Law class notes 1 24 2018 What is Biblical Law?
Intro to class
 welcome: year in program, research plans, any special interest in law?
 syllabus
 course structure (much will be covered in syllabus)
o Hebrew: 2–3 chapters of MT per week, plus some SP. BHQ for Deuteronomy.
o Versions: selective use. About 1 text-crit analysis per week.
o Secondary: about 100pp. per week
o Meetings: about 2 topics, with break somewhere in the middle. Be prepared to
jump around in primary texts and discuss secondary readings as we go or
separately.
 Parallel laws assignment
 Paper
 Exam: midterm only
Biblical and ANE “law codes”: Bottéro and Wells
Bottéro
 Note: on prelims reading list
 “The prologue and epilogue clearly are not farfetched and superfluous pieces; they are
essential for the entire work, whose profound meaning they indicate in their own way.”
 internal contradictions signal LH not a code of laws (163): cf. Ska, Berman
 B’s view: LH “not a law code, nor the charter of a legal reform, but…a treatise…on the
exercise of judicial power (167)
 What is the point of B’s comparison of LH to Mesopotamian science?
o LH “scientific” in that it finds the universal in the specific (172)
o order of laws: by association (173: cf. biblical laws)
o both are “practical and didactic” (177)
 Presentation vs. function: even if LH is not a law code, does it want to sound like one? Cf.
biblical laws.
 Comprehensiveness (“desire to cover everything”): B says this reflects the “scientific nature
of LH. Could it be rhetorical? Hammurabi is so just and wise, he’s thought of every case?
 No Mesopotamian law codes: none are needed because, as LH shows, king intrinsically just?
(179)
Wells
 Note that he is not really talking about the purpose of biblical law codes. He wants to know
whether they reflect practice, not whether they were meant to be used juridically.
 How does Wells see the connection between biblical law and practice, and how does he
explain it? (some laws reflect practice, others are innovative and idiosynchratic)
Relationships among the law collections: Berman and Ska
 Ska gives a very simple and brief introduction to one of our major concerns in this course:
comparing parallel laws. What is Ska’s main argument about the parallel laws?
 Which of Berman’s camps would include Ska: “complementarian” or “supersessionist”?
o neither. Ska says later laws correct earlier ones, which is sort of in the middle.
 Berman’s problematic terminology. He gets it from Stackert but “replacement” or
“alternative” is a better and fairer characterization of Stackert’s view (and Levinson, etc.)
 What are Berman’s criticisms of “supersessionist” view? How strong are they? How fair?
o statutory law: unfair. Wells 2008: 226: “Scholars have articulated this purpose in
various ways, but most agree that biblical law, as it is presented in the Pentateuch,
functions to promote a religious agenda rather than to establish a full-fledged
legal system.”
 Much of bib law is not “customary” either. Imagine a judge taking the
words of the deity as a judicial starting point! And many of the laws lack
punishments and are really instructions. Imagine a judge ruling on cultic
place, or on skin diseases.
o Combined Pentateuch and Legal blends: weak. These say nothing about the texts
themselves, only about how they were later used. And in the case of the combined
Pentateuch, the difficulties of interpreting the pentateuch speak for themselves!
o Cross-references: Berman’s strongest criticism. But it only applies to
Deuteronomy!
o Lemmatic citation
 Again, mostly found in D.
 Not as prevelant as B’s presentation would suggest. This
mischaracterization is widespread and stems from Levinson’s influential
study, in which Levinson overstates the importance of “lemmatic
citation.”
 But for D, a relatively important critique. “It is difficult to imagine how a
reader could accept D as authoritative because D calls CC to mind and at
the same time accept only D as authoritative because the reader ignores or
forgets CC.” (my book, p. 21)

Applying Berman’s ideas to Ska’s examples:
o Can we read the slave laws as complementary?
 D “corrects” CC by including female slaves in main law (daughter law
either overriden or only applies narrowly to daughters)
 D adds an “end-of-service indemnity”
 D secularizes permanent enslavement ritual (part of a larger pattern of
cultic centralization plus local secular practices)
 H more difficult to reconcile: 49 years vs. 6
o Loan laws and helping enemies: D and H can perhaps be read as adding to CC
o Decalogue
 relatively minor differences
 additional problem: not just divine Mosaic laws, but both Decalogues
claim to be the exact words spoken by the deity at Horeb to all Israelites
 Cultic Decalogue: is Ska correct that the reader would expect a repetition
of the (ethical) Decalogue?
 Exod 34:1: YHWH says he will write the Decalogue on the tablets
 v. 27: YHWH commands Moses to write and says “I have
made/hereby make a Covenant in accordance with these words”
 v. 28: 40 days and nights, Moses writes “ten words”
 v. 32: Moses instructs the Israelites (implies new laws given)