Remembering Narrative in Deuteronomy. Brian M. Britt. The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Narrative

Remembering Narrative in Deuteronomy
Oxford Handbooks Online

Brian M. Britt
The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Narrative
Edited by Danna Nolan Fewell
Print Publication Date: Jun 2016 Subject: Religion, Christianity, Literary and Textual Studies
Online Publication Date: Feb 2015 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199967728.013.12
Abstract and Keywords
The narrative of Deuteronomy contains Moses’s farewell speech, which in turn

encompasses retrospective and prospective history, legal instruction, and covenant ritual.
Past, present, and future thus merge within a larger narrative frame that unobtrusively
records and performs acts of memory that give the book coherence. This chapter surveys
scholarship on the narrative of Deuteronomy and proposes the category of memory as a
way to integrate the book’s elements. Historical criticism, literary scholarship,
sociopolitical approaches, and reception history all agree that Deuteronomy has a
complex narrative structure with a fairly straightforward message. The questions that
remain are whether and how such a complex text can yield such a clear purpose. A
historically contextualized reading of Deuteronomy, attentive to repetitions, injunctions to
remember, and the framing statement “I call heaven and earth to witness against you
today” (4:26; 30:19), shows how acts of memory lend coherence to the book’s complex
narrative.
Keywords: Textual Memorial, Deuteronomistic History, Deuteronomic Code, Deuteronomic narrative, memory,
narrative
“THESE are the words that Moses spoke to all Israel beyond the Jordan” (Deut. 1:1). Thus
Deuteronomy narrates the last words of Moses, a series of apodictic, narrative, and ritual
discourses. The narrative of Deuteronomy contains Moses’s “farewell speech,” which in
turn encompasses retrospective and prospective history, legal instruction, and covenant
ritual. Past, present, and future merge within this narrative frame, which records and
performs the divinely commanded acts of memory that give the book coherence. This
chapter examines the narrative of Deuteronomy in relation to the book’s coherence and
complexity. Historical criticism, literary scholarship, sociopolitical approaches, and
reception history all agree that Deuteronomy has a complex narrative structure and a
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fairly straightforward message. The questions that remain are whether and how such a
complex text can yield a clear purpose.
Known for its repetition and emphasis on comprehensiveness, Deuteronomy would seem
to be a clear case of narrative coherence, what Robert Polzin, utilizing the terminology of
Mikhail Bakhtin, describes as monological narrative (Polzin 1980, 72). An even more
forceful claim for the coherence of biblical narrative in general is Meir Sternberg’s notion
of foolproof composition: “By foolproof composition I mean that the Bible is difficult to
read, easy to underread and overread and even misread, but virtually impossible to, so to
speak, counterread” (Sternberg 1987, 50). But what kind of coherence is this?
Deuteronomy lacks a singularity of message, logical consistency, and linear chronology,
yet its purpose and meaning remain quite clear. My thesis is that narratives of divine
action and human memory account for coherence in Deuteronomy.
I begin with a survey of modern scholarship on narrative in Deuteronomy. Historical-

critical approaches, from Julius Wellhausen (1889) to Moshe Weinfeld (1992), clarified the
position of Deuteronomy in the Pentateuch and biblical canon; but they also contributed
to broader cultural debates about the Bible, history, Judaism, and Christianity in which
narrative is central but often overlooked. The aesthetic attention paid by literary
approaches, along with social, cultural, and political methods, arose within an
increasingly diverse and contentious scholarly field. From all this emerged not only a
wealth of insight into the meaning and effects of biblical narrative but also a broader
awareness of the dynamics of biblical (p. 158) narrative in biblical scholarship. The
chapter shifts from this survey to an overview and selected readings of Deuteronomy,
with special emphasis on the place of memory as a source of coherence.
Deuteronomy and Biblical Narrative

Since Deuteronomy is best understood as the “farewell speech” of Moses, a largely
apodictic oration that resembles other valedictory testaments of ancient literature, the
category of narrative plays a secondary role in many discussions of its genre and form
(Weinfeld 1991, 4–6). Nevertheless, the book does contain a narrative frame and several
narrative units. Like the modern novel, the narrative of Deuteronomy incorporates
several other genres, including law, poetic texts, and ritual. The book’s distinct sections—
chapters. 1–4, 5–11, 12–26 (the Deuteronomic Code), 27–30 (the covenant ceremony), and
31–34 (the final words and acts and the death of Moses)—do not form a clear linear
narrative, and there is still little agreement on how the book was written and edited
(Lundbom 2013, 8–20).
In spite of its complexity, Deuteronomy seems straightforward and perhaps in need of

little literary explication. It would be a travesty to complicate this apparent simplicity just
for the sake of academic performance, but it would also be a mistake to take the book’s
apparent simplicity for granted. This chapter asks what the study of narrative can bring
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to impressions of the book’s relative clarity. Despite considerable literary complexity,

