Neo-Sumerian jurisprudence was determined by the excessive importance of royal jurisdiction" (NGU, I, 147). We are talking about the royal court in the broadest sense, i.e. members of the royal family and officials of the royal administration.
Excursus 1. The Old Testament hue and cry
The decisive intervention of the King of Jerusalem in local justice is recognizable here, as the new jurisdiction of the Jerusalem College for crimes is being established. This technical use of "cry for help" is illustrated in many other OT texts, where we can also discern an important development of hue and cry.
ANCIENT ORIENTAL LAW BEFORE HAMMURABI
Ancient Eastern laws are not a code in the modern technical, legal sense of the word. Here we can only specify a small part of the code's sixty pieces.
THE CODE OF HAMMURABI
The life and times of Hammurabi of Babylon
We can also imagine that he was always interested in the progress of the work and helped where he could. I established law and justice in the language of the land and thereby promoted the prosperity of the people.
A selection of legal principles from Hammurabi’s code
For example, the 5241-72 dollars are arranged chronologically according to the temporal sequence of the various agricultural taxes. They were evidently crimes that were considered particularly dangerous to the survival of the state and society and therefore deserved such a prominent place in the code. There is no doubt in the minds of both the Babylonian and Israelite legislators that the death penalty is the only appropriate punishment.
They are couched in quite general terms, without any reference to the social status of the slave owner. It is even more surprising that the OT laws contain no corresponding prescription. It is consistent with the social structure evidenced in the OT laws that there are no direct OT parallels to this set of prescriptions.
The reader will notice that there is no general statement about rent levels.
Old Testament law relating to real estate A. ALT, “Der Anteil des Kiinigtums an der sozialen Entwicklung in
All this then led to the situation that the prophets of the eighth century found themselves with. Now let's jump to the bottom of the gap we mentioned earlier, which starts at $65. There is no devaluing of women; for the Eastern mind the opposite is true.
CH sets aside several prescriptions for the dowry in the event of the wife's death. We can talk about the woman's right to divorce, although it was only effective if it could be proven that the man failed in the marriage ($142). We need only mention that the location of the crime played a role in the administration of the punishment.
In the context of marriage law, it is not surprising that a violation by a married woman was punishable by death.
Old Testament marriage law
18:25 for the OT illustrates the so-called service marriage, which we often encounter in other cultures. Blau notes, “The Hillelites allowed a man to divorce his wife, 'even if the woman let his food be burned'” (31). 2:2, for example, “She is no longer my wife, nor am I her husband.” The most important text in this regard is Deut.
If a landowner, who decided to disinherit his son, said to the judges: "I want to disinherit my son," the judges will examine his record, and if the son has not acquired wrongful grave (enough) to cut not. cut off (him) from sonship, the father may not cut off his son from sonship ($168). If there was no marriage gift, a portion of the inheritance was set aside to support her ($172). In any case, the firstborn son had a special position in the family, as many cases in the narrative literature of the OT testify, for example Gen.
We may note in passing that the rights of the mother were guaranteed together with those of the son.
The right of inheritance and adoption in the Old Testament
It is even more surprising that even the narrative parts of the OT do not refer to adoption in the strict sense of the term. The levirate custom cannot fully explain the absence of adoption in the OT. If it was the slave of an elderly person, the slave owner will give two shekels of silver to the surgeon ($223).
In the paragraphs on builders there are some striking applications of the law of the talion. If it caused the death of a slave of the owner of the house, he must give slave for slave to the owner of the house ($231). If a landowner hired an ox and destroyed its eye, he must give half its value in silver to the owner of the ox ($247).
The precise explanation for the frequent use of the talion in CH is debated.
THE BOOK OF THE COVENANT
The style and character of casuistically formulated law
The description of the facts and the declaration of legal consequences form the casuistic law. The Book of the Covenant 157 frequently quoted phrase that the slave was an instrumenti genus vocale (a kind of instrument that can speak). The reason was that a slave in the full sense of the word could not enter into a marriage.
Even then, the man and the woman had to be slaves to the same master. In the context of the previous verses, the reason given at the end of verse 15 would give us a legal precept with enormous implications in the context of the ancient East.
