Week 10 Deuteronomy
At some point last week it occurred to me that quite a bit of Deuteronomy was Moses speaking to the people. In fact as I glanced through, it looked like huge chunks of the book were public speeches.
I wondered how much.
I got a copy of the New Living Translation of the bible because it divides the text into paragraphs as well as uses quotation marks – that made it quicker to scan through looking for when Moses was speaking. And as it turned out it was easier to look for when he was not speaking. I found about 60 verses.
That’s not too many non-Moses’-speeches in a book that has 959 verses.
It means Moses was not addressing the people 6.25% of the time, which means that almost 94% of Deuteronomy is a transcription of Moses’ spoken words.
If I had a red-letter Books of Moses then Deuteronomy would not have much black print.
Note: these are the verses I found where Moses wasn’t speaking (so don’t take them to the bank): 1:1-5, 2:20-23, 4:41-49, 27:1, 9, 11, 29:1-2, 31:1, 7, 9, 14-25, 30, 32:44-45, 48-52, 33:1, 34:1-12.
The Deuteronomy verse-count is from neverthirsty.org (March 1, 2020)