Bernard M. Levinson

Gender and Law in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East

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.

The reconceptualization of kingship in Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic History's transformation of Torah

Because the royal ideology of ancient Israel was largely identical to that of the broader ancient Near East, the points of divergence are the more remarkable. In particular the legal corpus of Deuteronomy conceptualizes the king in a way that rejects all prevailing models of monarchic power, both Israelite and Near Eastern. Deuteronomy submits a utopian manifesto for a constitutional monarchy that sharply delimits the power of the king. This redefinition of royal authority takes place as part of a larger program (Deut. xvi 18-xviii 22) whereby the authors of Deuteronomy redefine the jurisdiction of each branch of public office (local and central judicial administration, kingship, priesthood, and prophecy). Each is subordinated, first, to the requirements of cultic centralization, and, second, to the textual authority of deuteronomic Torah. This utopian delimitation of royal power never passed from constitutional vision into historical implementation: it represented such a radical departure from precedent that the Deuteronomistic Historian, precisely while seeming to implement deuteronomic law, pointedly reversed the deuteronomic program and restored to the monarch all that Deuteronomy had withheld.

‘You Must Not Add Anything to What I Command You:' Paradoxes of Canon and Authorship in Ancient Israel

For all the debate in the contemporary humanities about the canon, there is little interdisciplinary dialogue on the issue, nor even meaningful input from the perspective of academic biblical studies, the one discipline that specializes in the formation and interpretation of the canon. Seeking to provide such a perspective, this article shows how cultures having a tradition of prestigious or authoritative texts address the problem of literary and legal innovation. Engaging the work of Jonathan Z. Smith on exegetical ingenuity, the study begins with cuneiform law, and then shows how ancient Israels development of the idea of divine revelation of law creates a cluster of constraints that would be expected to impede legal revision or amendment. As a test-case, the article examines the idea that God punishes sinners transgenerationally, vicariously extending the punishment due them to three or four generations of their progeny. A series of inner-biblical and post-biblical responses to the rule demonstrates, however, that later writers were able to criticize, reject, and replace it with the alternative notion of individual retribution. The conclusions stress the extent to which the formative canon sponsors this kind of critical reflection and intellectual freedom.

The birth of the lemma: The restrictive reinterpretation of the covenant code's manumission law by the holiness code (Leviticus 25:44-46)

The jubilee laws of the Holiness Code contains a previously unrecognized restrictive reinterpretation of the Covenant Code’s law requiring manumission of the Hebrew slave (עבד עבר) after six years of service. This case, which involves studied lemmatic citation and reformulation of the earlier law, has important implications for contemporary pentateuchal theory, where the question of the dating of the Holiness Code relative to the other literary sources has been reopened during the last quarter century. The reasons why this case has escaped the attention of scholarship are equally significant. The Septuagint translator failed to recognize the reuse of two technical legal idioms relevant to manumission law and misconstrued the syntax and punctuation of the Hebrew Vorlage of Leviticus 25:44, 46. That ancient misunderstanding has had a lasting impact upon the way this unit has subsequently been understood. Seeing the text in its own light opens up a significant new perspective on the sophistication of the Holiness Code and its literary relation to the other pentateuchal sources. The techniques for legal reinterpretation employed in Leviticus 25 include the use of the Wiederaufnahme and pronominal deixis. These techniques, as well as their larger goal of textual reapplication, reveal an emergent form of the methods that are well attested in the pesher and other more formalized exegetical literature of the later Second Temple period. That they occur here in a text that presents itself as revelatory rather than as exegetical, however, raises a series of fascinating hermeneutical issues.

Calum M. Carmichael's Approach to the Laws of Deuteronomy

In three books and numerous articles, Calum M. Carmichael argues for a radical transformation in the way the laws of Deuteronomy are to be understood. His most recent work, Law and Narrative in the Bible , maintains that the legal corpus of Deuteronomy, far from being “law,” rather constitutes “literature,” in which the Deuteronomistic historian reflects upon the full range of pre-exilic Israelite narrative, Genesis through 2 Kings. In the course of this argument, Carmichael makes fundamental assertions about the composition of Deuteronomy, the history of Israelite literature, and the history of interpretation. Carmichel introduces his work as an attempt “to overturn longstanding views on material that has always been in center stage in the study of the Bible” and as “radical in its results.” His work has already generated a series of further studies of narrative allusion and drafting techniques in Deuteronomy that presuppose his arguments.

Reading the Bible in Nazi Germany: Gerhard von Rad's Attempt to Reclaim the Old Testament for the Church

From 1933 until 1945, the Hebrew Bible and the connection between Christianity and Judaism came under attack in Nazi Germany. Gerhard von Rad defended the importance of the Old Testament in a courageous struggle that profoundly influenced his interpretation of the book of Deuteronomy.

