Deuteronomy purports to contain the laws under which Israel is to live in the land of Canaan. It deals with the conditions of an agricultural people, settled in towns and villages, in the presence of a native population to the contamination of whose religion and morals the Israelites are exposed. This legislation was revealed to Moses at Horeb (Deut. v. 28-33), but, inasmuch as it was not to go into effect until Israel was established in the possession of Canaan, being in fact wholly inapplicable to nomadic conditions—a consideration of which P, in its code of worship, is oblivious—it was not promulgated till the moment when the people, encamped opposite Jericho, was on the point of invading Palestine. Then the aged Moses, about to lay down his office and his life, delivers to the people, in national assembly, the law by which they are in future to be governed, and adds his most urgent injunctions and solemn warnings to be faithful to their religion and the law of their God.

The book is thus almost wholly in the form of address, and the hortatory note is insistent. As an introduction, Moses briefly recalls the history of the wanderings, from Horeb on, impressing at every turn the lessons of their experience (Deut. 1-3); the material is taken chiefly from E's narrative, which it was intended to supersede in an independent Book of Deuteronomy. There follows a hortatory discourse (iv. 1-40), closely akin to cc. 29-30. The last acts and the death of Moses are narrated in confused fashion in c. 31; xxxii. 48-52; 34. The Song of Moses (c. 32), and the Blessing of Moses (c. 33), are apparently independent compositions which have been given an appropriate place at the end of the book. The core of Deuteronomy is cc. 5-11; 12-26; 28. Speaking generally, the first part (cc. 5-11) expounds the fundamental principles of religion, while the second (cc. 12-26) contains special laws, and, as a fitting and effective conclusion of the whole, c. 28 sets forth the blessings which God will bestow on Israel if it keeps his commandments, and the curses it will incur by unfaithfulness and disobedience. The special laws, particularly in Deut. 22 ff., are similar in character to those in Exod. 21-23 and in Lev. 17-25, and doubtless embody in the main ancient custom; but beside them are provisions of a singularly Utopian kind, such as those on the conduct of war in c. 20 and the septennial cancelling of all debts (xv. 1-11).

The conception of religion which dominates the whole book, but is most conspicuous in cc. 5-11, is the highest in the Old Testament. There is but one God, supreme in might and majesty, constant in purpose, faithful to his word, just but compassionate; he is not to be imaged or imagined in the likeness of anything in heaven or on earth; idolatry, divination, and sorcery are strictly forbidden. The essence of religion is love (Deut. vi. 4), the love of God to his people and their responsive love to him is the ruling motive in worship and conduct. In the relations of men to their fellows, whether countrymen or strangers and to the brute creation, humanity and charity are the prime virtues; the Utopian features of the laws are such only because they push the ideal of humanity too hard for unideal human nature.

What is most characteristic in the Deuteronomic legislation, the thing on which it dwells with insistent iteration, is that Jehovah will be worshipped only at one place, to be chosen by himself in the territory of one of the tribes. There all sacrifices must be offered, all festivals celebrated. At the head of the special laws this fundamental article is repeatedly laid down (Deut. xii. 13-19—seemingly the oldest formulation—xii. 2-7, 8-12, 20-27), and it recurs in connection with the laws concerning the disposition of God's share in man's increase (tithes, firstlings, etc.) and the annual festivals (Passover, Tabernacles).

This was an innovation which dislocated the whole system of religious observances, and the Deuteronomic legislation had to provide for the direct and indirect consequences of so radical a change. By ancient custom the religious dues were rendered and sacrifices offered at the village altars ("high places"), and there also the festivals were kept which marked the seasons of the husbandman's year; beside the altar, with a simple religious rite, domestic animals were slaughtered whenever hospitality or a family festival gave occasion. If a man visited a more renowned sanctuary at a distance from his home, he did it of his own accord and in his own time and way. The feasts at the village altars, at which custom prescribed open hospitality, were a godsend to the poor of the community, many of whom would else seldom have tasted flesh or eaten their fill. The Deuteronomic law licenses the slaughter of animals at home without any religious rite, and introduces a plan of charity tithes to replace the hospitality of the altar. Its concern for the levites (that is, the priests of the local sanctuaries), who by the new arrangement were left without a livelihood, is also to be noted.