Deuteronomy achieves coherence through repetition, apodictic discourse, and a
combined focus on divine sovereignty and human responsiveness, particularly in the form
of narrative and memory.
Narrative operates in the dimensions of time and space. In the case of Deuteronomy, the
space is fixed, and time elapses according to the long “farewell speech” of Moses. Yet in
his speech Moses revisits the distant past and the places of Israel’s memory and provides
a detailed proleptic image of the future. The immediate future includes his own death and
the Israelite conquest of the land across the Jordan River, while the distant future will
stretch to the rise and fall of the Israelite kingdoms and return Israel to the status of a
people without territory.
With its circumscribed setting in time and place, the narrative of Deuteronomy fulfills the
book’s Hellenistic name as a second law, a retrospective and prospective telling of the
story from the privileged vantage point of a narrator and a prophet. The “plot” of
Deuteronomy recapitulates the major covenant tradition of the Pentateuch, leading to the
present time of Moses’s valedictory address and covenant ceremony, and it anticipates
the future conquest, settlement, monarchy, and exile from the land of Israel. The book
thus juxtaposes the retrospective narrative standpoints of Moses and the later nameless
Deuteronomist(s).
So unlike the modern literary concept of plot, in which uncertainty guides a suspenseful
desire to discover what will happen, the outcome here is known. What, then, explains
affective engagement with the narrative of Deuteronomy, since its plot is totally
unsuspenseful? To answer this question requires a full reckoning with the differences
between modern and ancient Israelite literature, beginning with what makes
Deuteronomy distinctive. With its oratorical, apodictic, and ritualized nature,
Deuteronomy combines ancient conventions of epic myth to create a new kind of
narrative history designed to affirm and remember a particular set of traditions. The
text’s affective drive involves combining and contextualizing (p. 159) familiar narratives
for contemporary ideological ends—namely, linking the monarchy and exilic periods of the
late seventh and early sixth centuries to the tradition of Moses.
Identification of the Deuteronomic source goes back to an 1805 study by W. M. L. de

Wette and had become widely accepted and more fully articulated by Wellhausen by the
end of the century (de Wette 1805; Wellhausen 1889). Martin Noth’s identification of
Deuteronomy as the first in a series of seven books ending in 2 Kings led to major studies
of Deuteronomy’s meaning and significance, including Polzin’s literary studies of the
series (Noth 1943). Finally, Frank Moore Cross’s proposal that there are at least two
editions of the Deuteronomistic History, a pre-exilic Dtr1 and an exilic Dtr2, has further
complicated the picture of narrative in Deuteronomy, raising the question whether a
given passage was written with knowledge of the exile (Cross 1973, 274–289; Friedman
1987).
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What do narrative studies of the Bible provide? As Hans Frei notes in The Eclipse of
Biblical Narrative, the modern study of the Bible acknowledged the presence of narrative
but failed to analyze it closely, often preferring to ask whether it was historically true
(Frei 1974, 10–16). Narrative studies are thus relatively new to biblical scholarship,
bringing attention to the contours and contexts of biblical texts in contrast to the
tendencies toward abstraction in theology and toward fragmentation in historical
research. What emerges is not only a wealth of insight into the meaning and effects of
biblical narrative but also a broader awareness of the dynamics of biblical tradition.
At least three moments converge in the narrative of Deuteronomy: the time of the past
events recounted by Moses, the time of Moses’s recounting, and the later time(s) when all
this is recorded in written form. Moses the prophet and lawgiver who serves as a
prototype for King Josiah is thus also Moses the narrator in parallel to the nameless
biblical narrator. The distance between the time of Moses and the seventh-century time of
Deuteronomy can be approached from either point. In The Death of Moses, Dennis Olson
argues that the final scenes in Deuteronomy form the basis for many later interpretive
moves: “The death of Moses, the ‘author’ of Deuteronomy, freed the text and opened its
horizons to a long and winding path of interpretation through generations upon
generations of reading” (Olson 1994, 172). Gerhard von Rad, by contrast, takes the
writing of the text as a moment of canon formation in which the past tradition of Moses is
reactivated: “It is surely a very interesting fact that the Israel of the later period of the
monarchy saw itself in the guise, which had become almost canonical, of the Israel of the
Mosaic period … . The great cultic festivals had already taught Israel to realize that they
were present at the redemptive events of the past” (von Rad 1966, 28; cf. Carmichael
1985:10). For von Rad, as for Michael Fishbane, biblical writing belongs to a
hermeneutical tradition in which the past and present come together to shape the future
(Fishbane 1985).
The double-framed narrative of Deuteronomy means that literary and historical analysis
cannot be disentangled. For literary scholars, understanding the “art” of narrative
requires some awareness of the historical standpoint of the “artists” writing before and
after the Babylonian exile as they looked back to distant memories of Moses and the
conquest. Likewise, historians interested in the world behind the text have no choice but
to go through its narrative, noting elements of structure, language, and form.
The category of memory provides a key to the imbrication of narrative and history
particular to Deuteronomy. Repeated injunctions to remember the words, narratives, and
instruction (torah) of Deuteronomy link the past of the text to its present and future
readings (Deut. 5:15; 7:18; 8:2, 18; 9:7, 27; 11:2; 15:15; 16:3, 12; 24:9, 18, 22; 25:17;
32:7). Just as spoken (p. 160) admonition frames narrative in Deuteronomy, so does
memory, a set of practices that actualize the tradition, relating the past of Deuteronomy
to the present and future. In this sense, Deuteronomy itself is what I have called a textual
memorial (Britt 2000). Narrative is ritualized in Deuteronomy as events remembered by
Moses, integrated with covenant ritual and retold from the perspective of later centuries.
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These layers of memory thus require the combination of literary and historical
scholarship alike.
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Biblical History and Narrative

