Deuteronomy as Didactic Poetry? A Critique of D. L. Christensen's View

Abstract

For years, a minority voice has asserted that Deuteronomy is best characterized as
didactic poetry rather than prose, falling on the more heightened side of the Hebrew
Bible's continuum of elevated style. In contrast, through rigorous comparative statistical
analysis, this study argues that Deuteronomy, while including instances of embedded
poetry (e.g., chs. 32-33), is as a whole literary didactic prose. Specifically, the
book's frequent employment of the waw + verb-first clause pattern, its tendency to
precede a verb by no more than one constituent, and its high appropriation of prose
particles all point toward a prosaic rather than poetic nature for the book

Key Words: Deuteronomy, Hebrew language, genre, poetry, prose, mainline, syntax,
word-order, prose particles, literary analysis, linguistic analysis