The Book of the Covenant

The Book of the Covenant is widely considered the earliest collection of biblical law, with origins going back to the period of the monarchy. However, scholars are divided on many questions, such as whether the Book of the Covenant comprises all of Exodus 20:22–24:1 or only discrete sections of this block; the degree of the Book of the Covenant’s literary unity; and the purpose of the original collection and its social and historical setting. This chapter provides an overview of the problems, and discusses directions for future research.

Social Justice

This chapter surveys biblical laws relevant to social power and the distribution of resources and addresses challenges of assessing the legislation and finding potential for the application of its principles within the modern world. The goal of social justice in biblical law is not to overturn the existing social order but to preserve pre-existing privileges of individuals within their respective socioeconomic statuses. Thus, laws protect and aid persons who are socially, legally, and/or economically vulnerable (e.g. poor, widows, fatherless, and resident aliens), and remedy problems of those who are already suffering from loss of their status (e.g. debt slaves). Biblical law fosters a society in which people enjoy fair representation and have access to resources with which to independently support themselves. Social justice is based on ethical values that must be taught, encouraged, and accepted as part of the collective world view; it is not enough to legislate and enforce them.

Social Justice in Early Christianity

Scripture, early Christians agreed, instructed believers not only how to worship God but how to live rightly with their neighbors. Christians nevertheless pursued social justice only selectively. Concern for the poor and for strangers became an early and lasting preoccupation in Christian discourse. By contrast, many Christians remained partial to the violent entertainment of circus games, and did not consistently advocate for the empire’s least regarded members. While homilists might instruct Christians to treat well their own slaves, slavery as an institution remained unchallenged by even the most socially conscious Christian writers. By the fourth century, the increasing Christianization of the empire led to Roman legal support for clergy’s efforts to ensure social justice. The care of prisoners and orphans and, increasingly, the resolution of conflict among particularly the empire’s Christian population were tasks that had long been part of bishops’ roles and that now enjoyed imperial support.

The Law and the Prophets

Recent research is overturning the view of modernist scholarship since Wellhausen that written, priestly legislation arose subsequent to pre-exilic prophecy. It now appears that the tradition of revealed law in Israel antedates even eighth-century prophets like Hosea. Not only oral traditions of divine law but also bodies of written priestly law are pre-exilic in origin. These corpuses, including codes within Deuteronomy and H (the texts of the Holiness School), informed prophets such as Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Ideal distinctions, such as those of Max Weber, between priestly lawgivers and charismatic prophets are unhelpful in understanding these priestly prophets and they obstruct progress in investigating the legislative dimensions of Prophecy and the prophetic dimensions of the Torah. The key hermeneutical question of the core theological place of law and prophecy within Scripture is still debated, but a picture is emerging of the pair as conversation partners set in dialogic equilibrium by canonical shaping.

Offenses Against Human Beings in Private and Public Law

This chapter deals with the legal functions of law of different literary genres in the Hebrew Bible and their legal historical development within their societal “settings in life. It concentrates on laws of bodily injuries and homicide in a comparative approach with ancient Near Eastern law and asks for the influence of religion on the legal history of the biblical law of offenses against human beings and for trends of correlating law and narrative in the Pentateuch. Special attention is given to the origins of talionic retaliation in cuneiform law and to the efforts in biblical law already in the Covenant Code to check and repeal the talio.

Women, Children, Slaves, and Foreigners

This chapter examines the treatment of women, children, slaves, and foreigners in biblical law, focusing on a few topics related to each of these groups that highlight some methodological issues and current debates within the field. Topics covered include the adultery and rape laws, deviant behavior by children and its punishment, the slavery manumission laws, the case of the daughter sold into slavery in Exodus 21:7–11, and the identity and status of the ger in biblical law. Some of the issues discussed in the context of these topics are the relationship between the content of the legal collections and law as it was actually practiced in ancient Israel and the relative dating of each of the legal collections and the relationship between them.

Women, Children, and Slaves in Rabbinic Law

Rabbinic law on women, children, and slaves developed on the basis of biblical law and in the context of the Greco-Roman and Sasanian cultural environments in which Palestinian and Babylonian rabbis lived. The discussions were innovative in their adaptation of biblical law to new circumstances. From a sociological point of view, women, children, and slaves were dependents of the householder who were generally associated with the private sphere of the household. At the same time, they differed from each other with regard to honor, which only free persons possessed, and with regard to gender, since male children were raised to become Torah-observant male Jews themselves. Palestinian rabbinic law shows interesting similarities with and differences to Roman law of which rabbis would have been aware even if direct influences cannot be established.

The Bible and the Sources of Rabbinic Law

There are two aspects to the question of the relation between biblical law and rabbinic halakhah: the historical one, which refers to the continuum between the two cultures, and the creative one, which refers to the conscious efforts of the rabbis to interpret the biblical text and to deduce halakhic details from it. This chapter deals primarily with the second aspect, and surveys the state of research of the literature of halakhic midrashim—focusing on their division into two tannaitic schools—as well as of the place of midrash in other rabbinic compilations, notably the Babylonian Talmud. Following this survey the chapter discusses several relevant historical questions, especially the question whether midrash is the true source of halakhah, or just a method to artificially link pre-existing halakhot to the biblical text. Based on the view that the nature of midrash is the impetus to extract from the biblical text answers to all halakhic questions which bother the reader, whether or not they are actually referred to in the text, the chapter suggests several arguments in favor of the former view. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the great historical question of the continuity between biblical law and rabbinic halakhah. The chapter proposes studying halakhah from a longue durée perspective, which will enable us to approach this question on an evidential basis, and sketches some of the methodologies and research developments needed to advance this goal.

Determining the Date of Biblical Legal Texts

Determining the date of the legal texts of the Bible is fundamental to the study of biblical law because scholars seek to illuminate the interrelationship between law and the historical development of ancient Israel. Employing a pattern of evolving socio-economic institutions as a means of securing a chronological framework is faulty because a specific legal issue may have been addressed during a wide range of Israelite history. Charting the development of a single institution as a means of dating legal texts that lack an explicit chronological reference assumes a linear process without deviations. It is important to note that although we might assume that legal texts mirror reality, they might express an ideal divorced from reality or an ideology articulated in one time period that is adopted in another. By contrast, using linguistic criteria to determine dating is a more rigorous approach. This method can assign a text to a broad chronological era. It can mark out a chronology between texts from different linguistic strata, but it cannot ascertain a relative chronology between texts from the same linguistic stratum. For a relative chronology to be ascertained, a method to determine whether one text is alluding to another must be employed. Identification of an allusion must be based on shared language that is distinctive and rare.

Litigation

The chapter examines the Old Testament evidence concerning the nature of the trial procedure in ancient Israel. Although the evidence is limited in comparison with the abundance of material available in the ancient Near East, the laws in the Pentateuch and the narratives in the Old Testament do provide indirect evidence for the way in which the judicial system operated in Israel and Judah. The elders played a prominent role in trials at a local level, and it is probable that the main qualification for eldership was possession of landed property. Appeal against arbitrary decisions by the local assemblies could be made directly to the king, though, in practice, this responsibility was probably delegated to his officials. In cases where there were no witnesses present the matter could be directed to God for a verdict by means of a “trial by ordeal.”