Modern conceptions of history as series of events that can be verified by evidence
continue to challenge readings of the Bible that enshrine “fact” as the highest value.
Neither Søren Kierkegaard, whose Training in Christianity (1850) brushed aside the
historicist challenge of David Strauss’s The Life of Jesus (1835), nor Friedrich Nietzsche
(1887), whose sardonic attacks on Christianity conceded the robustness and complexity
of biblical tradition, has ever generated enough popular reception to resolve the apparent
crisis of biblical history. These nineteenth-century responses to biblical scholarship only
underscored the modern divide between the scholarship and the religious communities
that considered it a threat.
Nietzsche’s apparent contempt for the Bible contains insights on the retrospective
shaping of history in theological terms. “With unparalleled disdain of every tradition,
every historical reality, they translated their own national past into religious terms, that is
to say they made of it a stupid salvation-mechanism of guilt towards Yaweh and
punishment, piety towards Yaweh and reward” (Nietzsche 1990, 149). Referring to the
discovery of a “book of the law (torah)” in the time of Josiah (2 Kings 22:8) and its
implications for the legitimacy of his (Deuteronomic) reforms, Nietzsche claims that for
the priests a “literary forgery becomes necessary, a ‘sacred book’ is discovered—it is
made public with all hieratic pomp, with days of repentance and with lamentation over
the long years of ‘sinfulness’” (Nietzsche 1990, 150). Though it contributes to an
antireligious tirade, Nietzsche’s account of the discovery of the book of the law that is
now generally considered to comprise the core chapters of Deuteronomy accurately
describes the combination of narrative, divine action, and ritual response that appears in
Deuteronomy overall. What is more, Nietzsche’s antireligious diatribes (in Anti-Christ and
Thus Spoke Zarathustra especially) are paradoxically more biblical, by their imitations
and observations of the Bible, than most biblical scholarship of the period (Britt 2011,
177–191).
Nietzsche’s strikingly biblical attacks on biblical religion raise a question for current
studies of narrative in Deuteronomy. What if, far from standing outside the Bible,
scholarship on biblical narrative and history actually inherits and reflects biblical
tradition? Conflicts over historical “fact” and religious “value,” after all, are biblical.
Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic History confront a theodicy in which history
bafflingly undercuts covenant ideology. Attempts to correlate events with theology appear
to collapse when Josiah, the greatest king of Judah, dies an untimely death that soon
leads to the loss of homeland, temple, and king. Efforts to explain this disaster as the
result of Josiah’s wicked grandfather Manasseh (2 Kings 23:24–27) leave the reader to
conclude that one bad king who lives a long and comfortable life can bring untimely death
and unprecedented catastrophe to later kings, even a king whose goodness reflects that
of Moses. The “biblical” nature of modern debates (p. 161) on biblical history challenge
the division between a “sacred” Bible and a “secular” biblical scholarship. Peter Berger’s
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suggestion that the Hebrew Bible represents an early phase of secularization, for
instance, may in fact point to the collapse of the binary of sacred and secular. For the
Bible, it turns out, is no more purely sacred or purely religious than Western modernity is
purely secular (Berger 1969, 121; Britt 2011, 15–22).
Narrative Studies and the Book of

