Sovereign Authority and the Elaboration of Law in the Bible and the Ancient Near East PDF Download

Author: Dylan R. Johnson
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
ISBN: 3161595092
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
Five Pentateuchal texts (Lev 24:10-23; Num 9:6-14; Num 15:32-36; Num 27:1-11; Num 36:1-12) offer unique visions of the elaboration of law in Israel's formative past. In response to individual legal cases, Yahweh enacts impersonal and general statutes reminiscent of biblical and ancient Near Eastern law collections. From the perspective of comparative law, Dylan R. Johnson proposes a new understanding of these texts as biblical rescripts: a legislative technique that enabled sovereigns to enact general laws on the basis of particular legal cases. Typological parallels drawn from cuneiform and Roman law illustrate the complex ideology informing the content and the form of these five cases. The author explores how latent conceptions of law, justice, and legislative sovereignty shaped these texts, and how the Priestly vision of law interacted with and transformed earlier legal traditions.

Author: Bruce Wells
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108658679
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 407

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Author: Joshua Aaron Bowen
Publisher: Digital Hammurabi
ISBN: 1736592092
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
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.

Author: Mahri Leonard-Fleckman
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004511539
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 443

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Book Description
A “Community of Peoples” draws together a diverse community of scholars to honor the career of Daniel E. Fleming. Through a diversity of methods and disciplines, each contributor attempts to touch a sliver of ancient Middle Eastern history.

Author: Jordan Davis
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
ISBN: 3161618564
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Author: Victor H. Matthews
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9780567080981
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
This striking new contribution to gender studies demonstrates the essential role of Israelite and Near East law in the historical analysis of gender. The theme of these studies of Babylonian, Hittite, Assyrian, and Israelite law is this: What is the significance of gender in the formulation of ancient law and custom? Feminist scholarship is enriched by these studies in family history and the status of women in antiquity. At the same time, conventional legal history is repositioned, as new and classical texts are interpreted from the vantage point of feminist theory and social history. Papers from SBL Biblical Law Section form the core of this collection.

Author: Raymond Westbrook
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 904740209X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1235

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Book Description
A comprehensive survey of the Law of the Ancient Near East by a team of specialist scholars, this volume allows non-specialists access to the world's earliest known legal systems.

Author: Gregory C. Chirichigno
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9781850753599
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
This original study concerns itself with the manumission laws of Exodus 20, Deuteronomy 15 and Leviticus 25. It begins with the social background to debt slavery and the socioeconomic factors encouraging the rise of debt slavery in Mesopotamia. After a comparative analysis of the Mesopotamian and biblical material Chirichigno examines the social background to debt slavery in Israel, the various slave laws in the Pentateuch (in order to delimit the chattel-slave laws from the debt-slave laws), and the biblical manumission laws themselves.

Author: Robert A. Yelle
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022658562X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Sovereignty and the Sacred challenges contemporary models of polity and economy through a two-step engagement with the history of religions. Beginning with the recognition of the convergence in the history of European political theology between the sacred and the sovereign as creating “states of exception”—that is, moments of rupture in the normative order that, by transcending this order, are capable of re-founding or remaking it—Robert A. Yelle identifies our secular, capitalist system as an attempt to exclude such moments by subordinating them to the calculability of laws and markets. The second step marshals evidence from history and anthropology that helps us to recognize the contribution of such states of exception to ethical life, as a means of release from the legal or economic order. Yelle draws on evidence from the Hebrew Bible to English deism, and from the Aztecs to ancient India, to develop a theory of polity that finds a place and a purpose for those aspects of religion that are often marginalized and dismissed as irrational by Enlightenment liberalism and utilitarianism. Developing this close analogy between two elemental domains of society, Sovereignty and the Sacred offers a new theory of religion while suggesting alternative ways of organizing our political and economic life. By rethinking the transcendent foundations and liberating potential of both religion and politics, Yelle points to more hopeful and ethical modes of collective life based on egalitarianism and popular sovereignty. Deliberately countering the narrowness of currently dominant economic, political, and legal theories, he demonstrates the potential of a revived history of religions to contribute to a rethinking of the foundations of our political and social order.

Author: Anselm C. Hagedorn
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780985614201
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Papers from the Biblical Law Section, 2009 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, New Orleans. Essays in memory of Raymond Westbrook on law in the ancient Near East, the Bible and the Mediterranean world.