Biblical Law

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela Barmash
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Biblical Law ◽  
Literary Structure ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
Social And Economic Development ◽  
Legal Concepts ◽  
The Relationship

Law plays a major role in the Hebrew Bible, and biblical law, whether appearing as formal statutes or as motifs embedded in other genres, has served as a source and inspiration for later Jewish culture. The bulk of the Pentateuch is devoted to legal material, and biblical narrative often invokes legal matters. The prophets refer to law and use legal idioms and literary expressions. The major theological and literary structure of the Hebrew Bible is the covenant between God and the Israelites, a relationship based on legal concepts and requirements. Most legal sources assent to this concept, but the Priestly (P) source in the Pentateuch bases the relationship between God and the Israelites on a pact, with obligations for the Israelites, rather than the bilateral agreement of a covenant, with obligations for both sides. The study of biblical law is closely tied to major issues in the critical study of the Bible: source criticism of the Pentateuch; the social and economic development of ancient Israel; form criticism and the literary characteristics of the Bible; the comparative method and the relationship between ancient Israel and the influential cultures of the ancient Near East.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Michael E. Pregill
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Transitional Period ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Golden Calf ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
The Relationship

This book is a study of the famous—or infamous—narrative of the Israelites’ worship of the Golden Calf, explored through historical and literary analysis of the various interpretations and expansions of the episode across more than a thousand years. The story of the Calf is familiar even to laypeople with very little scriptural literacy; many people know it from the version recounted in the Hebrew Bible (sometimes still termed the “Old Testament”), and perhaps from later Jewish and Christian versions as well. However, while those versions will be discussed at length here, this book focuses in particular on the version found in the Qur’an—which, I will argue, represents an integral part of the biblical tradition, broadly conceived. I will trace the development of understandings of the episode from ancient Israel through the consolidation of classical Judaism and Christianity up to the emergence of Islam, using it as a case study through which to re-evaluate the relationship between Bible and Qur’an. Interrogating both historical and contemporary scholarship on the Qur’an and its connections to the Bible and ancient Jewish and Christian traditions of interpretation provides us with a framework in which to investigate the relationships between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, particularly during the long transitional period now commonly termed Late Antiquity....

Clio and Canons: in Search of a Cultural Poetics of the Hebrew Bible

1997 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 300-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert P. Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
New Historicism ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
Cultural Poetics ◽  
Leading Edges

AbstractThe enterprise of writing "histories" of "ancient Israel" in which biblical historiography is reproduced by old credulists or critiqued by new nihilists represents one of the leading edges of contemporary biblical studies in relation to the Hebrew Bible. This quest for a cultural poetics or cultural materialist accounts of the Bible is virtually equivalent to a New Historicism in the discipline. In this article analyses of three topics from current debates in biblical studies (historiography of "ancient Israel", the empty land topos, canons and context) are used to provide insights into how new historicist approaches to contextualizing literature may contribute to these current debates about the Bible.

Egypt in the Old Testament

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Hays
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Direct Evidence ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Buffer Zone ◽  
Military Aid ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
Egyptian Religion ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship between Egypt and ancient Israel and Judah was far more complex than is often recognized. Egypt figures prominently in their national myths of origin as a way station for the patriarchs and as the “house of slaves” and starting point of the Exodus. Although no Exodus event can be confirmed from extrabiblical sources, its significance in the Bible suggests an historical kernel. The diverse existing traditions about Egypt in the texts of the Pentateuch and other early biblical writings, combined and written down at a later date, seem to reflect different experiences on the part of the groups that coalesced into Israel By the time of the monarchy, there is more direct evidence for Egyptian influence on Israelite culture, particularly in administrative affairs. It is also clear that Egyptian religion was practiced in the Levant at this time and would have been known in Israel and Judah. By the time of the divided monarchy, the historical picture comes into better focus. Relations between Egypt, Israel, and Judah were quite variable. Although Egypt’s New Kingdom empire in the Levant had ended, the region continued to be a useful trading outlet, and the pharaohs were not above raiding to assert their power. However, there are numerous examples of fugitives from the Levant finding refuge from their enemies in Egypt. In the interest of maintaining a buffer zone against the northern empires that encroached, Egypt and Kush gave military aid to Israel and Judah at times, through both direct action and supplies. The prophets had not forgotten Egypt’s role as an oppressor and frequently condemned it, as well as the tendency of Israelite and Judahite rulers to seek its help. But at times the prophets also envisioned peace with Egypt. There are a number of specific Egyptian texts that supply mutually illuminating points of comparison with biblical texts, including wisdom instructions, prayers, hymns, creation accounts, and autobiographies. These are indications of the extensive, ongoing, cultural interactions between Egypt and the cultures that produced the Old Testament.

