Israel in Deuteronomy

Abstract The book of Deuteronomy is engaged in an intensive project of Israelite identity formation, provoked initially by an increased exposure to alternative cultural matrices in the southern Levant in the long seventh century bce and then reinforced by the global scope of Israelite experience in the wake of the destruction of the kingdom of Judah in the early sixth century. Although the construction of a distinctively Israelite religious and cultural identity is not the book’s sole concern, it accounts for a number of the book’s preoccupations and constitutes one of its most significant contributions to the theology of the Hebrew Bible and associated religious traditions. This chapter discusses some of the most important features of Israelite identity developed in Deuteronomy’s legislative and exhortatory core, including the distinctively Israelite cultural characteristics of exclusive Yahwism, centralized worship, and a shared mythology of Israel’s origins in an exodus from Egypt, as well as examining ways in which this Deuteronomic material seeks to protect the distinctive Israelite identity it constructs. A final section discusses some of the ways that this construction of Israelite identity was adjusted in response to Israel’s deportation, displacement, and long-term diaspora.