It doesn’t take great expertise to see that the book of Devarim is significantly different from the other books of the Torah: Words and expressions that don’t appear anywhere in the Torah’s first four books suddenly appear here. This is most glaring when it is the same object or concept that is referred to by a different word in Devarim than how it is described elsewhere.1 Even place names appear to be changed, such that it not always clear whether similar sounding names (like Kadesh and Kadesh Barnea) are referring to the same place or two different ones.2
Yet the most significant new feature here is that Moshe generally speaks in first person, often telling us that “God told me…” as opposed to the typical earlier narrative, wherein we are told: “God spoke to Moshe…” In fact, most of this book records a series of speeches that Moshe gave over to the Israelites at the end of his life, a time that significantly coincides with the end of their journey.
Classical commentators grappled with these significant differences in a variety of ways. For some – like Don Yitzchak Abarbanel, for example – the possibility that Moshe might have written his own words in this book presents a big problem. For him, such a possibility would necessarily compromise the book’s Divinity, and, hence, its authoritative status.
What exactly was Abarbanel’s concern? It would appear that he makes a connection between the Divine choice of words in the Torah and its complete reliability as binding truth. In other words, if Devarim is essentially a record of Moshe’s words and not God’s, how can it have the same status as the unadulterated words of God that constitute the rest of the Torah? While this doesn’t invalidate what we read in it, it would give it the status of other prophetic books written after the Torah.
What the above question may fail to take into account is the status and level of Moshe at the end of his life and career. True, Moshe remains a human being. At the same time, he is an individual whose understanding of God was unparalleled. As such, one can’t really say that Devarim was only written by Moshe. Even though it would not bear the perfection of God Himself, what is critical here is that it would be acceptably close.
To better appreciate this idea, it will be helpful to understand the holiness of the various books of the Bible as comprising a spectrum. It is well known that the Writings (Ketuvim) are on a lower level than the Prophets (Nevi’im), which, in turn, are not as holy as the five books of the Torah. Perhaps it would not be a far stretch to suggest that there may be differences within each grouping as well. For example, the rabbis praise the holiness of Shir haShirim as something highly unusual3 – one could easily understand this to mean that it is more holy than other books in the Ketuvim. If that is true, we could say the same thing about the Torah; that in the same way as there is a difference between Shir haShirim and, for example, Iyov, there is actually also a difference between Devarim and the other books of the Torah. However, it is not a significant enough difference to take it out of the category of Torah and put it into the category of Nevi’im.
While many have been concerned with Abarbanel’s problem, wanting to make sure that the Torah not be brought down to the human level, one can actually put this on its head to much more interesting results: The fact that a human book can become a book of the Torah is a tribute not only to Moshe, but to mankind more generally. It is saying that a man can become so elevated in his consciousness and understanding that his words can be just as authoritative as the Divine writ.