21 February 2025
Reminder: We are reviewing John Walton's Ancient Israelite Literature in Its Cultural Context.
Walton discusses the function of legal literature. Collections of law code do not constitute "law" per se. Rather, they are declarations of some of the law used by the jurisdiction in question. The example he uses is that flogging is mentioned only once in the Torah as a punishment (Deuteronomy 22:18). However, there is a provision discussing limitations of flogging (Deuteronomy 25:1-3). It makes sense to realize that there might be other reasons flogging would be used as a discipline aside from what is addressed in the Code of Moses. In other words, proper authorities can adhere to boundaries not mentioned by Moses.
We know from reading the historical documents in the Bible that this happened often enough that we should hardly be surprised by it. Walton's discussion is divided into four areas.
1. The cuneiform legal collections already cited include introductions and concluding material that indicates one or more functional outcomes that represent common notions of justice. Oddly enough, we see no evidence that authorities made any reference to things in the the Code of Hammurabi once the stele was erected and copied. The case can be made that none of the codes and collections were meant to be take literally, but were more admonition than anything else. By the same token, they were taken quite seriously.
Walton examines the arguments back and forth on this issue, but the one thing I noticed is how much of it brings western assumptions to the task. I'm still surprised at the amount of scholarship that does not shift into the ANE mindset to explain the ANE mind.
2. The function of law in Mesopotamia was to reflect cosmic order in the sense of "this is how things are". Any formal written compilation was merely a manifestation of the cosmic order that most people were expected to know based on cultural expectations of what justice meant. In other words, it was merely a reflection of generations of experience. As the deity of justice, Shamash was not the source of that cosmic justice, but the guardian of it. Thus, law is not justice in itself, but the path to it.
Thus, in Mesopotamian thinking, morality was not an absolute thing somewhere that one could define, which is quite contrary to the western notion. Walton doesn't express it in these terms, but it comes to the same end: The Mesopotamian deities didn't operate by a fixed code, but would respond if someone transgressed social stability. Justice was personal and contextual. You weren't forbidden from stealing, but you would be punished if you did steal and it caused trouble.
Thus, gods didn't reveal what it meant to be civilized, but did require people to find their way to civilization and to maintain it. The gods themselves didn't adhere to laws, but to ideals for outcomes.
3. The function of Biblical collections of laws, as previously noted, includes both casuistic law (which all cuneiform texts are) as well as apodictic law that ostensibly doesn't appear anywhere else. Again, there's a lot of back and forth among scholars how to describe the similarities and differences with parallel collections.
If we understand that apodictic law is closest to treaty law in Ancient Near Eastern history, then the concept of guarding the Covenant makes a lot more sense to us. If we view the Decalogue, for example, as treaty law, then it fits right into the broader context.
For my own part, I have long noted something that apparently isn't included in the academic handling of this whole question of parallels. The various mythological deities didn't stake a claim over various civilizations the way Jehovah did over Israel. They are elohim, not Jehovah; they are managers, not owners. Their management was rather poorly executed, and we know this, thanks to Heiser. Moreover, even divinity students knew for a very long time that the Covenant was a treaty, not legislation or edicts. I'm not sure why Walton treats it as something deep and significant, as if it answers some grand questions upon which men have pondered a long time.
4. At any rate, Walton gets around to only hinting that Israeli law is a matter of performance to please someone who actively communicated routinely to and through His servants in a way none of the pagan deities were supposed to have done. Jehovah is personally involved as if He were a literally there in the Tabernacle/Temple and paid attention to daily events in the nation. Israelis asked how they could keep peace with a Person. Mesopotamians asked how they could keep chaos at bay.
Thus, while the parallel societies did publish guidelines on how to go about worshiping various deities, such material was never part of their laws. In Israel, all law had religious meaning. All civil code was bathed in a sort of moral absolutism wholly absent from the parallel collections. Thus, while there are superficial similarities, the differences are monumental.
Finally, the last section of this chapter mentions Egyptian collections as being in a separate class. This is because the rulers held a pretense of partial divinity, with no particular need to justify themselves before the gods. Instead, Egyptian culture held to a mythology of ma'at in which the cosmos had a moral fabric of its own which defines justice. Thus, government was ideally consistent with the moral fabric of reality itself. While this is somewhat similar to the Mesopotamian social order versus chaos, the Egyptian concept was far more pervasive and had a grand power of its own.
Thus, when Moses grew up under an Egyptian education, he later realized that what he considered ma'at was personified in Jehovah. Instead of waiting on men to discover His will, God went out of His way, not just to make it known, but to actively watch over it in Person.
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