Blogging about a commentary is not easy. I found it rewarding, though, when I used Jacob Milgrom’s Leviticus commentary as a reading project. So I now find myself seeking to give you a sense of the argument in Stephen Cook’s Reading Deuteronomy. This will mean passing over a lot of detailed discussions.
Cook believes there is a sense in which Deuteronomy belongs among the prophetic books.
The lines between law and prophecy shade into one another in Deuteronomy. Moses is the voice one hears. Moses is a prophet and speaks for God (Deuteronomy 34:10). The argument that came out of the Fundamentalist/Modernist debate about whether the Moses really wrote or spoke it misses the point. The structure of the book is built around discourses of Moses. This is not about later writers being sneaky and trying to give the book a legitimacy it would not otherwise have. The book continues…
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James' Ramblings 