One aspect inherent in any discourse is cohesion, and authors create cohesion in their discourse through various cohesive ties (Todd A. Scacewater, “Introduction,” in Discourse Analysis of the New Testament Writings, ed. Todd A. Scacewater (Dallas: Fontes Press, 2020), 15). Participant reference is one key cohesive tie that helps a reader follow the author’s flow of thought as they track who is speaking to whom (first and second-person address) and who is being spoken about (third-person). Biblical Hebrew has various ways of encoding participant reference, including nouns, pronouns, pronominal suffixes, and verbal conjugations.
As has been widely recognized in Deuteronomy, Moses switches between addressing Israel in the second-person singular and the second-person plural. From a linguistic perspective, these switches could interrupt Deuteronomy’s cohesion and make it difficult to follow the flow of the discourse. Traditionally, this number switch has been attributed to Moses’s “shifting conception of the audience being addressed” (Christopher T. Begg, “The Significance of the Numeruswechsel in Deuteronomy: The ‘Pre-History’ of the Question,” Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 55.10 (1979): 119). Two recent proposals, however, maintain that the number switch could relate to the literary structure of Deuteronomy (Duane L. Christensen, “The Numeruswechsel in Deuteronomy 12,” in A Song of Power and the Power of Song, ed. Duane L. Christensen. Sources for Biblical and Theological Study 3.00 [Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1993], 394; Jason S. DeRouchie, A Call to Covenant Love: Text Grammar and Literary Structure in Deuteronomy 5-11, Gorgias Dissertations 30.00 [Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2007], 277).
The present paper will enter this discussion by arguing for the discourse-structuring use of the number switch in Deuteronomy 12. First, a brief survey of the historical understanding of the number switch in Deuteronomy will be given. Then, the method and proposals of DeRouchie and Christensen will be summarized and contrasted. Finally, the discourse structure of Deuteronomy 12.00 will be argued for, utilizing DeRouchie’s methodology, and it will be argued that the number switch, in part, contributes to the discourse/literary structure of Deuteronomy 12.