The Valediction of Moses: A Proto-Biblical Book

Idan Dershowitz's The Valediction of Moses is a 2021 academic monograph from Mohr Siebeck, a respected European academic press, arguing that the nineteenth century Shapira Strips, long dismissed as Moses Wilhelm Shapira's own forgery, in fact preserve an authentic and much earlier proto biblical text underlying the book of Deuteronomy. Dershowitz supports the argument with philological analysis and with his own archival discovery of a draft transcription of the strips among Shapira's papers, a genuine contribution regardless of how the authenticity question ultimately settles. Its status is a serious, professionally published reassessment rather than either a fringe claim or an accepted new consensus; specialists in biblical philology and manuscript history have responded with real interest and real skepticism in roughly equal measure. Cite it as a documented contemporary scholarly position under live debate, not as having resolved the strips' authenticity.