Women, Children, Slaves, and Foreigners

2019 ◽  
pp. 58-78
Author(s):  
Hilary Lipka
Keyword(s):  
Deviant Behavior ◽  
Methodological Issues ◽  
Biblical Law ◽  
Relative Dating ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
The Relationship

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.

scholarly journals ALIENASI ISRAEL UTARA

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (01) ◽  
pp. 24-39
Author(s):  
Adelvia Tamu Ina Pay Djera
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
Media Group

Masyarakat sebagai elemen dasar dari peradaban manusia, sejatinya terbentuk dalam berbagai upaya dan interaksi sosial. Interaksi yang terjalin disebabkan oleh berbagai aspek, hubungan biologis, lokasi tempat tinggal, suku, pemahaman ideologi yang sama termasuk usaha untuk mencapai tujuan bersama melalui kesepakatan-kesepakatan sosial tertentu yang mengikat. Tulisan ini bertujuan untuk mengkaji fenomena ini dengan teori Karl Marx sebagai acuan dari munculnya konflik dalam kehidupan Bangsa Israel, lebih lanjut didukung oleh beberapa teori sosial lainnya. Adapun tulisan ini menggunakan metode hermeneutik untuk memahami situasi sosio-historis dari keberadaan Israel dan menganalisanya sesuai dengan teori-teori sosial.  Dinamika sosial kehidupan bangsa Israel menunjukkan bahwa sebagai komunitas,yaitu komunitas yang bersatu pada masa kepemimpinan Daud (Israel Bersatu) dan terpecah pada masa pemerintahan Salomo menjadi Israel Selatan dan Israel Utara. KEPUSTAKAAN Bernhard W. Anderson. The Books of the Bible. New York: CSS, 1991. Elly M. Setiadi & Usman Kolip. Pengantar Sosiologi: Teori, Aplikasi dan Pemecahannya. Jakarta: Kencana Prenada Media Group, 2011. George Ritzer & Douglas J.Goodman. Teori Sosiologi: Dari Teori Sosiologi Klask sampai perkembangan terakhir teori sosial postmodern. Bantul: Kreasi Wacana, 2016. Heine Andersen & Lars Bo Kaspersen. Classical and Modern Social Theory. Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. John A. Titaley. Persepuluhan dalam Alkitab Ibrani Israel Alkitab. Salatiga: Satya Wacana Press, 2016. Norman K. Gottwald. The Hebrew Bible: A Socio-Literary Introduction. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985. Norman K. Gottwald. The Tribes of YHWH:  A Sosiology of The Religion of Liberated Israel. New York: Orbis Book, 1979. Norman K. Gottwald. The Politics of Ancient Israel. Louisville Kentucky:Westminster John Knox Press, 2001. Robert B. Coote & David Robert Ord. Sejarah Pertama Alkitab: Dari Eden hingga Kerajaan Daud berdasarkan Sumber Y. BPK Gunung Mulia; Satya Wacana Press, 2015. Robert B. Coote. Demi Membela Revolusi: Sejarah Elohist. Jakarta: BPK Gunung Mulia, 2011. Soerjono Soekanto. Sosiologi: Suatu Pengantar. Jakarta: Raja Grafindo Persada, 1982. Samuel Koenig. Mand and Society, the basic teaching of sociology. New York: Barners & Noble Inc, 1957

The Pivotal Characterization: Ancient Law as Non-Statutory Law

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua A. Berman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Biblical Law ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
Statutory Law ◽  
Ancient Law ◽  
History Of

Scholars of biblical law have long seen the inconsistencies among the law corpora of the Pentateuch as signs of schools and communities in conflict. This chapter offers an introductory foundation for the following five chapters on biblical and ancient Near Eastern law. It demonstrates that the dominant approach to the critical study of biblical law—that is, as statutory law—is based on anachronistic, nineteenth-century notions of how law works and how legal texts are formulated. The chapter traces the history of legal thought in that century, and how it shaped (a better term might be distorted) how we view the ancient legal texts of the Bible and the Near East, and recovers premodern understandings of how law works and how legal texts are to be read in accordance with common-law jurisprudence.

