Ritual Law

Religion Compass, 2018

Biblical law has had a profound influence on Western culture, but it must be understood in its historical context. It arose in the context of the tradition of Mesopotamian law, where scribes exhibited their flair for justice by writing statutes on a repertoire of traditional cases, of which the most outstanding example is the Laws of Hammurabi. Rarely did legal texts explicitly discuss legal principles. Three collections of formal legal statutes are found in the Hebrew Bible. The Book of the Covenant is most like Mesopotamian law in dealing with disputes arising in an agrarian society. The priestly law consists of two sources, the priestly source that aims at protecting the welfare of the people by the performance of sacred rituals and the Holiness source that seeks to sanctify the everyday activities of the people. Deuteronomy aims at ritual and social reforms. Among the most debated issues in scholarship today is biblical law's view of women.

2024

This Companion offers a comprehensive overview of the history, nature, and legacy of biblical law. Examining the debates that swirl around the nature of biblical law, it explores its historical context, the significance of its rules, and its influence on early Judaism and Christianity. The volume also interrogates key questions: Were the rules intended to function as ancient Israel's statutory law? Is there evidence to indicate that they served a different purpose? What is the relationship between this legal material and other parts of the Hebrew Bible? Most importantly, the book provides an in-depth look at the content of the Torah's laws, with individual essays on substantive, procedural, and ritual law. With contributions from an international team of experts, written specially for this volume, _The Cambridge Companion to Law in the Hebrew Bible_ provides an up-to-date look at scholarship on biblical law and outlines themes and topics for future research.

“Biblical Law and Rabbinic Literature.” Pages 283-99 in The Cambridge Companion to Law in the Hebrew Bible. Edited by Bruce Wells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024. , 2024

Introduction 1 bruce wells Part I The Historical Context of Biblical Law 1 Law in the Ancient Near East 15 sophie dé mare-lafont 2 Law in the Eastern Mediterranean 34 anselm c. hagedorn Part II The Biblical Legal Collections 3 The Nature of the Collections 55 bruce wells 4 The Origins of the Laws 76 sara j. milstein 5 The Narrative Context of the Collections 95 simeon chavel Part III The Biblical Laws 6 Substantive Law 117 sandra jacobs 7 Procedural Law 138 giovanna r. czander 8 Ritual Law 158 michael b. hundley Part IV Biblical Law and Other Scriptural Discourses 9 Law and Prophecy 181 reinhard achenbach vii

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion, 2019

Biblical laws are found mainly in the Pentateuch (i.e., the first five books of the Hebrew Bible). The laws are linked to the figure of Moses, who is depicted as having received them directly from God in order to transmit them to the people of Israel during the years in the Wilderness after being released from slavery in Egypt. Biblical laws are thus presented as being of divine origin. Their authority was further bolstered by a tradition that they were included in covenants (i.e., formal agreements made between God and the people as recorded in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy). Similar claims of divine origin were not made for other ancient Near Eastern laws; their authority flowed from kings, who issued the laws, although these kings might also be seen as having been placed on their thrones through the favor of the gods. The biblical law collections are unlike other ancient Near Eastern “codes” in that they include sacral laws (i.e., governing cult, worship, and ritual, as well as secular laws: namely, governing civil, and criminal behaviors). This mingling of sacral and secular categories is the likely reason both for the many terms used to denote the laws, as well as for the unexpected number of formulations in which they are presented. The formulations used in biblical law can be classified as “casuistic” or “non-casuistic.” They are not equally distributed in the books of the Pentateuch nor are they equally used with secular and sacral laws. While there are similarities in content between secular laws found in the Hebrew Bible and laws found in the ancient Near Eastern law “codes,” the latter do not exhibit a comparable variety in the numbers of law terms and formulations. The Hebrew Bible tended to “blur” the differences between the law terms and their formulations, ultimately to the point of subsuming them all under the law term torah (“teaching”) to describe the totality of the divinely given laws in the Pentateuch. Biblical studies in general and Pentateuchal studies in particular are challenged by the fact that manuscripts contemporary with the events described have not survived the ravages the time. Scholars must therefore rely on looking for “clues” within the texts themselves (e.g., the laws cited by the prophets, the reform of Josiah, the teaching of torah by Ezra, and evidence for customs and customary laws found in books of the Hebrew Bible outside of the Pentateuch).

Verbum et Ecclesia, 2021

In this contribution, the notion that the concept of ‘law’ in the Letter to the Hebrews only pertains to the cultic domain is challenged against the discourse on law in the whole letter. Apart from instances in which the law includes moral aspects of the law, the broader theological context in which the concept of ‘law’ is set in Hebrews suggests that the whole Mosaic system is in view throughout the letter. Such a conclusion is drawn on the basis of pertinent contrasts in the letter between the old and new covenants, between the different sources of revelation, between Moses and Jesus, between the ways in which priesthood and sacrifices function in relation to sin, between the outward or physical and the inward or spiritual, and between the earthly and heavenly domains of the respective covenantal systems.

Literature of the Hebrew Bible: Introductions and Studies (ed. Z Talshir; Ben-Zvi), 2011

An introductory overview of the legal texts in the Hebrew Bible, their literary, legal, and religious qualities. Focused on laws of camp, town and city, rather than tabernacle and temple, the chapter emphasizes reading the laws subordinate to the compositions in which they appear, the agrarian setting that animates their ideas, and intertextual aspects.

Harvard Theological Review, 1980

Critical scholarship on the Hebrew Bible a hundred years ago held a much lower estimation of the role of law in the religion of ancient Israel and of the value of biblical law than do scholars today. Julius Wellhausen, for example, whose work was the most influential of the nineteeth century, maintained that in its creative period, Israel had no law, but only “usage and tradition” which “were looked on to a large extent as the institution of the Deity.” Thus, the prophets, whom Wellhausen stressed, did not preach out of any legal tradition in his view, but rather “out of the spirit which judges all things and itself is judged of no man.” In their canonical shape, however, the materials ancient Israel bequeathed us are so strongly nomistic that even Wellhausen could not deny that at a certain point law became central, displacing the spirit. That point marks the transition from Israelite religion to something new called “Judaism,” which is distinguished by the idea of a written Torah....

This paper will examine recent scholarship on the topic of biblical law in order to demonstrate that biblical law is best understood as a common-law tradition. After outlining long-standing questions in regard to the nature of law in the Hebrew Bible, I will argue for a complementarian rather than supersessionist view of law, following the work of Berman. The complementarian perspective entails a common-law account of the nature of the law tradition as opposed to the ubiquitous and presupposed statutory view. I will then further develop Berman’s argument by appealing to Jackson’s semiotic hermeneutic for interpreting biblical law. As supporting evidence, I will examine several biblical texts where scholars have demonstrated the explanatory power of non-statutory interpretation. To flesh out the implications of the common law approach, I will discuss the pivotal role of judges using distinctions described by Reaume. Finally, I will provide evidence for the claim that this common-law view is applicable not only to the Hebrew Bible but also to the New Testament. These texts and scholarly viewpoints together provide compelling evidence that the biblical law tradition is a common-law tradition that operates not by the force of codified legislation but rather through the agency of judges shaped by the values of the tradition that is maintained in both major corpora of biblical texts.

Forthcoming in a volume on Biblical Law edited by Pamela Barmash.

No ancient Near Eastern parallels exist for the presentation of civil and criminal law as clauses attaching to a covenant, established between a God and a people or nation. In the Hebrew Bible, this conception is widespread. In particular, the Covenant Code (Exod 21-23), the Holiness Code (Lev 17-25), and the Deuteronomic Code (Deut 12-26) all—though in different ways—pretend to draw their force from a covenant between YHWH and Israel. In the present chapter, the notion of covenant and the various elaborations of covenant theology are explored. It is suggested that the combination of law and covenant was first established in Exod 19-24, and that the other law codes adopted the idea, together with an important number of laws (more in the case of Deuteronomy than in the Holiness Code), from there.

2008