Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Law

In two different treatments of the Nuzi contract HSS V 67, E. A. Speiser provided two different transliterations and translations of a key phrase without giving his reasons for the revision. It turns out that the text in question is damaged, rendering one particular cuneiform sign nearly unreadable. The significance of Speiser’s revision for biblical studies is that, depending on which reading is taken, this text provides some legal background either for the concern that a full wife might send away the children of a secondary wife (as in Genesis 21) or for the phenomenon of surrogate motherhood (i. e. the identification of the child of a secondary wife as in some way the child of the full wife; see Genesis 16 and 30). Though some biblical scholars have noted Speiser’s two translations, no one so far has engaged in a technical discussion of the primary text in order to understand the revision. Rather, scholars have sometimes simply chosen the reading that fits better with their purposes (usually Speiser’s earlier reading). This article examines the original cuneiform text of HSS V 67 in order to ascertain, using orthographical and linguistic data, which of Speiser’s two readings is the more likely. Speiser’s revised reading proves to be the correct one, meaning that HSS V 67 does not provide a background legal concern that a full wife might send away the sons of a secondary wife (e. g. Genesis 21).

This paper considers the fact that the verbal forms typically used in the protases (if-clauses) of conditional sentences in the law code of Hammurabi (iptaras and iprus) have a typical value of past ('if a man stole a man's small child …'), while the verbal forms typically used in the protases of conditional sentences in the Book of the Covenant (yiqṭōl and wĕqāṭal) have a typical value of future ('if a man will steal another man …'). Meanwhile, the verbal forms typically used in the apodoses (then-clauses) of conditional sentences in both CoH (iparras) and BC (yiqṭōl and wĕqāṭal) have a typical value of future ('… then he must be killed').

The interpretation here, however, assumes that it was the ruins of Jericho, and not a living city, that inspired the Inauguration of Joshua at Jericho. The ruins of its lofty tower and massive walls were monuments to the affluence and organization of the peoples who once lived at Jericho. Like others who came on these ruins, the Hebrews were awestruck. The ruins made the Hebrews wonder why Yahweh allowed this great city to be destroyed, and whether or not they should rebuild it.

This translation of Deuteronomy follows a similar approach to my translations of Genesis and Samuel. In this, as in my other translations, my priority was always to express the ideas in the text in the most natural way in English, and at the same time to capture the energy and rhythm of the original Hebrew. Compared with my other translations, this translation is "freer" and departs further and more frequently from the literal meaning of the text. This is especially true for the many laws in the middle portions of the book, which are written in a legalistic prose style that I could only reproduce by employing a more formal semi-legalistic vocabulary and syntax.

One unique aspect of this translation is that it jettisons the traditional chapter divisions and instead organizes the material according to the Masoretic parashot. Organizing the text in this way gets us closer to the ancient writers, and yields numerous insights into their composition approach.

The commentary accompanying the translation focuses primarily on issues of translation and language. After the commentary I provide an essay that summarizes my views on the composition history of Deuteronomy and that assigns each of the parashot to one of the four major compositional stages that I identify, which span a period of nearly three hundred years, from the late seventh century to the mid fourth century BCE.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike International 4.0 license. The full text can also be downloaded at the Internet archive at https://archive.org/details/deuteronomy_202008/mode/2up.

The print edition of this book is available at: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1733441573/

Here are presented the Georgian translation and comments of the Hittite laws. The Hittites were one of the oldest Indo-European inhabitants of present-day Turkey, living in central Anatolia. They appeared at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC and created a strong military state.

This volume examines how gender relations were regulated in ancient Near Eastern and biblical law. The textual corpus examined includes the various pertinent law collections, royal decrees and instructions from Mesopotamia and Hatti, and the three biblical legal collections.

Law and Gender in the Ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible offers an invaluable resource for anyone working on Near Eastern society and culture, and gender in the ancient world more broadly.

Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für altorientalische und biblische Rechtsgeschichte 4. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. The book examines the laws in the Pentateuch that govern trial-court witnesses and their testimony (for example, the requirement of at least two witnesses and the prohibition of false testimony). Through a detailed comparison of these laws with Neo-Babylonian trial records, the author proposes new solutions to longstanding interpretive problems posed by the biblical texts. The book argues that these records from Mesopotamia shed important light on the biblical laws and demonstrate how rules, like those contained in the pentateuchal codes, may have operated within an ancient Near Eastern judicial system. The features shared by the biblical and Neo-Babylonian material include legal terminology, evidence requirements, a preference for empirical evidence over religious rituals for resolving disputes, and the treatment of wrongful prosecution. The author concludes that these features are more pronounced in the Neo-Babylonian than any other period, although they may have developed over time and found their way into the biblical codes even before then. The book contains fresh analysis of a number of Neo-Babylonian as well as biblical texts.