Deuteronomy
Narrative literary studies and studies of biblical narrative stand far apart from each
other. Literary studies reflect the history of novels and short stories written by single
authors according to conventions of relative coherence and plot unity that have flourished
since the eighteenth century (Herman et al. 2012). When fiction departs from these
norms, critics characterize this work as innovative, avant-garde, postmodern, or
antimimetic, while most fiction and criticism continue to follow conventions of genre,
including linear narrative. It is a paradox that biblical narrative has more in common with
postmodern, “nonmimetic” fiction than with its more conventional, monolithic
counterparts (cf. Richardson 2012, 24).
Modern literary approaches to the Bible emphasize the “art” of biblical narrative,
borrowing from research on modern literature to emphasize plot analysis,
characterization, narrative, language, and structure in biblical texts. Robert Alter’s The
Art of Biblical Narrative is a landmark in the field, notable not only for its keen literary
observations but also for its awareness of traditional rabbinic interpretations of the Bible
(Alter 1981). For Alter and other literary scholars, such as Adele Berlin, the literary
features of biblical texts challenged biblical scholarship that tended to fragment the text
into numerous unrelated documentary parts (Berlin 1983; Alter 2007, 98). Yet modern
literature and literary criticism emerged to a great extent outside or even against
religious institutions. So even though the literary study of the Bible turned back to the
text, its own assumptions about authorship, reading, and texts sometimes limited its
impact.
In his groundbreaking Moses and the Deuteronomist, Polzin offers the first sustained
engagement with narrative in Deuteronomy from the standpoint of literary theory. Placing
Deuteronomy in the context of the Deuteronomistic History, Polzin argues that the
narrator and Moses overlap to produce an ideologically monologic text, even though at
the end of the book the narrator interrupts the flow of the narrative with many “frame-
breaks” until the death of Moses, whereupon “the words of the narrator take center stage
in the history” (Polzin 1980, 72). Like Sternberg, Polzin overstates the unity of the text,
but his analysis does demonstrate the combination of literary complexity and coherence
in Deuteronomy.
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Olson offers a more dynamic model of the text. He characterizes Deuteronomy, with its
focus on torah, as catechesis, a “process of education in faith from one generation to
another based on a distillation of essential tradition” (Olson 1994, 11). An advantage of
Olson’s suggestion is that it explains the structure of Deuteronomy in terms of its obvious
religious ideology. At the same time, the category of “faith” reflects a modern (especially
Protestant Christian) contrast between “faith” and “action” that is not internal to
Deuteronomy.
Literary studies of the Bible also engage in social and political critique. The
(p. 162)
feminist studies of Phyllis Trible, J. Cheryl Exum, Mieke Bal, and Renita Weems reflect a
range of methods and approaches that include rhetorical criticism, close reading, and
structuralist, narratological, and womanist perspectives. Tikva Frymer-Kensky’s article on
Deuteronomy for the Women’s Bible Commentary understandably concentrates on how
the book’s legal instructions affect women but also notes the deeply patriarchal valences
of divine jealousy and the book’s emphasis on centralizing worship of one god at the
expense of all others, especially female images (Frymer-Kensky 1992, 53). Concerned
with uncovering and challenging the core assumptions and implications of biblical texts,
feminist studies of biblical narrative make indispensible contributions to the
understanding of biblical texts. Building on work by Exum, Bal, and Frymer-Kensky, one
could read the relentlessly repetitive narrative of Deuteronomy as evidence of a discourse
anxious, like a jealous husband (or god), to preserve patriarchal structures of power and
privilege, from the exclusion of foreign gods and foreign wives to the centralization of
power and worship in the Judahite monarchy.1
Narrative studies of the Bible recognize the dual roles of oral and written tradition. The
reading of ancient Israel, like much religious reading, was typically oral recitation in a
social and ritual setting. And while writing enjoyed a high level of prestige and religious
value in biblical tradition, the transmission of texts was probably an elaborate
combination of oral and written texts, particularly in the context of schools and
academies (Carr 2005; van der Toorn 2007).2 The idea of a Deuteronomic school,
elaborated most fully in Weinfeld’s work, suggests a process of scribal and compositional
development for Deuteronomy, far from modern notions of single authorship, in which
members of a “school” collected, assembled, edited, and wrote the book of Deuteronomy
over several generations.
Yet the difference between biblical and modern ideas of authorship underscores a major
limitation of literary scholarship on the Bible. When biblical scholars celebrate the
originality, unity, and artistry of biblical texts, they risk anachronism. Biblical authors
were self-effacing even when they were brilliant, and tradition-bound even when they
were original. Authorial originality and its counterpart, readerly desire and enjoyment,
are modern aesthetic constructs far removed from the biblical text. It is tempting to apply
literary understandings of plot, such as that of Peter Brooks (1992), to biblical narrative,
but it is difficult to imagine two more different literary worlds than that of modern fiction,
in which individual reading reflects Freudian drives, and biblical narrative, in which
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community reading, guided not by suspense or desire but by traditional practices,

