Secret_History

452 The Secret History of the World
be fulfilled in Josiah. And then: full stop, as Friedman notes. The story resumes
after the death of Josiah from a radically different point of view. 337
We also note that this writer’s agenda is centralization of religion. All the kings
who are rated as “bad” are those who restored the “high places” where the
sacrifice could be made locally. The one consistent criterion applied to every king
is based on this centralization of religion. But after Josiah, this criterion vanishes
from sight. This suggests to us that religion was not centralized in the time of
Josiah, but when the Bible itself was finally assembled during or at the end of the
exile in Babylon, that was no longer an issue, it was a fait accompli; accomplished
by the Persians, I should add..
King David also figures powerfully in the writings of the Deuteronomist. Half of
the book of 1 Samuel, all of 2 Samuel, and the first chapters of 1 Kings deal with
his life. The writer states explicitly that because of David’s merit even a bad king
of Judah cannot lose the throne as long as he is descended from David. He
compares Josiah to David. The name David occurs about five hundred times in the
Deuteronomistic history. Then, suddenly, it stops. The text stops referring to the
Davidic covenant, no one is compared to David anymore, and it does not explain
how this covenant failed to save the throne. What is more, we have already seen
that the “House of David” was the Omride dynasty, and it was utterly destroyed by
the Assyrians when they massacred the sons of Ahab. So, what is the deal here?
Someone created the book of Deuteronomy and the following six books of the
Bible as one continuous work. The original edition told the story from Moses to
Josiah. One of the primary features of this work was what is known as the “law
code”. This law code takes up half of Deuteronomy – chapters 12 through 26. And
the first law is the centralization of worship. The second law is that the king must
be chosen by Yahweh – which, of course, means that a king reigns only by virtue
of being approved by the priests. The further law codes include prohibitions
against pagan religions, false prophets, rules covering charity, justice, family and
community law, holidays and dietary laws, laws about war and slaves and
agriculture and magic. Most especially, it refers repeatedly to the sustaining of the
well-being of the Levites; all Levites, not just the Aaronid family.
So, clearly, the author of this series of books was not merely a scribe or someone
from the royal court seeking to garner favor from Josiah. It strictly proscribes the
power of the king, and gives the power firmly and fully into the hands of the
Levites – including the power of summoning the tribes to battle.
The fact that the writer of Deuteronomy favors Levites in general, with no
specific mention of Aaron, indicates that this writer was of the lineage of the
Shiloh priesthood of the Northern Kingdom who has been indoctrinated into the
Yawist religion. Deuteronomy also never makes mention of the ark, the cherubs,
337 Cf. Friedman, p 136 ff.