Download or read book Studies in Mesopotamian Legal Symbolism written by Meir Malul and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Studies in Legal Symbolic Acts in Mesopotamian Law written by Meir Malul and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Symbols of Law written by Åke Viberg and published by BoD - Books on Demand. This book was released on 2021-12-03 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This analysis deals with Old Testament law in the form of legal symbolic acts, defined as non-verbal acts which fulfil a legal function when performed under the proper circumstances and when the legal function is different from the physical result of the act. Legal symbolic acts belong to customary law. Since the customary law of ancient Israel is not as well-known as the codified law, these acts provide important information regarding the customary law of ancient Israel. Legal symbolic acts are also conventional, i.e., they are not so much dependent upon their performance for their meaning as upon the general agreement attached to the acts by those who form the surrounding socio-cultural context. This invites a contextual approach to the texts in which the acts are described. Such a contextual approach also restricts the use of comparative material to an illustrative function. Only when the literary context cannot be used to conclude whether it is a case of a legal symbolic act or not, will the comparative material be used in a further, explanatory sense. The analysis focuses on the three aspects of performance, legal function, and historical explanation, and includes the following acts: raising the hand, shaking the hand, putting the hand under the thigh, walking through a divided animal, sharing a meal, piercing the ear of a slave, anointing the head with oil, grasping the horns of the altar, transferring the mantle, covering a woman with the mantle, removing the sandal, and putting a child on the knees.
Download or read book Writing Law and Kingship in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia written by Dominique Charpin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-11-15 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient Mesopotamia, the fertile crescent between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now western Iraq and eastern Syria, is considered to be the cradle of civilization—home of the Babylonian and Assyrian empires, as well as the great Code of Hammurabi. The Code was only part of a rich juridical culture from 2200–1600 BCE that saw the invention of writing and the development of its relationship to law, among other remarkable firsts. Though ancient history offers inexhaustible riches, Dominique Charpin focuses here on the legal systems of Old Babylonian Mesopotamia and offers considerable insight into how writing and the law evolved together to forge the principles of authority, precedent, and documentation that dominate us to this day. As legal codes throughout the region evolved through advances in cuneiform writing, kings and governments were able to stabilize their control over distant realms and impose a common language—which gave rise to complex social systems overseen by magistrates, judges, and scribes that eventually became the vast empires of history books. Sure to attract any reader with an interest in the ancient Near East, as well as rhetoric, legal history, and classical studies, this book is an innovative account of the intertwined histories of law and language.
Download or read book Early Mesopotamian Law written by Russ VerSteeg and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book synthesizes law in ancient Mesopotamia from its beginnings (roughly 3000 BC) to about 1600 BC. Author Russ VerSteeg explains Mesopotamian law using modern legal categories as points of reference in order to make the subject more accessible to the reader. Early Mesopotamian Law is the first book of its kind, filling a void of information left by most ancient law books, which discuss the law of Ancient Greece and Rome. It brings together information from many books on Mesopotamian history; translations of ancient law collections and documents; as well as monographs, journal articles, and unpublished papers dealing with specialized aspects of Mesopotamian law. This book will be of interest to scholars of Near Eastern studies who wish to have a single volume covering the basics of early Mesopotamian law as well as to law students and lawyers who are interested in legal history. Topics covered include: Part 1: Overview, Justice, Organization and Procedure -- the law collections ("codes"); justice and jurisprudence (the role of law); legal organization and personnel and legal procedure; Part 2: Substantive Law -- personal status; the family; inheritance and succession; criminal law; torts; property; and trade, contracts and business law.
Download or read book Deuteronomy and the Hermeneutics of Legal Innovation written by Bernard M. Levinson and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2002 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Positioned at the boundary of traditional biblical studies, legal history, and literary theory, Deuteronomy and the Hermeneutics of Legal Innovation shows how the legislation of Deuteronomy reflects the struggle of its authors to renew late seventh- century Judean society. Seeking to defend their revolutionary vision during the neo-Assyrian crisis, the reformers turned to earlier laws, even when they disagreed with them, and revised them in such a way as to lend authority to their new understanding of God's will. Passages that other scholars have long viewed as redundant, contradictory, or displaced actually reflect the attempt by Deuteronomy's authors to sanction their new religious aims before the legacy of the past. Drawing on ancient Near Eastern law and informed by the rich insights of classical and medieval Jewish commentary, Levinson provides an extended study of three key passages in the legal corpus: the unprecedented requirement for the centralization of worship, the law transforming the old Passover into a pilgrimage festival, and the unit replacing traditional village justice with a professionalized judiciary. He demonstrates the profound impact of centralization upon the structure and arrangement of the legal corpus, while providing a theoretical analysis of religious change and cultural renewal in ancient Israel. The book's conclusion shows how the techniques of authorship developed in Deuteronomy provided a model for later Israelite and post- biblical literature. Integrating the most recent European research on the redaction of Deuteronomy with current American and Israeli scholarship, Levinson argues that biblical interpretation must attend to both the diachronic and the synchronic dimensions of the text. His study, which provides a new perspective on intertextuality, the history of authorship, and techniques of legal innovation in the ancient world, will engage pentateuchal critics and historians of Israelite religion, while reaching out toward current issues in literary theory and Critical Legal Studies.