predominates.
Poststructuralist approaches to literature, described in such terms as the death of the

author, radical polysemy, and textual fragmentation, challenge modern ideas of textual
unity and coherence that never fit the Bible in the first place. And though it is often
couched in terms of radical novelty, poststructuralist analysis can suit the complexity of
biblical texts better than some traditional literary approaches. Biblical narrative, one
could argue, is more poststructuralist than contemporary fiction!
If a text like Deuteronomy, written and edited by many hands over many years to include
many subgenres and loosely connected sections, nevertheless makes sense, then what
kind of coherence is this? To answer this question, I suggest, would allow the Bible to
expand the scope of narrative studies beyond their predominantly modern, secular
orientation. The categories of divine sovereignty and memory, I argue, go far to explain
the coherence of Deuteronomy, and the following discussion represents an initial effort in
that direction.
A central insight of Fishbane’s Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel is how

(p. 163)
closely hermeneutics within the Bible relate to hermeneutics of the Bible. Without
minimizing differences of history and interpretation, this insight makes it possible to
speak of biblical tradition(s) before and after the completion of the canon. The currently
growing field of reception studies (or Wirkungsgeschichte), which investigates the many
forms of commentary, retelling, and appropriation of biblical texts, thus becomes crucial
to the enterprise of biblical studies, since reception is the living traditio acting in dynamic
tension with the written text (traditum). Mutually constituted by writing and commentary,
traditum and traditio, biblical texts thus conceived yield models of coherence quite
different from the unities of time, place, and action derived from Aristotle’s Poetics or the
unities of plot, narrator, character, or author still expected of most narrative literature
today.
Deuteronomy not only instantiates such a dynamic model of narrative text but also
describes it. The reflexivity of the text(s), with its many self-references to written and
spoken words, instruction, statutes and ordinances, and the Song of Moses, dramatizes
and thematizes the process of text production. Yet when the narrator says “then Moses
wrote down this law” (31:9) or when Moses admonishes Israel to “diligently observe all
the words of this law” (32:46), it is not exactly clear what that law contains. Within an
expanding canon, this ambiguity becomes a productive reminder of the intertextual links
between the spoken, written, and narrated words within and beyond Deuteronomy.
Readers are thus challenged to assign reference and meaning to the term law (torah)
when they encounter it. Does it refer to the immediate chapter in which it appears, the
entire Deuteronomic Code, or, even more expansively, Deuteronomy and other biblical
books? Does “law” serve a mainly negative function as a “witness against” Israel for
future wrongdoing (31:26) or the more positive role of their “very life” (32:47)? Open
enough to reveal a complex compositional process and clear enough to enable its
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continuation, Deuteronomy provides a model of dynamic coherence constituted by

writing, reading, and interpretation. Such a model fits surprisingly well with literary
theories that regard narrative as performance and as a dynamic machine engaging new
readers in new interpretations (Maclean 1988, 21).
Written and edited over many generations that precede and follow the Babylonian exile
and making clear use of prebiblical written traditions, the narrative of Deuteronomy gains
coherence from its many layers and disparate elements. This kind of coherence is far
easier to perceive than the multiple documentary layers that appear to underlie the text.
While debates continue on whether and how documentary sources flow into the final
version of Deuteronomy (Yoo 2012), there can be little disagreement over the book’s core
message. The line of tradition does not begin with Deuteronomy, of course; it also extends
back in time. Prebiblical farewell speeches have roots in ancient Near Eastern
instructional testaments in which leaders transmit teachings to their successors. “Indeed,
the book of Deuteronomy is a kind of manual for the future kings of Israel (cf. 17:14–23)
written by scribes … just as were the instructions for the Egyptian and Mesopotamian
kings” (Weinfeld 1991, 4; Berman 2013).
Time and Memory in Deuteronomy

