In few areas of critical Old Testament research is the chasm between evangelical and mainstream scholarship as broad as in discussions of the book of Deuteronomy. The issues relate not only to the provenance of the book, but also to its origin and composition, its ideology, its ethic, and its relationship to other biblical books. Evangelicals differ in their responses to historicalcritical scholarship. Some avoid it as much as possible; others consider neither critical methodologies nor the results of critical scholarship to be threatening to their evangelical convictions.
The essays in Sepher Torath Mosheh consist of invited papers that were presented at a special colloquium on the book of Deuteronomy at Wheaton College in the fall of 2015. Their purpose is to explore historical, literary, theological, and ethical issues at the heart of the tensions evangelicals feel with regard to mainstream scholarship on Deuteronomy. Although the contributors represent a broad spectrum of theological and hermeneutical perspectives within evangelicalism, they all subscribe to the statement on Scripture that unites the fellows of the Institute for Biblical Research: belief in “the unique divine inspiration, integrity, and authority of the Bible.”