This article argues that each of the three discrete law collections in the Pentateuch (the Covenant Code, the Holiness Code, and the Deuteronomic Code) possesses a distinctive approach to interpreting legal traditions. The article focuses on the interpretation of longstanding traditions that circulated in the broader ancient Near East. It looks at how the pentateuchal collections respond to expressions of these traditions in other biblical and cuneiform texts. It maintains that the Covenant Code discloses a traditional mode of interpretation, the Deuteronomic Code engages in an interpretive approach of redirection and expansion, and the Holiness Code promotes the interpretation of redefinition.

This article demonstrates the overlooked contribution of the ancient Near East to the development of constitutional law. The legal corpus of Deuteronomy provides a utopian model for the organization of the state, one that enshrines separation of powers and their systematic subordination to a public legal text—the “Torah”—that delineates their jurisdiction while also ensuring their autonomy. This legislation establishes an independent judiciary while bringing even the monarch under the full authority of the law. Deuteronomy’s implicit model for a political constitution is unprecedented in legal history. Two of its cornerstones are fundamental to the modern idea of constitutional government: (1) the clear division of political powers into separate spheres of authority; and (2) the subordination of each branch to the authority of the law. This legislation was so utopian in its own time that it seems never to have been implemented; instead, idealism rapidly yielded to political pragmatism. Nonetheless, Deuteronomy’s draft constitution provides an important corrective to standard accounts of constitutional legal history.

Keywords:
Constitutional theory; rule of law; separation of powers; Deut 16:18-18:22; Laws of public officials; Law of the king; independence of the judiciary; Deut 17:14-20; Ämtergesetze; Verfassungstheorie; Torah monarchy; Sophocles Antigone law; Herodotus Demaratus; Greek kingship; Mishnah King; mishnah Aboth 1:1; American constitution; Josephus πολιτεία [politeia]; origin of judicial system; Hammurabi; founding myth; independent judiciary.

This paper compares the genre of legal code across four different ancient cultures with an eye towards identifying both the inherent poetics of a code and the processes through which readers narrativize codes in order to give them context and meaning.

Necromancy is integral to the structure of Leviticus 20, being closely tied to each of the main Decalogue headings in the chapter. First, there is a close connection between necromancy and idolatry, in the form of Molech worship. This is not merely associative, but social, because vv. 2-6 seem to form a narrative sequence. Leviticus 20–21 present a structural opposition between the ‘Molech priest’ and the ‘Yhwh priest’. This implies that the practitioner of vv. 2-5 gains access to the underworld, and hence acquires an alternative form of spiritual power and cultic status as a necromancer (v. 6). This may be the reason why necromancy ‘naturally’ follows Molech worship. Second, within the worldview of Leviticus, necromancy is seen as dishonouring to ancestors, and is thus connected to the dishonouring of parents (v. 9). Third, the form of necromantic divination described in v. 27 is thought to involve actual ‘penetration’ of the ancestor spirit in the body of the practitioner. Within the Levitical worldview, necromancy is thus presented as the worst form of intercourse. Finally, necromancy is a fitting choice of capital penalty with which to close the chapter. It is the ultimate breach of boundaries in terms of sexual relationships and thus combines themes of sex and death evident elsewhere in the chapter, as well as the theme of inter-generational relationships. The closing verse can be seen as a dramatic, final, case which draws together all the main themes of the chapter into a single paradigm. If one wanted to come up with a single case that drew together all the ‘headings’ of the chapter—namely, spiritism, inter-generational relationships and sexual behaviour—this would be it. Far from being an example of the lex clausulae finalis, Lev. 20.27 is, instead, its pièce de résistance—the final, striking, case which defines the chapter as a whole.

How were legal issues featuring women treated and resolved in the Book of Numbers? Francesco Cocco studies a trio of texts and finds the prominent place afforded to women quite peculiar and, it seems, at odds with the notions of autonomy, freedom, self-determination, or whatever other synonym can be married conceptually to the idea of women in leading roles. This in-depth investigation goes beyond appearances however to reveal a broader, perhaps even unexpected, understanding of these three literary traditions – traditions which are the product of the skilful amalgamation of narrative and legislative material so characteristic of the Torah in general and the Book of Numbers in particular.