Download or read book Legal Friction written by Gershon Hepner and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2010 with total page 1138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel tracks the mystery of narratives in the Hebrew Bible and their allusions to Sinai laws by highlighting intertextual allusions created by verbal resonances. While the second and the third parts of the volume illustrate allusions to Sinai narratives made by some narratives occurring in the post-Sinaitic era, twenty-three Genesis narratives are analyzed to show that the protagonists were bound by Sinai Laws before God supposedly gave them to Moses, anticipating the Book of Jubilees. Legal Friction suggests that most of Genesis was composed during or after the Babylonian exile, after the codification of most Sinai laws, which Genesis protagonists consistently violate. The fact that they are not punished for these violations implies to the exiles that the Sinai Covenant was unconditional. In addition, the author proposes that Genesis contains a hidden polemic, encouraging the Judean exiles to follow the revisions of laws of the Covenant Code by the Holiness Code and Deuteronomy. Genesis narratives, like those describing post-Sinai events, often cannot be understood properly without recognition of their allusions to biblical laws.
Download or read book Bodies of Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia written by Matthew Rutz and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 704 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Bodies of Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia Matthew Rutz explores the relationship between ancient collections of texts, commonly deemed libraries and archives, and the modern interpretation of titles like ‘diviner’. By looking at cuneiform tablets as artifacts with archaeological contexts, this work probes the modern analytical categories used to study ancient diviners and investigates the transmission of Babylonian/Assyrian scholarship in Syria. During the Late Bronze Age diviners acted as high-ranking scribes and cultic functionaries in Emar, a town on the Syrian Euphrates (ca. 1375-1175 BCE). This book’s centerpiece is an extensive analytical catalogue of the excavated tablet collection of one family of diviners. Over seventy-five fragments are identified for the first time, along with many proposed joins between fragments.
Download or read book The Body as Property written by Sandra Jacobs and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-04-24 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Body As Property indicates that physical disfigurement functioned in biblical law to verify legal property acquisition, when changes in the status of dependents were formalized. It is based on the reality the cuneiform script, in particular, was developed in Sumer and Mesopotamia for the purpose of record keeping: to provide legal proof of ownership where the inscription of a tablet evidenced the sale, or transfer, of property. Legitimate property acquisition was as important in biblical law, where physical disfigurements marked dependents, in a similar way that the veil or the head covering identified a wife or concubine in ancient Assyrian and Judean societies. This is primarily substantiated in the accounts of prescriptive disfigurements: namely circumcision and the piercing of a slave's ear, both of which were required only when a son, or slave, was acquired permanently. It is further argued that legal entitlement was relevant also to the punitive disfigurements recorded in Exodus 21:22-24, and Deuteronomy 25:11-12, where the physical violation of women was of concern solely as an infringement of male property rights.
Download or read book Sworn Enemies written by C. A. Strine and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sworn Enemies explains how the book of Ezekiel uses formulaic language from the exodus origin tradition – especially YHWH’s oath – to craft an identity for the Judahite exiles. This language openly refutes an autochthonous origin tradition preferred by the non-exiled Judahites while covertly challenging Babylonian claims that YHWH was no longer worthy of worship. After specifying the layers of meaning in the divine oath, the book shows how Ezekiel uses these connotations to construct an explicit, public transcript that denies and mocks the non-exiles’ appeals to a combined Abraham and Jacob tradition (e.g. Ezek 35). Simultaneously, Ezekiel employs the oath’s exodus connotations to support a disguised polemic that resists Babylonian claims that YHWH was powerless to help the exiles. When YHWH swears “as I live” the text goes on to implicitly replace Marduk with YHWH as the deity who controls nations and history (e.g. Ezek 17). Ezekiel, thus, shares the “monotheistic” concepts found in Deutero-Isaiah and elsewhere. Finally, using James C. Scott’s concept of hidden transcripts, the author shows how both polemics cooperate to define a legitimate Judahite nationalism and faithful Yahwism that allows the exiles to resist these threatening “others”.
