Endnote 7 – Taking the Biblical Text Apart

Josiah’s reforms are connected to instructions that are found in D. And the narrative of Josiah’s making those reforms is told in terms and phrases that are typically found in D. And Josiah’s reforms are traced to the promulgation of a particular scroll, which is identified by the same words as the scroll that Moses writes in D. This interlocking chain of connections led to the extremely widely held view in scholarship that the scroll that was read in Josiah’s day was D. There have been a variety of conceptions: It may have been just the law code that appears in Deuteronomy (chapters 12–26). It may have been the law code and some of the material that precedes and follows it. It may have been written at the time of Josiah. It may have been written earlier and then made public and authoritative in Josiah’s time. But there is little room for doubt that D is linked in some integral way to the reign of Josiah.