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Barrick, The Authorship of Deuteronomy 34

ETS Annual Meeting, November 14-16, 2001

the geographical details represented in Deuteronomy 34 were beyond the knowledge of
Moses. Surprisingly, Eugene Merrill places himself within that circle by his claim that,

It is obvious that some of these place names are latter additions to the text
(e.g., Dan, Naphtali, Ephraim, Manasseh, Judah) inasmuch as they would not
have been assigned to these sites until after the conquest, some years
following Moses' death.

Merrill's position ignores the revelatory facts. Firstly, approximately 400 years before
Moses Jacob had already indicated that land would be apportioned to Ephraim and
Manasseh (Gen 48:22). It is not an unusual nor an unexpected occurrence that land
granted to an individual would be named for that individual (cf. Gen 36:21, 40 ["these are
the names of the clans of Esau by families and by localities according to their names"]).

Secondly, in Deuteronomy 33:23 Moses himself ties Naphtali to a specific location
within the land of promise ("take possession of the area south of the lake").

Unless

Moses suffered some sort of stroke that left him mentally incapacitated immediately after
he had delivered his final blessing in Deuteronomy 33, he certainly had a clear
understanding of the post-conquest lay of the land. To deny Moses' knowledge of the
geography of Canaan (even though he personally had never been there) would not only
require that his final blessing was not actually spoken by him, but would also require that
extensive portions of Genesis be removed from his authorship.

The anti-Mosaic argument is not a strong one because it assumes either that

Moses never received any information from eyewitnesses about the lay of the land in
Canaan (cf. the account of the twelve spies sent into the land who brought, presumably, a
detailed report back to Moses in Num 13) or that God never gave him any special
revelation about such details. Indeed,

While various geographical data have been proposed as post-Mosaic from
time to time, it is difficult to prove the case one way or the other. The
possibility may be admitted that editorial touches occurred in the post-Mosaic
period but it is not easy to prove which of those proposed are genuinely post-
Mosaic. Among those scholars who maintain an essentially Mosaic authorship
opinions vary as to the precise extent of the post-Mosaica in Deuteronomy.

Eugene H. Merrill, Deuteronomy, The New American Commentary, vol. 4 ([Nashville, Tenn.]:

Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1994), 452.

Indeed, the Table of Nations in Genesis 10 and 11 apply the names of the ancestral heads to the land area

their descendants would occupy.

Cf. Merrill, Deuteronomy, 446. An alternate translation offered by Craigie ("The west and the south he

will inherit") is possible, but seems unlikely since the tribal allotment of Naphtali was among the most
northern. Cf. Peter C. Craigie, The Book of Deuteronomy, New International Commentary on the Old
Testament (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1976), 401.

Thompson, Deuteronomy, 53.