The motives for this radical change in immemorial religious custom are characteristic. In the first place, the "high places" had been seats of Canaanite worship before they were taken possession of by the Israelites, and not only did the stigma of aboriginal heathenism cling to them, but, in fact, many heathenish doings were perpetuated at them—drunken debauches and consecrated prostitution. But, further, their existence seemed to be incompatible with strict monotheism: the many gods were worshipped in many places; the one God seemed to have as corollary one place of worship. As a matter of experience, the localizing of Jehovah at numerous sanctuaries—Dan, Bethel, Gilgal, Beersheba—with their distinctive traditions and local peculiarities of ritual, doubtless did result, for the apprehension of the common man, in making a local Jehovah, as happens to the Virgin and the Saints in Catholic countries. For the Deuteronomist this was only another kind of polytheism: "Hear, O Israel, Jehovah, our God, is one Jehovah!"

Deuteronomy is, therefore, the programme of a reform. Fortunately, we know how this programme was put in execution; the history of it is written in 2 Kings 22-23. In the course of some repairs in the temple in Jerusalem, a law book turned up, the reading of which threw King Josiah and his advisers into consternation. After taking counsel of a prophetess, an assembly was convoked, and the book publicly ratified by the notables and the people as the law of the realm. Thereupon the king proceeded to put the code in force. He not only cleaned house in the temple in Jerusalem, where a miscellany of foreign gods and cults was installed, but he destroyed and desecrated all the "high places," that is, the immemorial seats of the worship of Jehovah in the towns and villages of his kingdom, pulling the altars to pieces, smashing the stone pillars, hewing down the sacred poles, and forcibly carrying off the priests (levites) to Jerusalem, where he assigned them a living from the income of the temple, but—in his zeal going beyond the law of Deut. xviii. 6-8—excluded them from sacrificial functions.

It was seen long ago by some of the Church Fathers that the law book which Hilkiah found and Josiah enforced can have been no other than Deuteronomy. The historian of the kingdoms, writing after the reforms of Josiah and the following reaction and believing that the prohibition of worship at the high places had been binding since the building of Solomon's temple, is at pains to say that none of the kings from Solomon to Josiah, not even those to whom otherwise he gives the best mark for piety, had paid any attention to this law, with the sole exception of a brief attempt by Hezekiah. We can go further, and say that none of the older historians and none of the prophets of the ninth and eighth centuries show any acquaintance with such a prohibition. If the prophets assail the worship at the high places, as Hosea does, it is on the ground that it is heathenish and immoral, not that it is illegitimate; if Hosea condemns the pilgrimages to Gilgal and Beersheba, it is not implied that it would be better to go to Jerusalem; nor, indeed, is any condemnation of the worship at the high places more drastic than Isaiah's of the cultus in Jerusalem. Before the latter part of the seventh century there is no thought that Jehovah has such an exclusive preference for Solomon's temple.

All the other evidence in Deuteronomy points to the same age. Its conception of God and of religion is derived from the prophets of the eighth century. The influence of Hosea is particularly plain: that the essence of religion is love is Hosea's idea, if there is such a thing as originality in religion. The language and style of Deuteronomy are of the seventh century, in its excellences and in its defects; Jeremiah and the author of Kings have the closest resemblance to it in its rhetorical manner and in its peculiar pathos.

On these grounds, since the latter part of the eighteenth century, an increasing number of scholars have held that the book was written in the second half of the seventh century for the purpose of bringing about a revolution such as actually followed its well-timed discovery; and this is now the opinion of almost all who admit that the common principles of historical criticism are applicable to Biblical literature.

Deuteronomy is not all of one piece, as has already been pointed out. Many older laws were taken up into it at the beginning or introduced subsequently; considerable additions were made to it after Josiah's time, and even after the fall of Judah, for in several passages that catastrophe and the dispersion of the people are an accomplished fact, an existing situation. It is only the reform programme and what hangs together with it that can be definitely dated.