"Lawless, Lawlessness," in the Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (EBR). (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Cambridge Companion to Judaism and Law
There are two main precursors to Jewish law: one historical, and one literary. Historically, the clans, tribes, villages, cities, and eventually monarchies of Israel had law-in-practice for centuries, much of which was unwritten and can only be at best speculatively reconstructed by scholars today. On the literary side, some laws, stories about legal practice, and legal modes of address are preserved in writing in the Hebrew Biblethough the relationship between these writings and actual legal practice is extremely difficult to determine and may in fact be nonexistent. What can be said, then, about law in biblical Israel that spans both a history of ancient juridical practice of which we have little record and a record of legal discourse that may bear little relation to historical practice? Perhaps only a negative conclusion, albeit a significant one may be reached: that law does not seem to have been a highly developed, autonomous field, or a "system" in any real sense of the word. Rather, law in practice in ancient Israel appears to have been continuous with other social practices, an extension of familial or political duties. Moreover, law in writing, from its inception, appears to have been non-systematic and non-comprehensive; as preserved formally in the Hebrew Bible, rather than being more fully systematized, it was rather more fully embedded among an array of other discourses, such as the human-divine covenantal history, the poetry of the prophets, or the heightened emotional rhetoric of Deuteronomy. This chapter will first present an overview of legal practice in ancient Israel, showing, through a case study of homicide and blood feud, that far from being an autonomous, circumscribed field, law was rather a rule-bound pursuit of remedy for injury intimately tied to family and clan networks, as well as political or state institutions. Based on the limited evidence we have, we may also be able to hypothesize that legal practice in ancient Israel was open to improvisation, compromise and private negotiation. 1 Fraade, Legal Fictions, p. 12. 2 Fuller, Morality, p. 106. Fuller also discusses here the issue of the definitional feasibility of law being present even when a state-like authority to fully enforce legal rules is not operative. For him, it confuses the ability to fully realize the potential of a legal system with the definition of law itself. See also Hadfield and Weingast, "Law without the State," which provides multiple examples of societies that possessed what we might call "law" even though there is an absence of state coercion to enforce sanctions and penalties.
Law and Lawlessness in Texts from Qumran
Law and Lawlessness in Early Judaism and Early Christianity (eds. David Lincicum, Ruth Sheridan, and Charles Stang; WUNT 420; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck), 2019
Lawlessness taken as disregard for, or disobedience to the law by Israelites features largely in three respects in the Scrolls: first, as the historic lawlessness of Israel, from which the initiate to the group had to return to the Torah of Moses; second, as the (re)lapse of group members or initiates into various kinds of lawlessness; and third, as the present lawlessness of other Israelites, such as those whose practices are guided by a “wrong” calendar, a corrupt legal tradition, or a faulty understanding of the Torah. Lawlessness in the Scrolls serves largely as a means of “othering”: temporally, socially, and halakhically. It is seen as a deviation from which the law-abiding community has to be preserved; this strengthens the identity of this community. Ultimately, all true Sons of Light will be preserved from this feature of the rule of Belial.
Old Testament Essays, 2020
Various laws were practised in ancient Israel. Although the present study will introduce briefly the concept of law as practised in Ancient Near East (ANE) in general, the project focuses particularly on ancient Israel as depicted by the Old Testament (OT) law traditions. The study seeks to investigate two main issues, namely: (1) formulation and implementation of the laws in ancient Israel, and (2) the application of the OT laws during the New Testament (NT) era and in Christendom. An attempt is made to respond to the following three research questions: (1) how were the OT laws formulated and implemented? (2) Were the OT laws the same as those practised by pagan nations or kings? (3) what is the NT/Christian view of the OT laws? In its entirety, the discourse will utilise two approaches, namely: (1) narrative inquiry, and (2) desk research.
Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages 39/2 (2013), pp. 1-17
The article explores an unusual literary phenomenon in both biblical and Mesopotamian traditions: a consecutive order of clauses in a law collection serves to structure the plot of a later, narrative composition. The plot of Ruth follows the list of commandments in Deut 24:16-25:10, while a portion of the Neo-Babylonian work, “Nebuchadnezzar King of Justice” follows the order of LH 1-5. Strikingly, these narrative compositions invoke the venerated law codes of their respective traditions, and yet, at the same time, the practice of those very same laws invoked, is seen to be at variance with the prescriptions of the earlier codes. The implications of the phenomenon for understanding processes of legal revision in the ancient Near East are explored.
Biblical and ancient Near Eastern law
Religion Compass, 2018
Biblical law has had a profound influence on Western culture, but it must be understood in its historical context. It arose in the context of the tradition of Mesopotamian law, where scribes exhibited their flair for justice by writing statutes on a repertoire of traditional cases, of which the most outstanding example is the Laws of Hammurabi. Rarely did legal texts explicitly discuss legal principles. Three collections of formal legal statutes are found in the Hebrew Bible. The Book of the Covenant is most like Mesopotamian law in dealing with disputes arising in an agrarian society. The priestly law consists of two sources, the priestly source that aims at protecting the welfare of the people by the performance of sacred rituals and the Holiness source that seeks to sanctify the everyday activities of the people. Deuteronomy aims at ritual and social reforms. Among the most debated issues in scholarship today is biblical law's view of women.
Understanding the Israelite Legal System in the Biblical Text
Many times the biblical narrative presents us with stories that it believes occurred to the Hebrew people and its antecedents, and incidentally recounts legal actions that the individuals within had taken in their lives. This inevitably builds up to the climactic revelation at Sinai and the resulting civilization thereafter in which the laws continue to develop. This paper is an attempt to follow several key features of the Israelite legal system as they develop within the text.
Criminal law in the Old Testament
2020
Since much contemporary jurisprudence goes back in one way or another to its forebears, both recent and ancient, it is no surprise that criminal law, specifcally, also owes much to antique legal traditions and corpora. 2 This point is even truer when the framework in question is an explicitly Christian approach to (criminal) law, since Christianity has, from its inception, looked to Holy Scripture for inspiration and guidance, correction and instruction. As is well known, the words "Scripture" and "Scriptures" in the Greek New Testament almost invariably refer to what Christians now call the Old Testament, 3 and it is readily apparent that the Old Testament contains far more legal material, generically speaking, than the New. So, if one is looking for biblical materials pertaining to crime and delict, such matters will be found most easily and extensively in the Hebrew Bible. 4 Criminal law is a vast subject-in the biblical world no less than today-and so what follows is but a brief introduction to the subject that focuses on several aspects of Old Testament criminal law within its cultural environment. 5 I will 1 My thanks go to the editors for their assistance and to my fellow contributors for helpful remarks at the conference in London. I am especially grateful to Chloë Kennedy and Albert Alschuler for their thoughtful feedback 2 See, inter alia, Brent A. Strawn, ed. The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Law, 2 vols.
In the 1980's scholars identified the "legal blend"—the phenomenon in Ezra-Nehemiah and Chronicles whereby the practice of a law is expressed as a conflation of two earlier iterations of the law as found in the legal corpora of the Pentateuch. The phenomenon is thought to reflect upheaval in Israel's history and the need to reach a great compromise between competing strands of legal tradition. Discussions have identified legal blends in the books of Ezra-Nehemiah and Chronicles in descriptions of normative practice. This study claims that we also find the legal blend employed toward " aggadic " or rhetorical ends, whereby the law is extracted from its original focus and emerges within a new configuration of meaning. This study identifies seven narratives that blend iterations of the same law from across what are normally construed as distinct legal corpora. These examples are found in a broad range of narrative texts, most from the so-called Deuteronomic History. Trends that emerge from these examples are identified. The findings complicate the claim that the legal blend was exclusively a post-exilic phenomenon.