Deuteronomist in the context of "Book of Leviticus"

The Book of Jeremiah (Hebrew: ספר יִרְמְיָהוּ) is the second of the Latter Prophets in the Hebrew Bible, and the second of the Prophets in the Christian Old Testament. The superscription at chapter Jeremiah 1:1–3 identifies the book as "the words of Jeremiah son of Hilkiah". Of all the prophets, Jeremiah comes through most clearly as a person, ruminating to his scribe Baruch about his role as a servant of God with little good news for his audience.

His book is intended as a message to the Jews during the Babylonian exile, explaining the disaster of exile as God's response to Israel's pagan worship: the people, says Jeremiah, are like an unfaithful wife and rebellious children, their infidelity and rebelliousness made judgment inevitable, although restoration and a new covenant are foreshadowed. Authentic oracles of Jeremiah are probably to be found in the poetic sections of chapters 1 through 25, but the book as a whole has been heavily edited and added to by the prophet's followers (including, perhaps, his companion, the scribe Baruch) and later generations of Deuteronomists.

Judah (Hebrew: יְהוּדָה‎, Modern: Yəhūda, Tiberian: Yŭhūḏā) was, according to the Book of Genesis, the fourth of the six sons of Jacob and Leah and the founder of the Tribe of Judah of the Israelites. By extension, he is indirectly the eponym of the Kingdom of Judah, the land of Judea, and the word Jew.

According to the narrative in Genesis, Judah alongside Tamar is a patrilineal ancestor of the Davidic line. The Tribe of Judah features prominently in Deuteronomistic history, which most scholars agree was reduced to written form, although subject to exilic and post-exilic alterations and emendations, during the reign of the Judahist reformer Josiah from 641 to 609 BCE.

Goliath (/ɡə.ˈlaɪ.əθ/ gə-LY-əth) is a Philistine warrior of giant stature who plays a pivotal role in the origin myth of King David in the Book of Samuel. According to 1 Samuel, Goliath challenges the Israelites to best him in single combat. David, then a young shepherd, takes up the challenge and kills Goliath with a stone slung from a sling. The narrative signifies King Saul's unfitness to rule for not taking up the giant's challenge himself.

The phrase "David and Goliath" has taken on a more popular meaning denoting an underdog situation, a contest wherein a smaller, weaker opponent faces a much bigger, stronger adversary. Some modern scholars now believe that the original slayer of Goliath in the text may have been Elhanan, son of Jair, who features in 2 Samuel 21:19, in which Elhanan kills Goliath the Gittite, and that the authors of the Deuteronomistic history changed the original text to credit the victory to the more famous figure of David.

The Jahwist or Yahwist (J) is one of the most widely recognized sources of the Pentateuch (Torah), together with the Deuteronomist (D), the Priestly source (P) and the Elohist (E). The existence of the Jahwist text is somewhat controversial, with a number of scholars, especially in Europe, denying that it ever existed as a coherent independent document. Nevertheless, many scholars do assume its existence. The Jahwist is so named because of its characteristic use of the term Yahweh (German: Jahwe; Hebrew: יהוה) for God.

The documentary hypothesis (DH) is one of the models used by biblical scholars to explain the origins and composition of the Torah (or Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy). A version of the documentary hypothesis, frequently identified with the German scholar Julius Wellhausen, was almost universally accepted for most of the 20th century. It posited that the Pentateuch is a compilation of four originally independent documents: the Jahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist, and Priestly sources, frequently referred to by their initials. The first of these, J, was dated to the Solomonic period (c. 950 BCE). E was dated somewhat later, in the 9th century BCE, and D was dated just before the reign of King Josiah, in the 7th or 8th century BCE. Finally, P was generally dated to the time of Ezra in the 5th century BCE. The sources would have been joined at various points in time by a series of editors or "redactors".

The consensus around the classical documentary hypothesis has now faltered. This was triggered in large part by the influential publications of John Van Seters, Hans Heinrich Schmid, and Rolf Rendtorff in the mid-1970s, who argued that J was to be dated no earlier than the time of the Babylonian captivity (597–539 BCE), and rejected the existence of a substantial E source. They also called into question the nature and extent of the three other sources. Van Seters, Schmid, and Rendtorff shared many of the same criticisms of the documentary hypothesis, but were not in complete agreement about what paradigm ought to replace it.

The Deuteronomic Code is the name given by academics to the law code set out in chapters 12 to 26 of the Book of Deuteronomy in the Hebrew Bible. The code outlines a special relationship between the Israelites and Yahweh and provides instructions covering "a variety of topics including religious ceremonies and ritual purity, civil and criminal law, and the conduct of war". They are similar to other collections of laws found in the Torah (the first five books of the Tanakh) such as the Covenant Code at Exodus 20–23, except for the portion discussing the Ethical Decalogue, which is usually treated separately. This separate treatment stems not from any concern over authorship, but merely because the Ethical Decalogue is treated academically as a subject in its own right.

Almost the entirety of Deuteronomy is presented as the last few speeches of Moses, beginning with an historical introduction as well as a second introduction which expands on the Ethical Decalogue, and ending with hortatory speeches and final words of encouragement. Between these is found the law code, at Deuteronomy 12–26. In critical scholarship, this portion, as well as the majority of the remainder of Deuteronomy, was written by the Deuteronomist.

The Philistine captivity of the Ark was an episode described in the biblical history of the Israelites, in which the Ark of the Covenant was in the possession of the Philistines, who had captured it after defeating the Israelites in a battle at a location between Eben-ezer, where the Israelites encamped, and Aphek (probably Antipatris), where the Philistines encamped.

The ark narrative does not include any mention of Samuel; Bill T. Arnold suggests that it is "in order to celebrate the power of Yahweh's ark." Many scholars put 1 Samuel 4 - 6 together with 2 Samuel 6 and believe that it reflects an old source that was eventually incorporated into the History of David's Rise or into the later Deuteronomistic History.