Most Deuteronomy scholars acknowledge that this book offers more information on its own composition than any other book in the Hebrew Bible. Even so few critical scholars take at face value the book’s portrayal of Moses as the source of the oral addresses in the book or as the scribe who produced written versions of those addresses. They imagine a complex literary process over a long period yielding the present product almost a millennium after the purported author died. Later literary artists supposedly attached Moses’ name to their compositions to lend them gravitas and authority. This essay assesses these approaches by comparing Moses’ first address (Deut 1:1–4:44) with the Idrimi Statue Inscription from Alalakh. Assuming Moses was an historical figure, this exercise is valid because: (1) temporally, the two principal characters were near contemporaries in the Late Bronze Age; (2) geographically and linguistically, both were produced in the Levant in a region where people spoke dialects of Northwest Semitic; (3) literarily, both were produced by a third-party scribe; and (4) generically both involve historiographic recollections by the principal cast in first-person autobiographical form. The pseudonymous character of the Idrimi story is apparent, but does this warrant similar attribution for Moses’ first address? A closer synoptic analysis suggests a negative answer to the question.