Analysis of the five accounts of the making of a vow in the biblical texts reveals that the essential requirement of returning to the place in which the vow was made finds expression in almost all the cases in the obligations undertaken in its framework. The vow thus serves as a tool for achieving the fundamental wish of returning home safely, as well as elucidating how Absalom justified his appeal to David to let him go to pay his vow in Hebron and why this request failed to arouse David’s suspicions

The sixth commandment has been translated into English as either, "You shall not murder," or, "You shall not kill," but the Hebrew word that has been translated as "murder" or "kill" is a relatively rare root throughout the Hebrew Bible in comparison with the many other Hebrew words for the taking of life. Other than the prohibitions (the sixth commandment) in Exodus 20:13 and Deuteronomy 5:17, every time that the root appears in the Hexateuch, it is in the very specific context of the cities of refuge. Outside of the Hexateuch, the root occurs only three times in the Deuteronomistic History, and two of those times are directly related to each other. All other occurrences of the root are in a limited number of passages throughout the rest of the Hebrew Bible, and they provide little insight into the meaning of the root. While the meaning of the root still eludes us, it is important to recognize the problems of our present English translations of the sixth commandment. Given the limited scope of the root as well as its relative obscurity in other parts of the Bible, by systematically walk through every case in the Hebrew Bible where the root appears, I demonstrate that the Hebrew root in the sixth commandment should not be understood as either "murder" or "kill."

What are the sex crimes dealt with in the laws of the Hebrew Bible, and does the approach taken by these laws differ from that found in ancient Near Eastern societies other than Israel and Judah? These are the questions that this article seeks to address. The conclusion will be that, in the pentateuchal law collections, adultery is the one sexual violation considered to be a crime, as opposed to being only a sin against the god Yahweh, and that the main treatment of the topic in Deuteronomy does not differ dramatically from that of the cuneiform law collections.

Although at frst glance it might seem that §108–111 of the Laws of Hammurabi (LH) are not a unifed corpus, this article shows that §108–111 is a unifed corpus containing a main denominator – the king/state’s intervention and control of the female sābītu’s business venture in her capacity as either an entrepreneur or a state agent. In all four paragraphs, we encounter sub-denominators, i.e., (1) the sābītu, holding a leading or supplementary position together with (2) the sābītu’s business place or her house, and (3) the sābītu’s business activities. Then, although only §108–110 entail dramatic executions, §111 is still part of the unifed corpus for it serves as a transitional phrase to the preceding corpus. Overall the different scenarios in the unifed corpus of §108–111 illustrate King Hammurabi’s idealistic ambition for centralisation and control, especially with regards to the female sābītu’s business venture, thus engrossing the reader in different case studies within a certain grouping

Sovereign Authority and the Elaboration of Law in the Bible and the Ancient Near East Forschungen zum Alten Testament 2/122 Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020. Pp. xvi + 367. Paper. €89.00. ISBN 9783161595097. Sandra Jacobs Leo Baeck and King's Colleges (London)

The law on the “cities of refuge” contained in Num 35,9–34 is almost universally seen as a simple repetition of legal content that is basically already present in the legislation of other biblical books. Francesco Cocco demonstrates that we find ourselves here before a case of reformulation instead of simple repetition, the implications of which are extremely interesting for the understanding of biblical penal legislation. In this particular fragment, it exhibits traces of modernity so surprising as to be as good as the defence of civil liberties in the legal systems currently in force in the majority of democratic states.
The author’s enquiry takes its starting point and develops, therefore, from the novel contribution which the legislation in Num 35,9–34 confers on the entire biblical law of a penal character.

The so-called “law of the rebellious son” in Deut 21:18–21 has drawn many different interpretations. The excessive nature of the punishment (stoning to death) for a son not listening to his parents is, at the very least, striking. Moreover, it is an affair in which the community gets involved, learning the story from the parents (v20) and performing the penalty in public (v21): at the gate of ‘his city’ (v19–20). The law’s rationale indicates how much
of a threat the son’s behaviour is to society: to the land’s purity and the people’s own conscience. This challenging dynamic begs the question, what constitutes filial disobedience such that it deserves a public capital penalty? Why does everyone get involved? The legal process shows that the son’s behaviour is more than his or his family’s business: it concerns
the nation. But if this law is read as also applying to the nation, such communal interest in the extreme punishment takes on a further significance. If the whole of Israel is seen as the stubborn and rebellious son, then it is the nation that faces the threat of destruction for its
disobedience. Indeed, allusions to the law in two later biblical texts have been made to strengthen references to the fall of both Northern and Southern Kingdoms (Jer 5; Ps 78). A collective reading, suggested by the Deuteronomic context, accommodates the severity of the punishment as a warning of the nation’s destiny.

Jeffrey Stackert argues that the Holiness Legislation (including the traditional Holiness Code [Lev 17-26] plus outlying pieces of legislation that have typically been attributed to P) is a sort of "super law," the last of the biblical law codes which incorporates and expands upon all the older ones (Covenant Code and Deuteronomic Code).  The evidence for direct literary dependence of HL on D, however, is less strong than one would like.