14 February 2025
The similarities between Israeli Old Testament Law and the rest of the Ancient Near East is confined to some particulars and the forms in which they are stated, but the underlying moral purpose is radically different. While the laws were certainly familiar territory in wording and format, what was new for the Nation of Israel at Sinai was the divine motives.
The primary subcategory that the Bible adds to the standard split between civil and criminal law is the cultic (ritual) law. No other code has this. Walton offers a rather detailed chart showing which of the external documents include certain types of civil and criminal laws, and then another that compares the identified covenants within the biblical narrative.
Of course, you and I understand that God outlaws any scintilla of competition from other deities. He is both God and the true ruler of the nation and will not tolerate disloyalty. What most people miss is just how God took it personally, and Walton doesn't raise this issue.
By the same token, we note that biblical law scarcely mentions contract law, something that takes up a lot of space in the parallel documents. Mesopotamian law codes in particular devote a lot of effort to regulate fairness in commerce. However, the overlap between Bible and ANE laws in criminal codes are substantial.
Also unique to Scripture are the following categories:
Walton posits three areas of analysis for this category of literature: content, form and function. He lays out a frame of reference for degrees of similarities in those laws that are echoed in the Old Testament and neighboring cultures: identical, nearly identical, close, and simply being the same subject. An example of nearly identical law code would be regarding the goring of oxen. If you ask me, too many scholars automatically assume one must have borrowed from the other. It makes more sense that a common and rather uncomplicated issue like ox goring would have been settled in custom long before anyone bothered to write any laws at all.
Examining content, the difference is that the Mesopotamian laws generally ignore the ox and focus on the owner, where as the Bible requires killing the ox as well. It becomes almost a religious failure, not merely a tort claims issue. Walton agrees with other scholars who sense that an ox goring a human violates the command for humans to rule over nature. Thus, Scripture emphasizes not merely a tort claim of compensation, but the expiation of blood guilt, something absent from the parallel laws.
Thus, Mesopotamian Law is restricted mostly to social stability, whereas biblical law is mostly a matter of moral duty to God.
The next post in this series will examine the parallels in form.
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