Being the first legal corpus in the biblical canon, Exodus 19–24 is a law collection that belonged to a people living under the shadow of empire. Using an integrated approach of postcolonial studies and historical-comparative analysis, this important study analyzes the relationship between the laws given to the Israelites on Mount Sinai and cuneiform law collections. Dr. Anna Lo skillfully integrates postcolonial understandings of the colonized people to explore how the similarities and differences reflect the imperialized authors’ wrestling with the imperial legal metanarrative and subjugation of their time. This investigation into the dynamic of acceptance, ambivalence, and resistance invites attention to this selection of Scripture as a work of conservative revolutionists. Dr. Lo’s thorough work provides an important way forward for scholars to consider responses of the imperialized to empires in the past as well as to reflect on their own response to hegemonic domination today.

How should we talk about “the law” in a period so remote from our own and covering such a huge span of time and space? From the Code of Hammurabi (ca. 1750 BCE) to Justinian's Corpus Iuris Civilis (529-534 CE), A Cultural History of Law in Antiquity draws upon legal texts and non-textual forms (such as vase-painting, sculpture, and architecture) to uncover the diverse and rich legal traditions of societies ranging from the Ancient Near Eastern cities of Assyria and Babylon in Mesopotamia to the Ancient Israelites, and from Ancient Greece to Rome of the Archaic and Classical Periods. With a wealth of textual and visual sources, A Cultural History of Law in Antiquity presents essays that examine key cultural case studies of the period on the themes of justice, constitution, codes, agreements, arguments, property and possession, wrongs, and the legal profession.

Opened up by the revival of Classical thought but riven by the violence of the Reformation and Counter Reformation, the terrain of Early Modern law was constantly shifting. The age of expansion saw unparalleled degrees of internal and external exploration and colonization, accompanied by the advance of science and the growing power of knowledge. A Cultural History of Law in the Early Modern Age, covering the period from 1500 to 1680, explores the war of jurisdictions and the slow and contested emergence of national legal traditions in continental Europe and in Britannia. Most particularly, the chapters examine the European quality of the Western legal traditions and seek to link the political project of Anglican common law, the mos britannicus, to its classical European language and context. Drawing upon a wealth of textual and visual sources, A Cultural History of Law in the Early Modern Age presents essays that examine key cultural case studies of the period on the themes of justice, constitution, codes, agreements, arguments, property and possession, wrongs, and the legal profession.

This book presents a reassessment of the governmental systems of the Late Babylonian period—specifically those of the Neo-Babylonian and early Persian empires—and provides evidence demonstrating that these are among the first to have developed an early form of administrative law. The present study revolves around a particular expression that, in its most common form, reads ḫīṭu ša šarri išaddad and can be translated as “he will be guilty (of an offense) against the king.” The authors analyze ninety-six documents, thirty-two of which have not been previously published, discussing each text in detail, including the syntax of this clause and its legal consequences, which involve the delegation of responsibility in an administrative context. Placing these documents in their historical and institutional contexts, and drawing from the theories of Max Weber and S. N. Eisenstadt, the authors aim to show that the administrative bureaucracy underlying these documents was a more complex, systematized, and rational system than has previously been recognized. Accompanied by extensive indexes, as well as transcriptions and translations of each text analyzed here, this book breaks new ground in the study of ancient legal systems.

This collection of essays explores aspects of civil and criminal law in ancient Judaea. Whereas the majority of studies on Judaean law focus on biblical law codes (and, therefore, on laws related to sacrifice, cultic purity, and personal piety) this volume focus on laws related to the social and economic dealings of Judaeans in the Neo-Babylonian, Persian, and Greco-Roman periods and on the contribution of epigraphic and archival sources and to the study of this material.

Major innovations have occurred in the study of biblical law in recent decades. The legal material of the Pentateuch has received new interest with detailed studies of specific biblical passages. The comparison of biblical practice to ancient Near Eastern customs has received a new impetus with the concentration on texts from actual ancient legal transactions. The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Law provides a state of the art analysis of the major questions, principles, and texts pertinent to biblical law. The thirty-three chapters, written by an international team of experts, deal with the concepts, significant texts, institutions, and procedures of biblical law; the intersection of law with religion, socio-economic circumstances, and politics; and the reinterpretation of biblical law in the emerging Jewish and Christian communities. The volume is intended to introduce non-specialists to the field as well as to stimulate new thinking among scholars working in biblical law.

