Jeremy Bentham and the Birth of the Modern Study of Biblical Law (original) (raw)
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An Emerging Account of Biblical Law: Common-Law Tradition in the Old and New Testaments
This paper will examine recent scholarship on the topic of biblical law in order to demonstrate that biblical law is best understood as a common-law tradition. After outlining long-standing questions in regard to the nature of law in the Hebrew Bible, I will argue for a complementarian rather than supersessionist view of law, following the work of Berman. The complementarian perspective entails a common-law account of the nature of the law tradition as opposed to the ubiquitous and presupposed statutory view. I will then further develop Berman’s argument by appealing to Jackson’s semiotic hermeneutic for interpreting biblical law. As supporting evidence, I will examine several biblical texts where scholars have demonstrated the explanatory power of non-statutory interpretation. To flesh out the implications of the common law approach, I will discuss the pivotal role of judges using distinctions described by Reaume. Finally, I will provide evidence for the claim that this common-law view is applicable not only to the Hebrew Bible but also to the New Testament. These texts and scholarly viewpoints together provide compelling evidence that the biblical law tradition is a common-law tradition that operates not by the force of codified legislation but rather through the agency of judges shaped by the values of the tradition that is maintained in both major corpora of biblical texts.
The Cambridge Companion to Law in the Hebrew Bible
2024
This Companion offers a comprehensive overview of the history, nature, and legacy of biblical law. Examining the debates that swirl around the nature of biblical law, it explores its historical context, the significance of its rules, and its influence on early Judaism and Christianity. The volume also interrogates key questions: Were the rules intended to function as ancient Israel's statutory law? Is there evidence to indicate that they served a different purpose? What is the relationship between this legal material and other parts of the Hebrew Bible? Most importantly, the book provides an in-depth look at the content of the Torah's laws, with individual essays on substantive, procedural, and ritual law. With contributions from an international team of experts, written specially for this volume, _The Cambridge Companion to Law in the Hebrew Bible_ provides an up-to-date look at scholarship on biblical law and outlines themes and topics for future research.
“Biblical Law and Rabbinic Literature.” Pages 283-99 in The Cambridge Companion to Law in the Hebrew Bible. Edited by Bruce Wells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024. , 2024
Introduction 1 bruce wells Part I The Historical Context of Biblical Law 1 Law in the Ancient Near East 15 sophie dé mare-lafont 2 Law in the Eastern Mediterranean 34 anselm c. hagedorn Part II The Biblical Legal Collections 3 The Nature of the Collections 55 bruce wells 4 The Origins of the Laws 76 sara j. milstein 5 The Narrative Context of the Collections 95 simeon chavel Part III The Biblical Laws 6 Substantive Law 117 sandra jacobs 7 Procedural Law 138 giovanna r. czander 8 Ritual Law 158 michael b. hundley Part IV Biblical Law and Other Scriptural Discourses 9 Law and Prophecy 181 reinhard achenbach vii
Law and the Bible: justice, mercy, and legal institutions
Choice Reviews Online, 2014
Each of the nine chapters of Law and the Bible is cowritten by a legal scholar and a theologian. The goal of these pairings is "to integrate different areas of human learning" and to ensure that the work addresses concerns that "legal scholars alone or theologians alone might miss" (15). With rare exceptions, the contents of each of the chapters should be fully accessible to the educated lay reader. Prior legal training is not required because, for all of the authors, the level of applicability of the biblical text stops well short of an agenda for the sorts of policies to which many Christians of varying political persuasions often put it. Each of the essays presumes facility with the biblical text and at least some awareness of hermeneutics and the history of biblical interpretation. Coming from the leading publisher in American Evangelicalism, these presumptions will generally be met among the readership of Law and the Bible. Drawing from the book of Genesis, the rst chapter of Law and the Bible, "The Biblical Foundations of Law: Creation, Fall and the Patriarchs," shows the strong inuence of the Reformed "two-kingdoms" approach of coauthor David VanDrunen, whose book Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms: A Study in the Development of Reformed Social Thought was previously reviewed in the Journal. 