Some Remarks On the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy Xxxii

Abstract

The Song of Moses is one of the most impressive religious poems in the entire Old Testament, but it differs so strikingly from other poems in genre 1) that it has been exceedingly hard to date. The views of serious scholars have in the past ranged over nearly a millennium, but there is lately a strong tendency to date the Song earlier. So, for instance, in the first edition of my book, From the Stone Age to Christianity (1940) I dated it about the seventh century B.C. (p. 227). In the latest edition, on the other hand, published seventeen years later (1957), I dated it apparently in the tenth century (p. 296). Meanwhile Otto EISSFELDT has gone much farther. In the second edition of his famous Einleitung in das Alte Testament (1956) he refers the Song to the middle of the eleventh century B.C. (pp. 271 f.). This very early date is defended at length in a monograph on Deut. xxxii and Psalm lxxviii, published two years later, where he proposes as termini post and ante quem 1070 and 1020 B.C. 2) My own first reaction was a somewhat dazed admiration for Eissfeldt's daring, but after rereading the chapter over and over again at intervals I have come around to his eleventh-century dating-though a little later with quite different interpretations of some key passages. In this short essay I shall limit myself to observations on a few passages. Here again the Dead Sea Scrolls have come to our rescue, with Mgr. Patrick W. SKEHAN'S publication of a large fragment of a stichometric text of the Song, in typical book-hand from about the Christian