The God of the Old Testament commanded and endorsed many practices that we find morally reprehensible today. High on the list was the institution of slavery, which features prominently in several sections of the Hebrew Bible. Fathers could sell their daughters into slavery, masters could beat their slaves, creditors could carry off children for failure to repay a debt, and foreigners could be kept for life, passed down as inherited property. How are we to make sense of all of this from our modern point of view? Atheists and skeptics will often say that the God of the Old Testament was a moral monster for endorsing such atrocities. Christians will often respond that the slavery in the Hebrew Bible wasn’t as bad as we think, and was more like having a job or owning a credit card. While both sides of this debate are sincere in their positions, neither are ultimately correct. Our conclusions must derive from a thorough understanding of both the Old Testament and ancient Near Eastern contexts. This extensively revised and expanded second edition includes a wealth of information and analysis, including three additional chapters and two new appendices. Dr. Bowen thoroughly explores law collections of the ancient Near East, asking why they matter, and how they influence our understanding of slavery in the Old Testament. A comparative analysis of the legal provisions made for the treatment of slaves in the ancient world sheds extensive light on how slavery in the Old Testament should be viewed in relation to other ancient cultures, and an entire chapter explores biblical slavery after the Old Testament, through the New Testament, early church, and down to the antebellum south. This book will: Provide a detailed overview of slavery laws and practices in the Old Testament and the ancient Near East. Examine the significant – and highly controversial – passages in the Hebrew Bible that deal with slavery, including laws about beating your slave, taking foreign chattel slaves, and what to do if a slave runs away from their master. Answer the most challenging questions about slavery in the Old Testament, including, “Could you beat your slave within an inch of their life and get away with it?”, “Were slaves just property that had no human rights?”, and “Did the Old Testament really endorse slavery?” Consider how the biblical treatment of slaves changed from the Old to New Testament, and whether Old Testament slavery was substantially different to slavery in the American antebellum south.

In this study of motives and arguments in Jesus' halakic conflicts, Thomas Kazen suggests a way beyond the use of traditional criteria of authenticity. Employing results from recent research on the development of halakah during the Second Temple period, which outlines trajectories and areas of tension within and between various Jewish movements, the author revisits the Synoptic conflict narratives about Sabbath observance, purity rules and divorce practices. Kazen disentangles theological motives from reasonable historical explanations and suggests relative dates and contexts for motives and arguments often ascribed to Jesus. He questions interpretations which focus on unique authority and suggests that Jesus' stance is better explained within the framework of prophetic criticism and a traditional Israelite understanding of Torah. With this study, he contributes as much to our understanding of halakic development during the Second Temple period as he does to our understanding of the historical Jesus and his relationship to contemporary movements.

This book offers a novel approach for the study of law in the Judean Desert Scrolls, using the prism of legal theory. Following a couple of decades of scholarly consensus withdrawing from the "Essene hypothesis," it proposes to revive the term, and suggests employing it for the sectarian movement as a whole, while considering the group that lived in Qumran as the Yahad. It further proposes a new suggestion for the emergence of the Yahad, based on the roles of the Examiner and the Instructor in the two major legal codes, the Damascus Document and the Community Rule. The understanding of Essene law is divided into concepts and practices, in order to emphasize the discrepancy between creed, rhetoric, and practices. The abstract exploration of notions such as time, space, obligation, intention, and retribution, is then compared against the realities of social practices, including admission, initiation, covenant, leadership, reproof, and punishment. The legal analysis yields several new suggestions for the study of the scrolls: first, Amihay proposes to rename the two strands of thought of Jewish law, formerly referred to as "nominalism" and "realism," with the terms "legal essentialism" and "legal formalism." The two laws of admission in the Community Rule are distinguished as two different laws, one of an association for a group as a whole, the other as an admission of an individual. The law of reproof is proven to be an independent legal procedure, rather than a preliminary stage of prosecution. The methodological division in this study of thought and practice provides a nuanced approach for the study of law in general, and religious law in particular.