1 Whatever reservations might be had about some aspects of two-kingdoms theology need not keep one from drawing valuable insights from this chapter. Questions of authority (distinguished from power), the nature of "the good" (distinguished from desires), and the place of law both before and after the fall into sin are well displayed. The chapter is worth reading for its careful parsing of the creation account, analysis of the implications of sin, exegesis of the Noahic covenant, and attention to the contemporary signicance of patterns of patriarchal life. Chapter 2, "Law and Political Order: Israel's Constitutional History," largely follows the pattern of analysis seen in the rst chapter. Relying signicantly on the political-theological work of Oliver O'Donovan, law professor William Brewbaker and theologian V. Philips Long review topics such as holy war, Israel as a nation among the nations, the contemporary signicance of the mixed nature of its government, and the theo-political import of Israel's eventual exile. Brewbaker and Long accept the traditional dating and authorship of what Christians identify as the "historical books" of the Hebrew Scriptures. They do not, however, read them without nuance. The historical and cultural distance of the modern reader from the circumstances of ancient Israel is taken seriously. Thus, they caution that "the Old Testament has proven susceptible to misuse as a political sourcebook" if only because "Israel [had], during this period, a wide variety of political institutions and practices, none of which seem[ed] to have been adequate" (50). They ultimately argue that the questions of modern political theory-the relationships of individuals, associations, and the state-are simply absent from the biblical text, and that to derive specic answers to those questions from that text is therefore misguided. Instead, they conclude that the contemporary political signicance of these historical accounts lies in their fundamental teachings about a God whose providential control extends to the weal and woe of human activity generally and not the details of political or legal rules. The three subsequent chapters address specic application of the Torah, Wisdom literature, and the prophetic writings to contemporary state law. Here, one can observe an increasing variety of 1 C.
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 Law and Religion, 2014
Each of the nine chapters of Law and the Bible is cowritten by a legal scholar and a theologian. The goal of these pairings is "to integrate different areas of human learning" and to ensure that the work addresses concerns that "legal scholars alone or theologians alone might miss" (15). With rare exceptions, the contents of each of the chapters should be fully accessible to the educated lay reader. Prior legal training is not required because, for all of the authors, the level of applicability of the biblical text stops well short of an agenda for the sorts of policies to which many Christians of varying political persuasions often put it. Each of the essays presumes facility with the biblical text and at least some awareness of hermeneutics and the history of biblical interpretation. Coming from the leading publisher in American Evangelicalism, these presumptions will generally be met among the readership of Law and the Bible. Drawing from the book of Genesis, the rst chapter of Law and the Bible, "The Biblical Foundations of Law: Creation, Fall and the Patriarchs," shows the strong inuence of the Reformed "two-kingdoms" approach of coauthor David VanDrunen, whose book Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms: A Study in the Development of Reformed Social Thought was previously reviewed in the Journal. 1 Whatever reservations might be had about some aspects of two-kingdoms theology need not keep one from drawing valuable insights from this chapter. Questions of authority (distinguished from power), the nature of "the good" (distinguished from desires), and the place of law both before and after the fall into sin are well displayed. The chapter is worth reading for its careful parsing of the creation account, analysis of the implications of sin, exegesis of the Noahic covenant, and attention to the contemporary signicance of patterns of patriarchal life. Chapter 2, "Law and Political Order: Israel's Constitutional History," largely follows the pattern of analysis seen in the rst chapter. Relying signicantly on the political-theological work of Oliver O'Donovan, law professor William Brewbaker and theologian V. Philips Long review topics such as holy war, Israel as a nation among the nations, the contemporary signicance of the mixed nature of its government, and the theo-political import of Israel's eventual exile. Brewbaker and Long accept the traditional dating and authorship of what Christians identify as the "historical books" of the Hebrew Scriptures. They do not, however, read them without nuance. The historical and cultural distance of the modern reader from the circumstances of ancient Israel is taken seriously. Thus, they caution that "the Old Testament has proven susceptible to misuse as a political sourcebook" if only because "Israel [had], during this period, a wide variety of political institutions and practices, none of which seem[ed] to have been adequate" (50). They ultimately argue that the questions of modern political theory-the relationships of individuals, associations, and the state-are simply absent from the biblical text, and that to derive specic answers to those questions from that text is therefore misguided. Instead, they conclude that the contemporary political signicance of these historical accounts lies in their fundamental teachings about a God whose providential control extends to the weal and woe of human activity generally and not the details of political or legal rules. The three subsequent chapters address specic application of the Torah, Wisdom literature, and the prophetic writings to contemporary state law. Here, one can observe an increasing variety of 1 C.
