses' view of himself,
why not stress what such descriptions of the servant say about his Lord? As Beegle
rightly observed, "The leading role in the whole story is Yahweh's. Moses was a gifted
man, but it was only by Yahweh's grace that he lived to exercise those gifts."
von Rad echoes the thought:
Not a single one of all these stories, in which Moses is the central figure, was
really written about Moses. Great as was the veneration of the writers [sic] for
this man to whom God had been pleased to reveal Himself, in all these stories
it is not Moses himself, Moses the man, but God who is the central figure.
God's words and God's deeds, these are the things that the writers [sic] intend
to set forth.
In the midst of his discussion of the problem of Numbers 12:3, Ronald Allen
admits that it "is theoretically possible that Moses might have authored such a line under
inspiration, just as it is possible that he might have recorded the account of his death and
burial by prophetic insight (Deut 34). These things are possible but not likely."
such things "not likely"? After arguing that an editor must have inserted the problematic
verse, Allen suggests a viable resolution to the interpretive difficulty. He offers Cleon
Rogers' suggestion that adopting the Qere' (
wyn() would make it possible for Moses to
have written that he "was a very miserable
man, more miserable than anyone else on the
might very well have viable
solutions that might also allow the interpretation-based objection to lose its foothold.
One potential solution would be to translate
{fq with the future tense ("A prophet
will not arise in Israel like Moses"). The same verb was utilized in reference to a future
royal figure in Numbers 24:17 (
lê")fr:&éYim ü+ebó"$ {Ûfqºw bèoqA(áY×im bðfkOK |íarfD, "a star
will appear out of Jacob and a scepter will arise out of Israel").
Moses' prophetic office is significant in the overall structure and content of the
Pentateuch even though it specifically refers to that office only twice (Deut 18:15-18;
34:10). The major poetic pericopes of the Pentateuch (Gen 49; Num 22-24; Deut 33) are
prophetic. They are strategically placed prior to major transitions in the overall flow of
the narrative: "the death of Jacob and the end of the ancestral stories in Genesis 50, the
death of the Exodus generation in Numbers 25-26, the death of Moses in Deuteronomy
74
Beegle, Moses, 347-48.
75
Gerhard von Rad, Moses, World Christian Books 32, Second Series (New York: Association Press, n.d.),
8-9.
76
Ronald B. Allen, "Numbers," in The Expositor's Bible Commentary, ed. by Frank E. Gaebelein (Grand
Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan Publishing House, 1990), 2:798.
77
Cleon Rogers, "Moses: Meek or Miserable?" Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 29/3 (Sept
1986): 257-63.
78
Allen, "Numbers," 2:798.
79
The use of in Deut 31:16 is also future, but it is not preceded by a qatal. It is preceded by a participle that
could be classified as an imminent future.