Since Deuteronomy is not a continuously linear narrative, many of its disparate sections
or pericopes are held together by transitional phrases that repeat or echo an earlier
phrase. This (p. 164) phenomenon, known as “resumptive repetition,” can lend a sense of
simultaneity rather than chronological flow to the text (Talmon 1993). Such may be the
case in the phrases that begin Deuteronomy 4:1, 4:44, 12:1, 27:1, and 29:1, but as any
reader of the text can tell, these phrases belong to the large set of stock Deuteronomic
phrases that make the book seem repetitive (Weinfeld 1992, 320–365). As Weinfeld
shows, the phrases and terms so emphatically repeated in Deuteronomy serve the
ideological and pedagogical ends of the text. One illustration of the book’s emphasis on
comprehensiveness is the recurrence of the phrase “all the words,” which appears nine
times (9:10; 17:19; 27:3, 8; 28:58; 29:29; 31:12; 32:44, 46).
The concern for comprehensiveness reflects a general impulse toward control of time in
Deuteronomy. The present of Moses’s farewell speech seeks to unite the past and future,
and the speech itself becomes even more stable as a past-framed later narration. For a
book concerned with the fragility of covenant and its promise of land, securing the past,
present, and future against historical contingency is paramount. The book’s focus on the
future can be seen in Moses’s repeated statements about the territories Israel is about to
enter (2:4; 3:21; 4:5, 14; 6:1; 7:1; 9:1; 11:10; 12:2, 29; 18:14; 23:20).
Narrative time, in fact, closely tracks divine sovereignty in Deuteronomy. Time never
simply passes in the Deuteronomic narrative; like the people of Israel under the covenant,
time is subordinate to divine will. Consider the following two commands regarding time:
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Beyond the Jordan in the land of Moab, Moses undertook to expound this law
(hatorah hazo’t) as follows: The Lord our God spoke to us at Horeb, saying, “You
have stayed long enough (rav-lakhem shevet) at this mountain.” (Deut. 1:5–6)
So now (ve`atah), give heed to the statutes and ordinances that I am teaching you
to observe, so that you may live to enter and occupy the land that the Lord, the
God of your ancestors, is giving you.” (Deut. 4:1)
In Deuteronomy 1:5, God “calls time” to Israel through Moses—they have stayed “long
enough,” and now it is time for them to move on, once Moses has delivered the law and
died. In the second case (Deut. 4:1), Moses similarly announces that it is time for Israel to
take action by following divine law in order to inherit the land. Time, and thus narrative,
follows divine command.
In response to the divine sovereignty over time (and narrative), Deuteronomy structures
acts of memory, from repeated injunctions to observe and remember divine
commandments (e.g., chs. 4–6) to the ritual of the covenant ceremony (Deut. 27–30).
Since the narrative presented by Moses and framed by the third-person narrator spans
many centuries and took shape over many generations, it models a tradition of telling and
retelling. It is tempting to apply what Jan Assmann calls “mnemohistory,” the history of
memory, to Deuteronomy, but this kind of memory, practiced according to the book’s
instructions, not only indicates the past, but is also designed to continue well into the
future (Assmann 1997, 15–22). Yet these acts of memory, like narrative, are selective. No
discussion of memory and narrative in Deuteronomy should overlook what is
marginalized, forgotten, and expressly excluded. The most striking case of exclusion is
the paradoxical injunction against Amalek, “Remember what Amalek did to you on your
journey out of Egypt … . you shall blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under
heaven; do not forget” (Deut. 25:17–19; cf. Exod. 17). As many critics of ideology have
noted, acts of memory and history writing are also acts of erasure and forgetting
(Benjamin 2003, 391–392).
(p. 165)How do the two elements of divine sovereignty and human memory fit together?
For Paul Ricoeur, the combination of divine action and human retelling forms a basis for
divine revelation. In a discussion of Deuteronomy 26:5b–10b, cited by von Rad as a kind
of creed that affirms divine responsiveness to human action, Ricoeur notes how this text
unites divine action—the deliverance from slavery in Egypt—with Israel’s retelling of
these actions. Marking the combined roles of the divine and human, the narrative also
shifts from God, described in the third person, as rescuing and providing for Israel, to
Israel’s thankful offering of first fruits in response, addressing God in the second. In this
condensed retelling of the exodus, the text, like Deuteronomy itself, combines divine with
human, narrative with ritual. Ricoeur explains:
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What is essential in the case of narrative discourse is the emphasis on the

