Terror of the Radiance: Assur Covenant to YHWH Covenant

Richard-Jude Thompson investigates Martin Noth’s conclusion about the

Deuteronomistic History (DH) that the people of Israel had committed

apostasy ceased to obey the law code of Yhwh, and thus lost their land.

Scholars have challenged Noth’s hypothesis and even the existence of

such a history. The present study adopts a thematic reading of the DH as

a coherent corpus of writing with a consistent message. A close reading

reveals a god, Yhwh, who declares war on other gods (‘elohim 'a?erim)

and commands his followersto conquer and to sanctify the mountain of the

Emorites (har ha'emori; Deut 1:7) and the land of Canaan ('ere?k?na?an;

Deut 32:49) to Yhwh. The sanctification includes the killing of the

people living there: When you attack them, you shall annihilate

(ha?arem ta?arim) them entirely. Do not make a treaty with them and do

not show mercy to them (Deut 7:1-2). Throughout the DH, Yhwh and his

spokespersons, the n?bi'im, reward obedience and punish disobedience.

Because the disobedient people of Israel fail to enforce Yhwh’s command

to remove the nations of Canaan and their 'elohim 'a?erim, Yhwh enforces

imperial law and sentences them to national death and exile.

The author hypothesizes that the DH depicts an imperial, military

covenant. After a survey of the inscriptions of the second-millennium

b.c.e. Levant, the Hittite empire, the Neo-Assyrian empire, and the

first-millennium b.c.e Levant, the study concludes with a hypothesis

that the evidence points to the ideology of the Neo-Assyrian empire as

the historical precedent for the Dtr covenant. The study challenges two

presuppositions that underlie both the DH and its scholarship: that of

the torahas law and that of Yhwh as a unique god.