Dtr employs several structural and rhetorical devices that underscore the leading themes and signal the important stages and turning points in the story. Attention to these compositional features enhances appreciation of the challenges Dtr faced in composing his lengthy history from seemingly incompatible materials. Dtr not only unifies his work with transitions that link era to era but also employs several devices to link individual texts within each segment of history and spanning two or more segments. These thematic and rhetorical devices are editorial maneuvers that show DH to be a single document, forged from many documents and oral traditions and sprinkled with editorial comments and connections that show a consistent religious ideology. The architecture of this literary tour de force, like centuries-old cathedrals, is in no way diminished if, as seems likely, it has been worked on by several editors with shared understandings.
It is fairly easy to identify the principal theme of Dtr as the momentous clash between two versions of the Israelite story: the conditional terms of the Mosaic covenant and the unconditional terms of the Davidic covenant. The more challenging task is to bring to light the literary means by which that clash is represented. What makes the movement from Joshua to Kings so engaging is that we see at each point in the history a clash between the two covenants, but in different guises and with a constantly changing cast of characters. Assuming that Dtr aimed to show how the two covenants played out through the centuries after Moses, the big challenge was to decide what sources to use, how to arrange them, and how to link the sources into a continuous story from Joshua to the collapse of the two kingdoms.
Dtr had in hand several blocks of material, each dealing with a segment of that long history: taking of the land of Canaan; judges arising in a tribal system; the united kingdom under three successive kings, Saul, David, and Solomon; splitting into two states, one in the north (Israel) and one in the south (Judah), followed by the sequence of the kings in each monarchy and the loss of independence for both. It is crucial to realize that Dtr was not writing six books but one segmented history only later divided into six books within the canon. The four segments of Dtr’s work are sewn together with transitional links:
Era of the Occupation of Canaan
with a link to the era of judges: Joshua’s death and burial (Josh. 24:29–33)
repeated in the introduction to the judges (Judg. 2:6–10)
with a link to the united kingdom: annual festivals at Shiloh provide the setting for the last episode about judges (Judg. 21:16–23) and the first episode about the United Kingdom (1 Samuel 1)
Era of the United Kingdom
with a link to the divided kingdoms: episodes of Jeroboam and Ahijah before the death of Solomon (1 Kgs. 11:26–31) and after the death of Solomon (1 Kgs. 12:15)
Era of the Divided Kingdoms
ends with destruction of the two kingdoms, deportation of Judahite officials to Babylon, and an open-ended note about the favor shown to captive King Zedekiah by a Neo-Babylonian ruler.
The era of the united kingdom is told in a continuous narrative, by far the most cohesive segment of Dtr. In fact, many interpreters have treated the so-called Court History of David as an eyewitness account, so vividly and artfully is it fashioned (2 Samuel 9–20; 1 Kings 1–2). However, the sources for the other eras were not as cohesive, so that Dtr had to find a way of shaping them into an ongoing narrative. With the era of Joshua, the stories and lists are framed by his introductory and farewell speeches. With the era of the judges, Dtr linked episodes by means of an artificial cyclical framework with a repeated pattern: Israel does evil by abandoning the covenant, YHWH punishes the people by oppression at the hand of enemies, the oppressed Israelites cry out for deliverance from oppression, YHWH rescues the Israelites by raising up a military judge, and at the death of the judge the Israelites revert to their evil ways. Then the identical cycle is repeated several times. For the final phase of his history, Dtr tells the story of the divided kingdoms by drawing information about each king from royal archives, and using a formula that includes length of the reign and a verdict of good or bad on the king’s performance. Dtr inserts into this scheme a cycle of stories about the northern prophets Elijah and Elisha, largely folk traditions that venerate them as YHWH loyalists and defenders of the people.