The Legal Literature of the Hebrew Bible (original) (raw)
Related papers
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
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.
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.
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.
Laws in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion, 2019
Biblical laws are found mainly in the Pentateuch (i.e., the first five books of the Hebrew Bible). The laws are linked to the figure of Moses, who is depicted as having received them directly from God in order to transmit them to the people of Israel during the years in the Wilderness after being released from slavery in Egypt. Biblical laws are thus presented as being of divine origin. Their authority was further bolstered by a tradition that they were included in covenants (i.e., formal agreements made between God and the people as recorded in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy). Similar claims of divine origin were not made for other ancient Near Eastern laws; their authority flowed from kings, who issued the laws, although these kings might also be seen as having been placed on their thrones through the favor of the gods. The biblical law collections are unlike other ancient Near Eastern “codes” in that they include sacral laws (i.e., governing cult, worship, and ritual, as well as secular laws: namely, governing civil, and criminal behaviors). This mingling of sacral and secular categories is the likely reason both for the many terms used to denote the laws, as well as for the unexpected number of formulations in which they are presented. The formulations used in biblical law can be classified as “casuistic” or “non-casuistic.” They are not equally distributed in the books of the Pentateuch nor are they equally used with secular and sacral laws. While there are similarities in content between secular laws found in the Hebrew Bible and laws found in the ancient Near Eastern law “codes,” the latter do not exhibit a comparable variety in the numbers of law terms and formulations. The Hebrew Bible tended to “blur” the differences between the law terms and their formulations, ultimately to the point of subsuming them all under the law term torah (“teaching”) to describe the totality of the divinely given laws in the Pentateuch. Biblical studies in general and Pentateuchal studies in particular are challenged by the fact that manuscripts contemporary with the events described have not survived the ravages the time. Scholars must therefore rely on looking for “clues” within the texts themselves (e.g., the laws cited by the prophets, the reform of Josiah, the teaching of torah by Ezra, and evidence for customs and customary laws found in books of the Hebrew Bible outside of the Pentateuch).
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.
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 Interpretation of Legal Traditions in Ancient Israel
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.