Secret_History

458 The Secret History of the World
somehow to the Aaronid line of priests. His exact personal relationship we cannot
determine with any certainty, but he may actually have been a cousin of king
Zedekiah, or father-in-law to Josiah. In either case, this is what gave him his “in”
with the royal family.
Getting back to the content of Deuteronomy, the final result of the analysis of
the documents tells us that D and E complement each other. Both traditions refer
to the mountain of Moses as Horeb. J and P call it Sinai. These traditions regard
Moses as a superluminary individual. He is at the turning point of history, and is,
in fact, the crucial element of history. His life and times are carefully and
thoroughly developed with nothing comparable in the J and P sources. The
Deuteronomistic books also give great emphasis to prophets. The word prophet
occurs only once in P and never in the J source. The Deuteronomistic historian
also gives great favor and support to the Levites. In J, however, the Levites are
dispersed for having massacred the people of Shechem. In P, the Levites are
separate from, and lower than, the Aaronid priests. And finally, D and E both
regard Aaron as bad, referring to the golden calf event and the leprosy of Miriam.
Neither of these is mentioned in either J or P.
If we take a close look at this history, we find a curious thing: all of the passages
that mention the Davidic covenant divide into two categories: conditional and
unconditional. In the first case, a representative of the line of David on the throne
of Israel is conditional on the obedience of the people. In the event of the
destruction of Israel, the Davidic covenant refers simply to “holding the throne”.
Why is this? It is obviously because the writer had to finally re-edit his work. He
had told the story of how the house of David began ruling the whole united
kingdom of Israel, but that they had lost all of it except their own tribe of Judah
which would be theirs forever. And then, he had to deal with the fact of the death
of the sons of Zedekiah and the exile in Babylon.
Some have called this a “pious fraud”. Some would suggest that he made up the
Davidic covenant. But it does seem, indeed, that the writer was only writing about
what the people of this tribe believed. The Davidic covenant tradition appears in
some of the psalms that were composed before the Deuteronomist ever wrote his
history. So, he wasn’t making the story up out of thin air; if he had tried to do that,
who would have believed him? Nobody. He had to deal with accepted “stories” of
the people around him. And this was one of them. He merely transferred the
history he knew from the northern kingdom and placed it in the setting of the
southern kingdom and appropriated it to those to whom it did not belong. In this
way, he could write the prophecy in the early part of the book that would make
Josiah out to be the messiah, and then all he had to do was work on Josiah to make
it all come true.
The Deuteronomistic historian based his interpretation of the traditions and his
additions to the work on four things: faithfulness to Yahweh; the Davidic
covenant; the centralization of religion at the Temple in Jerusalem; and the Torah
– as Deuteronomy, that is. His interpretations of what happened were that: the
kingdom split because Solomon had forsaken Yahweh and the Torah. David’s
descendants retained Jerusalem because they had an unconditional covenant. The
northern kingdom fell because the people and their kings did not follow the Torah.
And now, at the time of the writing, all was going to be smooth sailing because the