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 the Bible: Justice, Mercy and Legal Institutions (book review)
2014
Each of the nine chapters of Law and the Bible is cowritten by a legal scholar and a theologian. The goal of these pairings is "to integrate different areas of human learning" and to ensure that the work addresses concerns that "legal scholars alone or theologians alone might miss" (15). With rare exceptions, the contents of each of the chapters should be fully accessible to the educated lay reader. Prior legal training is not required because, for all of the authors, the level of applicability of the biblical text stops well short of an agenda for the sorts of policies to which many Christians of varying political persuasions often put it. Each of the essays presumes facility with the biblical text and at least some awareness of hermeneutics and the history of biblical interpretation. Coming from the leading publisher in American Evangelicalism, these presumptions will generally be met among the readership of Law and the Bible. Drawing from the book of Genesis, the rst chapter of Law and the Bible, "The Biblical Foundations of Law: Creation, Fall and the Patriarchs," shows the strong inuence of the Reformed "two-kingdoms" approach of coauthor David VanDrunen, whose book Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms: A Study in the Development of Reformed Social Thought was previously reviewed in the Journal. 1 Whatever reservations might be had about some aspects of two-kingdoms theology need not keep one from drawing valuable insights from this chapter. Questions of authority (distinguished from power), the nature of "the good" (distinguished from desires), and the place of law both before and after the fall into sin are well displayed. The chapter is worth reading for its careful parsing of the creation account, analysis of the implications of sin, exegesis of the Noahic covenant, and attention to the contemporary signicance of patterns of patriarchal life. Chapter 2, "Law and Political Order: Israel's Constitutional History," largely follows the pattern of analysis seen in the rst chapter. Relying signicantly on the political-theological work of Oliver O'Donovan, law professor William Brewbaker and theologian V. Philips Long review topics such as holy war, Israel as a nation among the nations, the contemporary signicance of the mixed nature of its government, and the theo-political import of Israel's eventual exile. Brewbaker and Long accept the traditional dating and authorship of what Christians identify as the "historical books" of the Hebrew Scriptures. They do not, however, read them without nuance. The historical and cultural distance of the modern reader from the circumstances of ancient Israel is taken seriously. Thus, they caution that "the Old Testament has proven susceptible to misuse as a political sourcebook" if only because "Israel [had], during this period, a wide variety of political institutions and practices, none of which seem[ed] to have been adequate" (50). They ultimately argue that the questions of modern political theory-the relationships of individuals, associations, and the state-are simply absent from the biblical text, and that to derive specic answers to those questions from that text is therefore misguided. Instead, they conclude that the contemporary political signicance of these historical accounts lies in their fundamental teachings about a God whose providential control extends to the weal and woe of human activity generally and not the details of political or legal rules. The three subsequent chapters address specic application of the Torah, Wisdom literature, and the prophetic writings to contemporary state law. Here, one can observe an increasing variety of 1 C.
Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History, 2007
This article draws upon Robert Alter's insights into biblical narrative to challenge the strict dichotomies between law and narrative in the Hebrew Bible, demonstrating that both genres share many rhetorical techniques, and providing a template of narrative vision and legal praxis ...