Deuteronomy 31:9

"And Moses wrote this law, and delivered it unto the priests the sons of Levi, that bare the ark of the covenant of Jehovah, and unto all the elders of Israel. And Moses commanded them, saying, At the end of every seven years, in the set time of the year of release, in the feast of tabernacles, when all Israel is come to appear before Jehovah thy God in the place which he shall choose, thou shalt read this law before all Israel in their hearing. Assemble the people, the men and the women and the little ones, and thy sojourner that is within thy gates, that thou may hear, and that they may learn, and fear Jehovah your God, and observe to do all the words of this law; and that their children, who have not known, may hear, and learn to fear Jehovah your God, as long as ye live in the land whither ye go over the Jordan to possess it."

"And Moses wrote this law ..." (Deuteronomy 31:9,11,13). This law in these passages, and throughout the O.T., is not a reference to Deuteronomy or any part of Deuteronomy in any exclusive sense. Dummelow parroted the arrogant assignment of this expression to such a restricted meaning, as follows: "`This law' means the Deuteronomic law, especially Deuteronomy 12-26."[15] There is no way that such a limited definition of "this law" can be accepted. Sir Isaac Newton stated that the copy of "the law" discovered in the eighteenth year of Josiah's reign over Israel was none other than "The Pentateuch," the same volume owned by the Samaritans, the Torah, as it is called today. "Since the Pentateuch was received as `the book of the Law' both by the Two Tribes and the Ten Tribes, it follows that they received it before they became divided into two kingdoms ... Therefore The Pentateuch was the Book of the Law in the days of David and Solomon."[16] Of course, Sir Isaac Newton had not consulted Dummelow! He arrived at that conclusion by attention to what the Word of God says; and that Word of God still says what it always has said, that the first five books of our O.T. are "this law."

As Keil also discerned, "Ezra did not regard the Book of Deuteronomy as the true national law-book, like the critics of our day."[17] We might add that "nobody" for thousands of years, ever heard of such a limitation as the current school of unbelieving critics have vainly sought to impose upon sacred terminology.

How, it may be asked, do enemies of God's Word attempt to establish their dogmatic rejection of the whole Pentateuch as "this law" so frequently mentioned in the O.T.? Their principal argument, and usually admitted by them to be their main argument, is that the "reading of the book of the law" discovered in the reign of Josiah is represented as having taken place in a single day or so. This is merely imagination at work. There is not a line in the Bible that indicates "how long" the various readings mentioned in that connection required, and we may be certain that the time-argument in that context is worthless. Also, the various commandments throughout the Bible regarding reading of the "the Law," were probably never anything very much beyond "symbolical readings." The Holy Bible teaches this. For example, Paul declared in Acts 13:15 that both "the law and the prophets" were read at a single sabbath day service! And in Acts 13:27, indicated that this was done "every sabbath." It merely means that selected passages from "the law" and the prophets were read every sabbath; and it is definitely not an affirmation that the entire O.T. (or a major part of it) were read publicly every week. Cook therefore was correct when he declared that, "This reading every seven years was evidently a symbolical transaction."[18] When a man today says, `They read the Bible every Sunday at church," he means merely that they "read from the Bible." In this light, not only from every-day language, but from the Bible itself, how worthless are those silly arguments based upon how long some scheming critic thinks it might have taken to read `Deuteronomy?

Note also in Deuteronomy 31:9 that Moses gave a copy of "this Law" to all of the elders of Israel, indicating as Phillips pointed out, that, "both clerical and lay leaders were entrusted with the care of the written law."[19]

It is merely a quibble that Moses could not actually have written such large volumes, but it should be remembered that Moses' authority was hardly less than that of an absolute monarch, and, at his disposal, were countless men who had the ability to write. And, as far as the physical possibility of it is concerned, the Jewish tradition that Moses wrote twelve copies of the whole Pentateuch and gave a copy to the leader of each of the Twelve Tribes, is in no way unreasonable. The only reason for obscuring or ignoring this obvious truth is that doing so makes it easier to postulate the "total loss" of God's law prior to that discovery of Deuteronomy in the reign of Josiah.