From the Torah of Moses to the Torah of God: Changing Conceptions of Authority for the Law in the Book of Deuteronomy

This paper seeks to demonstrate that an earlier version of Deuteronomy presented the Decalogue alone as the word of God to Israel. In this version, God commissioned Moses to formulate just and righteous laws for the people after delivering the ten commandments. This reflects a conception according to which human wisdom suffices to ground obedience to the law. The law is "divine" only in the sense that it was commissioned by God and in that it follows the universal principles of justice, which are considered to be rooted in the divinity. At a later stage in the editing of Deuteronomy this conception of authority was considered too weak. At this stage the Torah of Moses was elevated to the status of the Decalogue and converted into the Torah of God. The paper will discuss continuities of the tension between divine law and human law in later Jewish literature, and consider the implications of this tension for the Jewish legal tradition as a whole.