Flora and Fauna of the Hebrew Bible

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mari Joerstad
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
Metaphor Theory ◽  
History Of ◽  
Normative Dimension ◽  
Noah's Ark

The flora and fauna of the Hebrew Bible has long fascinated scholars and lay readers alike. From illustrated volumes aimed at children, to the detailed tables and charts of archaeozoology and archaeobotany, the plants and animals of the Bible fascinate because of their many ties to daily life. What did people in ancient Israel eat? How did they garden? What wildflowers and trees grew around their homes? Which animals did they encounter in the desert? Animals and plants also feature centrally in some of the most memorable stories of the Bible: Noah’s ark, Balaam’s ass, Isaiah’s vineyard, Jonah in the belly of the fish, the Song’s lush gardens, God’s menagerie in Job—the list goes on. Because flora and fauna touch on topics historical, archaeological, literary, and symbolic, the study of the Bible’s flora and fauna is by necessity many-pronged. It requires multiple methodologies, as well as attention to a host of topics, including but not limited to law and purity regulations, agriculture and husbandry, metaphor theory, fables and parables, history of domestication, and so on. The recent growth in interest in ecological readings of the Bible has added a new, normative dimension to the study of flora and fauna in the Bible. While many early (and contemporary) studies focus on identification and classification of mentioned species in the Bible, ecological readings instead look at the quality of relationships between humans and their plants and animals, God’s relationship to non-human creatures, as well as relationships among non-human creatures. Scholars in the ecological vein often attempt either to derive ecological guidelines for present-day practice from the text or to critique the text’s lack of attention to responsible human conduct toward the natural world.

Jewish Theology Unbound

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Diamond
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Philosophical Theology ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Jewish Intellectual ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
State Of Israel

This book challenges the widespread caricature of Judaism as a religion of law as opposed to theology. Broad swaths of rabbinic literature involve not just law but what could be best described as philosophical theology as well. Judaism has never been a dogmatic religion, insisting on a monolithic theology rooted in a uniform metaphysics that would exclude all others. The book engages in close readings of the Bible, classical rabbinic texts, Jewish philosophers, and mystics from the ancient, to the medieval, to the modern period, which communicate a profound Jewish philosophical theology on human nature, God, and the relationship between the two. It begins with an examination of questioning in the Hebrew Bible, demonstrating that what the Bible encourages is independent philosophical inquiry into how to situate oneself in the world ethically, spiritually, and teleologically. It then explores such themes as the nature of God through the various names by which God is known in the Jewish intellectual tradition, love of others and of God, death, martyrdom, freedom, angels, the philosophical quest, the Holocaust, and the State of Israel, all in light of the Hebrew Bible and the way it is filtered through the rabbinic, philosophical, and mystical traditions. For all intents and purposes the Torah no longer originates in heaven, but flows upstream, so to speak, from the earth, propelled by the interpretive genius of human beings.

Determining the Date of Biblical Legal Texts

2019 ◽  
pp. 232-254
Author(s):  
Pamela Barmash
Keyword(s):  
Linear Process ◽  
Legal Issue ◽  
Biblical Law ◽  
Rigorous Approach ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Relative Chronology ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
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.

The Text-Critical Utility of the Peshitta to Ezekiel in View of Recent Research

2017 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-58
Author(s):  
Godwin Mushayabasa
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Textual Criticism ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Translation Technique ◽  
Semantic Frames ◽  
Base Text

Following recent studies demonstrating that the Peshitta to Ezekiel is largely a translation that was rendered at the level of semantic frames or the idiomatic level, the logical question to be asked from the point of view of textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible is whether such a translation would be useful at all within that discipline. Traditionally, a version that is considered ideal and useful for the textual criticism of the Bible is one whose translation technique is as literal as possible. Studying some difficult texts in the light of the idiomatic approach inpeshows thatpecan still provide meaningful contribution to the text-critical study of the book of Ezekiel, though not in every instance. There are instances where the process of translation inpecould have made the base text difficult to retrace.pecan therefore be used in the study of Ezekiel, with some precautions.

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