The Manumission of Hermeneutics: The Slave Laws of the Pentateuch as a Challenge to Contemporary Pentateuchal Theory

The three manumission laws of the Pentateuch (Exod 21:2-6; Lev 25:39-46; Deut 15:12-18), along with their narrative reflex in Jeremiah 34, intrinsically raise the issue of the relative dating, literary relation, and direction of influence of the literary sources of the Pentateuch. They served among the key cases to develop the classical model of the sequence of the legal collections: Covenant Code (BC), Deuteronomy 12-26 (D), and the Holiness Code (H; Leviticus 17-26). More recently, scholars have used these laws to challenge the classical model. In particular, the pivotal position of Deuteronomy as standing between the Covenant Code and the Holiness Code has come under attack. Sara Japhet and Jacob Milgrom maintain that Leviticus 25 precedes rather than follows Deuteronomy 15, which implies the sequence BC, H, D. In turning to biblical law to defend the claim for a late Yahwist (J), John Van Seters maintains that the manumission law of the Covenant Code is derived from that of Deuteronomy. Still other scholars have challenged the validity of diachronic analysis altogether or have argued that the laws allude to biblical narratives. With the foundations of pentateuchal theory thus in flux, this paper investigates the methodological assumptions involved in both the classical model and its challenges. At a number of points, standard models of text composition that prevail in the discipline, whereby composition and redaction are viewed as mutually exclusive, obscure the sophistication of these texts. The importance of biblical law for contemporary pentateuchal theory is stressed. The conclusion demonstrates the extent to which, in the utopian social vision promoted by the author of Leviticus 25, the text amounts to a systematic rewriting of earlier laws (BC and D). In a sense, the chapter represents an example of “rewritten Bible” or “rewritten Scripture” within the Pentateuch itself.

Theory and Method in Biblical and Cuneiform Law: Revision, Interpolation and Development

This seminal work, first published by Sheffield Academic Press in the JSOT Supplement Series, remains in demand among scholars of biblical and cuneiform law, as well as among all those interested in the Pentateuchal traditions. The essays in the collection focus on two crucial topics that have been too much neglected in recent debate on the formation of the Pentateuch: (1) biblical law, and the development of Israelite legal institutions, and (2) the significance of ancient Near Eastern law as a model for the composition and editorial history of the Pentateuch.To correct the imbalance, the contributors to this volume investigate whether the biblical and cuneiform legal corpora underwent a process of literary revision and interpolation. If so, what is the evidence for it, and how did such revision take place? If not, how are the textual phenomena to be explained?The contributors are: Raymond Westbrook, Bernard M. Levinson, Samuel Greengus, Martin Buss, Sophie Lafont, Victor H. Matthews, William Morrow, Dale Patrick and Eckart Otto.

Refining the Reconstruction of Col. 2 of the Temple Scroll (11QTa): The Turn to Digital Mapping and Historical Syntax*

Digital technology significantly expands the resources available to scholars seeking to reconstruct ancient manuscripts and, in combination with conventional philology, contributes to a more accurate reconstruction of both the text and the line breaks of col. 2 of the Temple Scroll. The column’s fragmentary condition led Yadin and Qimron to diverge in their reconstructions of the manuscript’s line-breaks and its lacunae. The problem is most acute at 2:8–9, where the scroll’s composer expanded the base text of Exod 34 with Deut 7:25–26. By employing techniques of digital mapping in conjunction with historical syntax, this article helps reconstruct the column’s line-breaks, helps restore the lacunae, and offers a refined reconstruction of the column.

'This is the Manner of the Remission': Implicit Legal Exegesis in 11QMelchizedek as a Response to the Formation of the Torah

This article sheds light on the debates that took place in ancient Judaism between sectarian and early rabbinic interpretation of Scripture. Scholarship on 11QMelchizedek (11QMelch; 11Q13) has largely taken the scrolls harmonization of Deuteronomys Sabbatical debt release (Deut 15:2) with the Jubilee (Lev 25:13) for granted, without examining its rationale. We provide an analysis of the hermeneutics that triggered the synthesis and argue that it was generated in part as a response to a legal-exegetical question: The Jubilee of Leviticus releases slaves, but does it require debt remission? When the separate sources of the Pentateuch were redacted into a single corpus, the compilation of originally inconsistent material into a single Torah must have posed interpretive problems for postexilic readers. After the promulgation of the Torah, Deuteronomys Sabbatical debt law and the Jubilee were read synchronically, now for the first time as part of a unified literary composition. This had to raise the issue of their relationship. Among the questions that emerged for Second Temple readers was whether the Jubilee of Leviticus requires debt release, as Deuteronomy commands. But the absence of an explicit demand for debt release in Leviticus left the door open to argue that the Jubilee does not release debts (the position maintained in the halakic exegesis of the Sipre Deuteronomy and Sipra Leviticus). Taking a contrary stance, the author of 11QMelchizedek responded to that absence by identifying Leviticuss Jubilee with Deuteronomys Sabbatical debt release. His synthesis of the two laws demonstrates that the often presumed opposition of legal and eschatological exegesis does not hold in the case of 11QMelchizedek.