Bruce Wells

The Hated Wife in Deuteronomic Law

In Deut 21:15-17, a father is required to grant the birthright to his biologically oldest son, when he has both a loved wife and a hated wife, and when the oldest son is the son of the hated wife. A common interpretation of this text is that it seeks to prevent fathers in general from demoting an eldest son and granting the birthright to a younger son. By contrast, this article argues that the text assumes that fathers had the right to demote their eldest and that they would continue to have this right. It suggests that the hated wife is one who has been arbitrarily demoted by her husband to a lower status within the household. Because of this action on the part of the husband, the text requires him to forfeit his right also to demote this woman’s son arbitrarily, a right he would otherwise have retained.

The Grammar of the Neo-Babylonian Assertory Oath

1 Research for this article has been funded in large measure by the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities and its award of a Collaborative Research Grant for the authors’ project, “NeoBabylonian Trial Procedure.” Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The abbreviations herein follow those of the most recent volume (U/W) of the Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (CAD; Chicago, 2010). All translations of ancient texts, unless otherwise noted, are those of the authors. We thank Małgorzata Sandowicz and our peer reviewers for their insights on an earlier draft of this article. Of course, all remaining errors are the authors’ alone. 2 It is beyond the scope of this article to enter the debate between “tense” and “aspect” for describing categories such as present, preterite, and perfect. We follow Michael Streck’s view that “das spB Verbalsystem grundlegend ein relatives Tempussystem mit enger Affinität zu einem Apektsystem [sic] darstellt” (Zahl und Zeit: Grammatik der Numeralia und des Verbalsystems im Spätbabylonischen [Groningen, 1995], 245). the preterite form. At least two Neo-Babylonian legal and administrative texts suggest that scribes used the perfect tense on occasion.