The Book of the Covenant 169 greater degree of agreement with OT law than with the CH.
DEUTERONOMY
Deuteronomy
In other collections of OT laws, Yahweh is the speaker and Moses is the first recipient of divine decrees; and here Moses addresses the people. The Deuteronomic Book of Moses and the Law of Holiness 181 In our assessment of the Deuteronomy collection of laws, attention to the form of the book is even more important than considering the material similarities between the Deuteronomy and B.C. The various parts of the corpus of laws, however, were not all subjected to parenetic transformation to the same extent.
There is also a change in the content, which equally reinforces the purely legal nature of the prescriptions. The two root types in the formulation of the OT law mix much more in Deuteronomy than in BC. We have yet to specify the most important peculiarity of the Deuteronomic Law.
How much more boldly is the confrontation with the religion of the Canaanites formulated here than in the altar law of the era.
The Law of Holiness
186 Deuteronomy and the Law of Holirless Deuterorlortly and the Law of Holiness 187 tion makes it sufficiently clear that the categories. Kilian accepts e.g. a primitive law of sanctity which formed the basis of the present code, and where the present form and content of the regulations in H were already essentially present in rudimentary form. But it still contained "none of the historical reminiscences or other historicizing elements" (166) characteristic of this text.
Still according to Kilian, this final redaction, to which we owe H in its final independent form, dates from the time of the exile. The question of the age of H therefore depends, as a first step, on the age of the sub-collections. 23*) has been dated by Feucht before Deuteronomy, sometime in the first decades of the seventh century BC, the second of which (H2=Lev. 25. 6) depends on Deuteronomy and, according to Feucht, dates from that time to the exile, and this date, whatever may be said about the details of the composition, is in fact the most probable (according to Baentsch in the last century, Thiel more recently).
Deuteronomy and the Law of Holiness 189 shares with Deuteronomy the interrelationship of legal principles with parenesis, and in this respect it is “very closely related to Deuteronomy” (G. v. Rad, 36).
APODICTIC LAW
Apodictic legal principles in participial and relative form
This was noted by Gese, who described the phenomenon as follows: "The complex syntactic structure of the sentences in the mot jcmat series must therefore be regarded as nothing more than a mixed form: casuistic laws are metamorphosed in these specific cases . by being adapted to poetic or liturgical forms” (148f). The crucial point is that the term "apodictic" is intended to refer to law embodying a legal conception quite different from that embodied by "casuistics": the purpose of apodictic law is "the formulation of a legal principle (Herrmann, 260). The primitive meaning of the curse formula must be described as follows (cf.
On the other hand, there is the use in the titles of both sections of this final chapter of the phrase “apodictic principles.” It is now part of the sexual law of the OT, which bears the stigma of an anti-Canaanite polemic. His conclusion is that “the reasons clause is clearly and definitively a peculiarity of Israeli or Old Testament law” (52).”
We cannot discuss here the Decalogue, the most important of the series of apodictic laws in forbidden form.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BRACKER H.-D., Das Gesetz Israels im Vergleich zu den altorientalischen Gesetzen der Babylonier, Hethiter und Assyrer, 1962. FALKENSTEIN A., Die neosumerischen Gerichtsdokumente (Proceedings of the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophie- Disch -historische Klasse), I (NS Nr. FOHRER G., „Das sogenannte apodiktisch formulierte Gesetz und das Emblem“ = Studien zur Theologie und Geschichte des Alten Testaments (EZAW.
KOCH K., „Das Sprichwort ‚Lass sein Blut auf seinem Haupt sein‘ und die israelitische Vorstellung vom vergossenen Blut“, 1962 = Um das Prinzip der Vergeltung in Religion und Recht des Alten Testaments, hrsg. Vorlesungen auf Einladung der Universität Tübingen, 16. Dezember 1952, mit einem Anhang zu Justice in the Gate, London 1956. MEYER E., „Slavery in Antiquity“, Small Writings on the Theory of History and the Wirtschafts- und Politikgeschichte der Antike.
POSSOZ E., „The Establishment of Law in the Clan“, Religious Ties in Educated and Oriental Law, hrsg.
INDEXES
