ABSTRACT
While many studies have examined the legal corpora and the curse formulae of Deuteronomy, fewer studies have explored its ritual instructions and sequences. The ritual material in Deuteronomy, and especially the covenant enactment in 27–30, plays a key role in the book's overall logic as the means by which the law is kept as a central focus for the community. The instructions for the enactment of the covenant read as a highly formalized script for a performance in a public assembly and led by ritual experts, namely the priests and Levites. The performance includes ritual actions such as the offering of sacrifices, the inscribing of stones bearing the words of the covenant, stage directions, and scripted words which are to be read aloud by both ritual experts and participants. The ritual performance of the covenant has a rhetorical intent in Deuteronomy: to persuade readers and listeners to keep the statutes of the law, lest Israel's God unleash the doom of the curses. Furthermore, a focus on the ritual performance aspects of oaths and treaties invites entirely new comparisons between Deuteronomy and other ritual texts, including Mesopotamian incantations.
