I enjoy Margaret Barker’s work, but I take it with quite a few grains of salt. One of the basic assumptions of her work is that the Hebrew bible was corrupted by a group of people called the “deuteronomists.” This is derived from a theory in biblical studies, articulated in the work of Martin Noth beginning in the 1940s.
Noth imagined that a single deuteronomist was responsible for producing an ideologically slanted history from the book of Deuteronomy to 2 Kings. Later scholars ran with his idea and found “deuteronomic” influence elsewhere, eventually seeing a deuteronomist conspiracy in the time of Josiah and beyond.
Like anything in biblical studies, what started as a simple discrete theory was turned into THE GRAND EXPLANATION for huge numbers of things we see in the bible. And again, it’s a core assumption in the work of Margaret Barker.
But is it true?
Continue reading “The Imaginary Deuteronomists”