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The Valediction of Moses: A Proto-Biblical Book
Moses Wilhelm Shapira's infamous Deuteronomy fragments - long believed to be forgeries - are authentic ancient manuscripts, and they are of far greater significance than ever imagined. The literary work that these manuscripts preserve - which Idan Dershowitz calls 'The Valediction of Moses' or 'V' - is not based on the book of Deuteronomy. On the contrary, V is a much earlier version of Deuteronomy. In other words, V is a proto-biblical book, the likes of which has never before been seen. This conclusion is supported by a series of philological analyses, as well as previously unknown archival documents, which undermine the consensus on these manuscripts. An excursus co-authored with Na'ama Pat-El assesses V's linguistic profile, finding it to be consistent with Iron Age epigraphic Hebrew. V contains early versions of passages whose biblical counterparts reflect substantial post-Priestly updating. Moreover, unlike the canonical narratives of Deuteronomy, this ancient work shows no signs of influence from the Deuteronomic law code. Indeed, V preserves an earlier, and dramatically different, literary structure for the entire work - one that lacks the Deuteronomic law code altogether. These findings have significant consequences for the composition history of the Bible, historical linguistics, the history of religion, paleography, archaeology, and more. The volume includes a full critical edition and English translation of V.
216 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 20, 2021
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February 5, 2024
This is one of those books like Julian Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind": so ingenious, so contrary to anything that's come before, and (if it has its facts right -- a big "if," obviously) so revolutionary that you root for it to upend generations of scholarship. What Dershowitz is proposing could overshadow the Dead Sea Scrolls and give specialists something I imagine few if any ever expected to see: an early version of a Biblical book, possibly predating by hundreds of years the text that's come down to us.
Dershowitz is tightly focused on the text of this supposed proto-Deuteronomy, doing a painstaking linguistic analysis of what he calls 'The Valediction of Moses." In the 1880s, Jerusalem antiquities dealer Moses Shapira came to Europe carrying leather strips with writing on them, claiming they'd been found by Bedouins in a cave east of the Dead Sea. He was basically laughed out of the British Museum, as experts looked at the strips (now vanished, though their contents were sketched and transcribed) and pronounced them fakes. The forms of the paleo-Hebrew letters were wrong; the language itself was riddled with mistakes; the leather looked like it had been cut from relatively modern Torah scrolls; and most of all, there was no way such objects could have survived for centuries in what one authority called the "damp climate" of Palestine. (This last, strange objection was still operative 65 or so years later, and led some to call the Dead Sea Scrolls forgeries, too. As others have said, the Shapira material might be considered the first Dead Sea Scroll.)
Dershowitz reviews handwritten notes he's uncovered in which Shapira tried to make sense of his find -- strange behavior if he was a forger -- and says the chances are negligible that anyone else was attempting a fraud for money or fame: Shapira bought the texts for a pittance, and their divergences from Deuteronomy (among much else, they're missing the vast legal code that makes up the heart of the book as we have it) supported no 19th-century notions about its composition. In fact, they tend to confirm theories that have only emerged in recent decades. What's more, several passages in Leviticus and elsewhere seem to reflect Valediction material that didn't make the cut for the final version of Deuteronomy.
The linguistic analysis, which takes up a big part of the book, is extremely technical and way beyond anything I can judge, but there's enough here for a nonacademic to wonder if "V," as Dershowitz calls the Valediction, is going to take a place alongside J, E, D and P as Biblical sources in future textbooks.
Dershowitz is tightly focused on the text of this supposed proto-Deuteronomy, doing a painstaking linguistic analysis of what he calls 'The Valediction of Moses." In the 1880s, Jerusalem antiquities dealer Moses Shapira came to Europe carrying leather strips with writing on them, claiming they'd been found by Bedouins in a cave east of the Dead Sea. He was basically laughed out of the British Museum, as experts looked at the strips (now vanished, though their contents were sketched and transcribed) and pronounced them fakes. The forms of the paleo-Hebrew letters were wrong; the language itself was riddled with mistakes; the leather looked like it had been cut from relatively modern Torah scrolls; and most of all, there was no way such objects could have survived for centuries in what one authority called the "damp climate" of Palestine. (This last, strange objection was still operative 65 or so years later, and led some to call the Dead Sea Scrolls forgeries, too. As others have said, the Shapira material might be considered the first Dead Sea Scroll.)
Dershowitz reviews handwritten notes he's uncovered in which Shapira tried to make sense of his find -- strange behavior if he was a forger -- and says the chances are negligible that anyone else was attempting a fraud for money or fame: Shapira bought the texts for a pittance, and their divergences from Deuteronomy (among much else, they're missing the vast legal code that makes up the heart of the book as we have it) supported no 19th-century notions about its composition. In fact, they tend to confirm theories that have only emerged in recent decades. What's more, several passages in Leviticus and elsewhere seem to reflect Valediction material that didn't make the cut for the final version of Deuteronomy.
The linguistic analysis, which takes up a big part of the book, is extremely technical and way beyond anything I can judge, but there's enough here for a nonacademic to wonder if "V," as Dershowitz calls the Valediction, is going to take a place alongside J, E, D and P as Biblical sources in future textbooks.
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