Judges Who Are Magistrates

The textuality of Deuteronomy has been the subject of much recent scholarly attention. See, inter alia, William M. Schniedewind, How The Bible Became A Book: The Textualization of Ancient Israel (Cambridge University Press, 2004) 106-114; David M. Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature (Oxford University Press, 2005) 134-139;  Karel van der Toorn, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible (Harvard University Press, 2007) 143-172.

Understanding the term shoterim as deriving from the Hebrew word “shetar” (document).

Moshe Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School (Clarendon Press, 1972), especially pg. 178.

For a thorough discussion of Deuteronomy’s identification of Levites as juridical agents stationed in Israelite cities and towns, see Mark Leuchter, “’The Levite in Your Gates’: The Deuteronomic Redefinition of Levitical Authority”, JBL 126 (2007) 417-436.

Ahijah is identified as a “Shilonite”, i.e., connected to the priesthood that once ministered at the Shiloh sanctuary (cf. 1 Samuel 1—4) that was eventually commanded by King Solomon to remain in their priestly enclave in Anatoth (1 Kgs 2:26).  Jeremiah was from this same priestly group (Jer 1:1).  On Hosea’s Levitical heritage, see Stephen L. Cook, The Social Roots of Biblical Yahwism (Society of Biblical Literature, 2004) 231-266.

See Jonathan Ben Dov, “Writing as Oracle and Law: New Contexts for the Book-Find of King Josiah”, JBL 127 (2008) 227-239.

On the topic of Levite authorship of Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic literature more broadly, see Jeffrey C. Geoghegan, The Time, Place and Purpose of the Deuteronomistic History: The Evidence of “Until This Day”(Brown Judaic Studies, 2006); Mark Leuchter, Samuel and the Shaping of Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2013) 19-21; Schniedewind, How The Bible Became A Book, 110-111; van der Toorn, Scribal Culture, 166-168.  Jack R. Lundbom also identifies Levites as the authors of Deuteronomy, promoting an older model that assumed Deuteronomy’s origins among a culture of prophetic-Levitical preaching or sermonizing (“The Inclusio and other Framing Devices in Deuteronomy i-xxviii”,VT 46 (1996) 314-315, though Bernard Levinson’s examination of Deuteronomy’s scribal character renders this unlikely; see his book Deuteronomy and the Hermeneutics of Legal Innovation (Oxford University Press, 1997).

For more on this, see the TABS essay by A. Avreich, “The Kohanim the Leviim.”

James Nohrnberg, Like Unto Moses (Indiana University Press, 1995) 10-11; Karel van der Toorn, Family Religion in Babylonia, Syria and Israel (Brill, 1996) 303.

Mark Leuchter, “The Medium and the Message, or, What is Deuteronomistic about the Book of Jeremiah”, ZAW 126 (2014) 220-221.

Cook, Social Roots, especially pp. 261-266.

The Laws of Hammurabi, for example, derive from the titular ruler, and the Neo-Assyrian treaty texts of the 8^th-7^th centuries BCE are presented as the words of the Assyrian emperors imposed upon their vassals.