Hello, on script listeners, this is Matt Lynch, and I'm about to interview Allison Joseph on her new book, Portrait of the Kings. But before I do that, I wanted to

do something a little bit different this week, because during the interview, we talk about the

Deuteronomistic history, which I realize is probably a new concept for some of you. Many of you

will be familiar with the idea if you've done some theological

training. But I thought I'd give an overview of the idea of the Deuteronomystic history so that

you have some background for the discussion that we have. So Allison Joseph's work, the Portrait of the Kings,

belongs within a larger conversation, scholarly conversation about the nature and formation of the Deuteronomystic history.

So you may be wondering to yourself, what is that?

And if you already know, you could probably skip ahead about 10 minutes, but I'm going to give a quick overview so that you have some

context for this. When scholars talk about the Deuteronomyistic history, they're talking about

the books that go from Deuteronomy through the Book of Kings. So Deuteronomy, Joshua, judges,

Samuel, and Kings, not Ruth. And the idea is that these books share something in common.

Deuteronomy, which is at the head of this collection of books,

seems to impact those books in a way that other books are not impacted in the Hebrew Bible.

So one of the basic questions behind that is,

why do these books in particular, that of Joshua through Kings, bear the distinct imprint

of the book of Deuteronomy in a way that other books, even books that came after Deuteronomy,

don't. And so the scholars have theorized, well, what is it that that brings these

books together? And it goes back, well, it goes back to a number of scholars, but one of them,

Wilhelm de Vetta was a German, in case he didn't know from the name. And he lived back in like the late 1700s, and I don't have the exact dates.

But anyway, Devetta theorized that when Josiah goes into the temple.

And if you remember the story, he finds, well, his men find the book of the law when they're clearing out the temple and cleaning it.

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