Deuteronomy's overall structure, an opening historical review of the journey from Sinai, a central law code, and closing blessings and curses invoking witnesses to the covenant, closely follows the standard form of ancient Near Eastern suzerainty treaties known from Hittite and later Assyrian archives, which likewise open with a historical prologue recounting the great king's past benefits before setting out obligations and consequences. Biblical scholars, drawing on this comparison, read Devarim as opening a book deliberately organised as a covenant renewal document addressed to a new generation, structurally distinct from the narrative-legal style of Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers that precede it.
Deuteronomy's speeches shift, sometimes within a single paragraph, between addressing Israel in the second person singular and the second person plural, a grammatical inconsistency easily lost in English translation but visible in the Hebrew text, that scholars studying Deuteronomy's own composition, apart from the broader source-critical model applied to the earlier books, have long used as evidence that the book combines material from more than one stage of composition or editing, though specialists differ on how many layers to distinguish and how to date each one.