Download or read book Economy and Society in Northern Babylonia in the Early Old Babylonian Period ca 2000 1800 BC written by Anne Goddeeris and published by Peeters Publishers. This book was released on 2002 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early Old Babylonian economy and society are analyzed in this volume. The first part presents all the relevant cuneiform documents published before 2002, about 1200 in number. As far as possible, the texts are situated in their original archival context. A short summary of the content of each of them is given and, if necessary, there is an accompanying discussion of specific problems. Each reconstructed archive is followed by a description of the activities recorded in it and by a study of its protagonists. A family tree is often added to clarify the history of the archive. In the second part of the volume, the data presented in the archival study are integrated in a comprehensive analysis of the early Old Babylonian economy. Aspects of economy, such as land and labor management, trade, crafts and credit are evaluated and situated in their specific historical context.
Download or read book Continuity and Innovation in the Aramaic Legal Tradition written by Andrew Gross and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008-10-31 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since the Elephantine papyri were first published over a century ago, scholars have speculated on the origins of the well-developed legal formularies used in these documents. Since then, many more Aramaic deeds of conveyance both from Elephantine and from elsewhere have been published, especially within the last decade or so. With this expanded text base now available, the time is ripe for a comprehensive re-assessment of these legal formularies. This book endeavors to show that these disparate Aramaic documents, whose chronological scope spans several centuries, form a discrete and coherent tradition. It isolates and identifies the distinctive elements that form the core of this tradition and traces the histories of these elements back through the cuneiform record.
Download or read book Marriage as a Covenant written by Gordon Hugenberger and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2014-01-08 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marriage as a Covenant is part of the Biblical Studies Library, which features North American paperback editions of original monographs of proven academic merit. These works model sound exegesis and theology and make a significant contribution to biblical scholarship.
Download or read book Marriage as a Covenant written by Gordon Paul Hugenberger and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-09-03 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the interpretation of Malachi 2:10-16, which censures the lax marital practice of its contemporaries. In particular, Hugenberger investigates Malachi's identification of marriage as a "covenant" in response to recent scholarly challenges to this identification. Taking the issues raised by Malachi as his point of departure, Hugenberger examines the nature of covenant and oath (including verba solemnia and oath-signs), and, in light of these findings, explores the theory of marriage implied elsewhere in the Old Testament. Included in this investigation are an analysis of the concentric literary structure of Malachi and a study of the Old Testament's ethical perspectives on divorce, polygamy, and sexual fidelity. An extensive bibliography and indices complete the book.
Download or read book Officina Magica written by Shaul Shaked and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-10-25 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book of essays deals with magical phenomena in Mesopotamian, Zoroastrian, Greek and Jewish cultures. The topics discussed include Mesopotamian magic, its impact on the Aramaic magic bowls, Jewish magical literature, magical gems, Zoroastrian omens, and methods of research.
Download or read book Marriage and Family in the Biblical World written by Ken M. Campbell and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2003-10-06 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ken M. Campbell presents the work of six scholars who map varying understandings of marriage and family in six cultural settings: Victor H. Matthews on the ancient Near East, Daniel I. Block on ancient Israel, S. M. Baugh on Greek society, Susan M. Treggiari on Roman society, David W. Chapman on Second Temple Judaism and Andreas Köstenberger on the New Testament era.
Download or read book Aspekte des Menschseins im Alten Mesopotamien written by Ulrike Steinert and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-02-17 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Being the first monographic study of this kind in the field of Assyriology, this book comprises an investigation of Ancient Mesopotamian concepts of the human person. Concentrating on Akkadian cuneiform texts from the 2nd and 1st millennium BC, the author examines the characteristics and attributes attached to human beings and the notions of the person as a composite being through a semantic analysis of Akkadian terms for the body, body parts and aspects of the self, which can be termed "souls". Through an examination of a wide range of textual sources and an interdisciplinary approach, this study shows that the Mesopotamian views of personhood share amazing similarities with those of the neighbouring ancient cultures, but often differ from our own. “...in short, as a piece of modern Assyriological scholarship it is very well done and a tribute to its author’s capabilities and accomplishments.” Benjamin R. Foster, Yale University
