Making A Case by Sarah Milstein, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters

Outside of the Bible, all the known Near Eastern law collections were produced in the 3rd-2nd millennia B. C.E. in cuneiform on clay tablets and in major cities in Mesopotamia and in the Hittite Empire. None of the five major sites in Syria that have yielded cuneiform tablets have borne even afragment of a law collection, even though several have produced ample legal documentation. Excavations at Nuzi have also turned up numerous legal documents, but again, no law collection. Even Egypt has not yielded a collection of laws. As such, the biblical texts that scholars regularly identify aslaw collections only represent the "western," non-cuneiform expressions of the genre in the ancient Near East, produced by societies not known for their political clout and separated in time from "other" collections by centuries. Making a Case: The Practical Roots of Biblical Law challenges the long-held notion that Israelite and Judahite scribes either made use of "old" law collections or set out to produce law collections in the Near Eastern sense of the genre. Sara Milstein instead proposes that what we call "biblicallaw" is closer in form and function to another, oft-neglected Mesopotamian genre: legal-pedagogical texts. During their education, Mesopotamian scribes studied a variety of legal-oriented school texts: sample contracts, fictional cases, sequences of non-canonical law, and legal phrasebooks. WhenExodus 20-23 and Deuteronomy 12-26 are viewed in the context of these legal-pedagogical texts from Mesopotamia, their practical roots in comparable (lost) legal exercises begin to emerge. | Making A Case by Sarah Milstein, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters