Richard-Jude Thompson investigates Martin Noth's conclusion about the Deuteronomistic History (DH) that the people of Israel had committed apostasy ceased to obey the law code of Yhwh, and thus lost their land. Scholars have challenged Noth's hypothesis and even the existence of such a history. The present study adopts a thematic reading of the DH as a coherent corpus of writing with a consistent message. A close reading reveals a god, Yhwh, who declares war on other gods and commands his followers to conquer and to sanctify the mountain of the Emorites and the land of Canaan to Yhwh. The sanctification includes the killing of the people living there: "When you attack them, you shall annihilate them entirely. Do not make a treaty with them and do not show mercy to them". Throughout the DH, Yhwh and his spokespersons reward obedience and punish disobedience. Because the disobedient people of Israel fail to enforce Yhwh's command to remove the nations of Canaan, Yhwh enforces imperial law and sentences them to national death and exile. The author hypothesizes that the DH depicts an imperial, military covenant. After a survey of the inscriptions of the second-millennium b.c.e. Levant, the Hittite empire, the Neo-Assyrian empire, and the first-millennium b.c.e Levant, the study concludes with a hypothesis that the evidence points to the ideology of the Neo-Assyrian empire as the historical precedent for the Dtr covenant. The study challenges two presuppositions that underlie both the DH and its scholarship: that of the torahas law and that of Yhwh as a unique god.

Visual presentation of the many types of houses built in America from the earliest Indian dwellings to designs for futuristic homes.

Imagine a killer with the infectiousness of the common cold and power of the Black Death. Imagine something so deadly that it wipes out 90% of those it touches. Imagine an organism against which there is no defence. But you don't need to imagine. Such a killer exists: it is a virus and its name is Ebola. The Hot Zone tells what happens when the unthinkable becomes reality: when a deadly virus, from the rain forests of Africa, crosses continents and infects a monkey house ten miles from the White House. Ebola is that reality. It has the power to decimate the world's population. Try not to panic. It will be back. There is nothing you can do...