founding event or events as the imprint, mark, or trace of God’s act. Confession
takes place through narration … God’s mark is in history before being in speech. It
is only secondarily in speech inasmuch as this history is brought to language in
the speech-act of narration. … This subjective moment is no longer the narration
insofar as the events recount themselves, but the event of narration insofar as it is
presented by a narrator to a community. (1980, 79)
For Ricoeur, biblical narrative implies and requires community reception in the form of
ritualized retelling.
Words from the root `ed (witness) appear frequently in Deuteronomy, often in reference
to laws about teaching. Describing the law (torah) as a witness against Israel for future
covenant violations (Deut. 31:26, 31:28, 32:46), Moses uses a term connoting temporal
endurance and sometimes used to describe stone monuments (Josh 22:28) for the words
of his text. On these grounds, I have proposed the notion of “textual memorial” as a
heuristic model for the genre of the last chapters of Deuteronomy, and on the basis of the
present discussion, I would venture to expand this claim to apply to the narrative of
Deuteronomy as a whole (Britt 2000).
“I call heaven and earth to witness against you today.” This statement appears early and
late in Deuteronomy (4:26; 30:19) to form a striking inclusio for the entire book. There
are no other cases of “I call” in the book. The first text anticipates the destruction of
Israel, suggesting a post-exilic perspective (Cross’s Dtr2): “I call heaven and earth to
witness against you today that you will soon utterly perish from the land that you are
crossing the Jordan to occupy; you will not live long on it, but will be utterly destroyed.”
The second, mirroring passage, near the conclusion of the covenant ceremony, leaves the
matter open to Israel’s choice:
I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life
and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants
may live, loving the LORD your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that
means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the
LORD swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. (Deut.
30:19–20 NRSV)
The appeal to choose life returns in 32:46–47, where Moses identifies the “words of this
law” with the life of Israel. This union of text and life depends on the choice not only to
follow divine commands but also to reactivate the past for the present and future. Like
the ritual and legal prescriptions it contains, the narrative of Deuteronomy thus combines
divine command with human memory in a dynamic process that yields a complex but
coherent text.
Page 12 of 16

References
Alter, Robert. 1981. The Art of Biblical Narrative. New York: Basic Books.
Alter, Robert. 2007. The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary. New York: W. W.
Norton.
Assmann, Jan. 1997. Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Benjamin, Walter. 2003. “On the Concept of History.” In Walter Benjamin: Selected
Writings, translated by Edmund Jephcott et al. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W.
Jennings, vol. 4, 389–400. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Berger, Peter. 1969. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion.
New York: Doubleday.
Berlin, Adele. 1983. Poetics and Interpretation of Biblical Narrative. Sheffield, Yorkshire:
Almond Press.
Berman, Joshua. 2013. “Histories Twice Told: Deuteronomy 1–3 and the Hittite Treaty
Prologue Tradition.” Journal of Biblical Literature 132: 229–250.
Britt, Brian. 2011. Biblical Curses and the Displacement of Tradition. Sheffield, Yorkshire:
Sheffield Phoenix Press.
Britt, Brian. 2000. “Deuteronomy 31–32 as a Textual Memorial.” Biblical Interpretation 8:

358–374.
Brooks, Peter. 1992. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Carmichael, Calum M. 1985. Law and Narrative in the Bible: The Evidence of the
Deuteronomic Laws and the Decalogue. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Carr, David. 2005. Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cross, Frank Moore. 1973. Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the
Religion of Israel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Exum, J. Cheryl. 1993. “Who’s Afraid of the Endangered Ancestress?” In Fragmented

Women: Feminist (Sub)versions of Biblical Narratives. 148–169. Valley Forge: Trinity
Press.
Fewell, Danna Nolan, and David M. Gunn. Gender, Power, and Promise: The Subject of the
Bible’s First Story. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1993.
Page 13 of 16

Fishbane, Michael. 1985. Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.
Frei, Hans. 1974. The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. New Haven, CT: Yale
(p. 167)
University Press.
Friedman, Richard Elliott. 1987. Who Wrote the Bible? New York: Harper and Row.
Frymer-Kensky, Tikva. 1992. “Deuteronomy.” In The Women’s Bible Commentary, edited

by Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe, 52–62. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox.
Herman, David, James Phelan, Peter J. Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol.
2012. Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates. Columbus: Ohio State
University Press.
Kawashima, Robert W. 2004. Biblical Narrative and the Death of the Rhapsode.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Lundbom, Jack. 2013. Deuteronomy: A Commentary. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
Maclean, Marie. 1988. Narrative as Performance: The Baudelairean Experiment. London:

Routledge.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1990. The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ,
translated by R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Penguin.
Noth, Martin. 1943. Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien I. Halle: Niemeyer.
Olson, Dennis T. 1994. Deuteronomy and the Death of Moses. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress.
Polzin, Robert. 1980. Moses and the Deuteronomist: Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Rad, Gerhard von. 1966. Deuteronomy. Translated by Dorothea Barton. Philadelphia, PA:
Westminster.
Richardson, Brian. 2012. “Antimimetic, Unnatural, and Postmodern Narrative Theory.” In

Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates, edited by Herman, David, James
Phelan, Peter J. Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol, 20–25. Columbus: Ohio
State University Press.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1980. “Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation.” In Essays on

Biblical Interpretation, 73–118. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress.
Sternberg, Meir. 1987. The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the
Drama of Reading. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Page 14 of 16

