NIV Commentary Series: Deuteronomy The nation of Israel was poised on the brink of a totally new kind of life. They would be changing from nomadic herdsmen to a settled agrarian lifestyle, living in villages and on farms. At the same time their charismatic leader of forty years was soon to die; the responsibility of caring for these people was to be turned over to another. Before they could possess the land in which they were to settle, they would have to battle the current residents for the privilege. At such a critical time in their history, their shepherd, leader, guide, mediator with God, and spokesman, Moses, felt it was imperative that he spell out to them one more time in the strongest possible language what God was expecting of them. Deuteronomy has been a controversial book for at least the last 120 years. At that time what is known as the critical school developed which insisted that the book could neither have been written at the time of the exodus and wandering nor could it have been written by Moses. Hall has cogently and thoroughly defended the conservative position which holds to the traditional view which the book claims for itself. By carefully delineating the structure of the book both holistically and in many disputed passages, he demonstrates that Deuteronomy was originally a single piece of legal history, not a hodgepodge of writings from various times in Israel's history put together by a series of editors in the years after the exile. One of the common Near Eastern legal documents in the 2,000 years before Christ was the covenant treaty in which one party was the vassal of the other. The vassal promised to give their total loyalty, love, obedience, and trust into the hands of the overlord in exchange for his protection, care, and provision. This is the form the book of Deuteronomy takes. It spells out in the legal terms of the second millennium the benefits the Israelites can expect from God as their overlord and the complete loyalty and obedience he expects from them in return. Deuteronomy has 502 pages.
