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On Describing the Purpose of Deuteronomy

This paper sets out to understand how different formulations of the purpose of Deuteronomy arise, and to suggest an approach towards developing a securely grounded interpretation. Gadamer’s description of the interpretative process illustrates how different understandings of Deuteronomy reflect the process of rearticulation of Deuteronomy within the philosophical and theological worlds of different interpreters. For the historian, relativism may be reduced and a more securely objective historical understanding attained through the reconstruction, based on the application of Habermas’s historical materialism, of the historical and political conditions within which Deuteronomy emerged in late pre-exilic Judah. Deuteronomy may then be understood as the systematic formulation of a new world-view in response to the culture shock of Assyrian domination, presenting traditional faith in a revitalized form.