Talmon, Shemaryahu. 1993. “The Presentation of Synchroneity and Simultaneity in

Biblical Narrative.” In Literary Studies in the Hebrew Bible: Form and Content, 112–133.
Jerusalem: Magnes Press.
Toorn, Karen van der. 2007. Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Weinfeld, Moshe. 1991. Deuteronomy 1-11: A New Translation With Introduction and
Commentary. The Anchor Yale Bible Commentaries. New York: Doubleday.
Weinfeld, Moshe. 1992. Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School. Winona Lake, IN:
Eisenbrauns.
Wellhausen, Julius. 1889. Die Composition des Hexateuchs und der historischen Bücher
des alten Testaments. Berlin: Reimer.
Wette, Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de. 1805. Dissertatio critic-exegetica, qua

Deuteronomium a prioribus Pentateuchi libris diversusm, alius cuisdam auctoris opus
essay monstratur. Jena: Literis Etzdorfii.
Yoo, Philip Y. 2012. “The Four Moses Death Accounts.” Journal of Biblical Literature 131:
423–441.
Notes:
(1.) See Fewell and Gunn (1993, 94–116), and the application of “repetition compulsion”
to the wife-sister stories of Genesis in Exum (1993). Of course, repetition by itself is not
clear evidence for repetition compulsion, but the emphatic repetitions in Deuteronomy
certainly justify questions about why such persistent restatement is needed. On forms
and uses of repetition in biblical narrative (Leitwort, motif, theme, sequence of actions,
and type-scene), see Alter (1981, 95–96).
(2.) Robert W. Kawashima, for example, argues that “biblical narrative is the result of a
specifically written verbal art” and that this “novelistic art” “results from decline of the
epic arts in ancient Israel” (Kawashima 2004, 10; see also Kawashima in this volume).
Brian M. Britt
Brian M. Britt, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Page 15 of 16

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Abstract and Keywords

The narrative of Deuteronomy contains Moses’s farewell speech, which in turn

Subscriber: Stockholm University; date: 20 December 2018

I begin with a survey of modern scholarship on narrative in Deuteronomy. Historical-

Deuteronomy and Biblical Narrative

In spite of its complexity, Deuteronomy seems straightforward and perhaps in need of

Subscriber: Stockholm University; date: 20 December 2018

to impressions of the book’s relative clarity. Despite considerable literary complexity,

Identification of the Deuteronomic source goes back to an 1805 study by W. M. L. de

Subscriber: Stockholm University; date: 20 December 2018

Subscriber: Stockholm University; date: 20 December 2018

Subscriber: Stockholm University; date: 20 December 2018

Biblical History and Narrative

Subscriber: Stockholm University; date: 20 December 2018

Narrative Studies and the Book of

Subscriber: Stockholm University; date: 20 December 2018

Subscriber: Stockholm University; date: 20 December 2018

community reading, guided not by suspense or desire but by traditional practices,

Poststructuralist approaches to literature, described in such terms as the death of the

A central insight of Fishbane’s Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel is how

Subscriber: Stockholm University; date: 20 December 2018

continuation, Deuteronomy provides a model of dynamic coherence constituted by

Time and Memory in Deuteronomy

Subscriber: Stockholm University; date: 20 December 2018

Subscriber: Stockholm University; date: 20 December 2018

What is essential in the case of narrative discourse is the emphasis on the

Subscriber: Stockholm University; date: 20 December 2018

Britt, Brian. 2000. “Deuteronomy 31–32 as a Textual Memorial.” Biblical Interpretation 8:

Exum, J. Cheryl. 1993. “Who’s Afraid of the Endangered Ancestress?” In Fragmented

Subscriber: Stockholm University; date: 20 December 2018

Fishbane, Michael. 1985. Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel. Oxford: Oxford

Frymer-Kensky, Tikva. 1992. “Deuteronomy.” In The Women’s Bible Commentary, edited

Lundbom, Jack. 2013. Deuteronomy: A Commentary. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Maclean, Marie. 1988. Narrative as Performance: The Baudelairean Experiment. London:

Noth, Martin. 1943. Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien I. Halle: Niemeyer.

Richardson, Brian. 2012. “Antimimetic, Unnatural, and Postmodern Narrative Theory.” In

Ricoeur, Paul. 1980. “Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation.” In Essays on

Subscriber: Stockholm University; date: 20 December 2018

Talmon, Shemaryahu. 1993. “The Presentation of Synchroneity and Simultaneity in

Wette, Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de. 1805. Dissertatio critic-exegetica, qua

Brian M. Britt, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Subscriber: Stockholm University; date: 20 December 2018

Subscriber: Stockholm University; date: 20 December 2018

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