The article reads the invention of the Exodus-Narrative in its historical context of the religious and political system of the Ancient Near East. It reconstructs the revolutionary different approach to political power and theological... more
The article reads the invention of the Exodus-Narrative in its historical context of the religious and political system of the Ancient Near East. It reconstructs the revolutionary different approach to political power and theological foundation in the development of the Mose- and Exodus-Narrative and its innerbiblical Fortschreibung. For this development it is most decisive that the Exodus-Narrative is not based on a historical migration-movement "from point A to point B", but on a historical confrontation with the political powers at that time. The foundation of a strict monotheistic understanding of theology and the invention of “textual authority” that diverged from the status of scripture in the Ancient Near East and which can be reconstructed through the structure of the Exodus-Narrative and its canonical form as the Tora of Mose, has laid the foundation for the identity of Israel and the basis for the three Monotheistic Religions. The article's argument is strictly developed in correspondence with contemporary exegetical and historical research (esp. E. Otto and Chr. Dohmen) and is brought together with contemporary accounts to political thought from poststructuralist and deconstructive philosophers like Derrida, Levinas, Badiou and Agamben. The outcome of this study is articulated as a contribution to an affirmative reading of the so-called »crisis of representation«.
In this article, we discuss a question bearing on the fundamental principles of criminal law in the Hebrew Bible: are they self-standing postulates on which the biblical laws are based (as suggested by Moshe Greenberg), or late... more
In this article, we discuss a question bearing on the fundamental principles of criminal law in the Hebrew Bible: are they self-standing postulates on which the biblical laws are based (as suggested by Moshe Greenberg), or late generalizations made from specific legal norms and statements which predate them? We address this question by considering Mesopotamian documents about a millennium older than biblical legal corpora – two 18th-century BCE letters found in Mari on the Middle Euphrates, and a 19th-century BCE treaty between two towns in the Diyala basin. Despite the spatial and temporal distance between these sources and the biblical legal corpora, the social and cultural similarities between the Amorite populations of northern Mesopotamia and Ancient Israel as reflected in the Hebrew Bible justify a comparison between the legal norms and practices in these two societies. Our discussion shows that at least one of the postulates of biblical law formulated by Greenberg – the absolute value of human life, which rules out monetary compensation in capital cases – finds expression in the legal practices of the Amorite tribes. Accordingly, we conclude that those legal practices, as well as the norm of blood revenge which is clearly connected to them, were inherited by Ancient Israel from its Northwest Semitic background, and their crystallization into a fundamental legal principle was a result of a later historical process.
