Evil-Merodach and the Deuteronomist: The Sociohistorical Setting of Dtr in the Light of 2 Kgs 25,27-30 I. Dtr: Person, School or Movement? When in 1943 Martin Noth formulated the seminal concept of the Former Prophets as a relatively integral composition produced by a Deuteronomically oriented individual (henceforth Dtr), a question arose regarding the sociohistorical location of this individual. Noth confidently stated that the last event reported by Dtr, Jehoiachin’s release and exaltation on the thirty-seventh year of his captivity (2 Kgs 25,27-30), in other words, in 562-560 BCE, provided “einen festen terminus a quo für die zeitliche Ansetzung von Dtr”. Moreover, he maintained that the corpus could not emerge much later and had therefore to be placed in the mid-sixth century BCE (1). This conclusion rested on two presuppositions. First, Dtr was but a single, if extremely gifted and erudite, person, whose activity could not span more than a few decades. Second, “er hat in dem göttlichen Gericht, das sich in dem von ihm dargestellten äusseren Zusammenbruch des Volkes Israel vollzog, offenbar etwas Endgültiges und Abschlie- ssendes gesehen und eine Zukunftshoffnung nicht einmal in der bescheidensten und einfachsten Form einer Erwartung der künftigen Sammlung der zerstreuten Deportierten zum Ausdruck gebracht”, thereby displaying lack of awareness of the second chance that the community received under Persian rule (2). Studies of the last three decades have left both presuppositions in shambles. At the first stage of this paradigm shift, which began in the early 1970s, Dtr was reconceptualized as a “school” or a “movement”, that is, a group of similarly minded individuals. Since in principle such a group can endure over several generations, emergence of the Former Prophets came to be seen as a gradual process that began well before Jehoiachin’s release and continued for at least some time after it; conceptual, and sometimes even factual, inconsistencies and tensions abounding in the corpus were interpreted as traces of its multi-stage (1) M. NOTH, Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien. Die sammelnden und bearbeitenden Geschichtswerke im Alten Testament (Tübingen 1957) 12. (2) NOTH, Studien, 108.