"Presenting a novel approach for the study of law in the Dead Sea scrolls, this book is conveniently divided into concepts and practices, highlighting the discrepancies between the two. A valuable study for anyone interested in Jewish law, legal history, sectarianism and communal life"--

This book offers a novel approach for the study of law in the Judean Desert Scrolls, using the prism of legal theory. Following a couple of decades of scholarly consensus withdrawing from the "Essene hypothesis," it proposes to revive the term, and suggests employing it for the sectarian movement as a whole, while considering the group that lived in Qumran as the Yahad. It further proposes a new suggestion for the emergence of the Yahad, based on the roles of the Examiner and the Instructor in the two major legal codes, the Damascus Document and the Community Rule. The understanding of Essene law is divided into concepts and practices, in order to emphasize the discrepancy between creed, rhetoric, and practices. The abstract exploration of notions such as time, space, obligation, intention, and retribution, is then compared against the realities of social practices, including admission, initiation, covenant, leadership, reproof, and punishment. The legal analysis yields several new suggestions for the study of the scrolls: first, Amihay proposes to rename the two strands of thought of Jewish law, formerly referred to as "nominalism" and "realism," with the terms "legal essentialism" and "legal formalism." The two laws of admission in the Community Rule are distinguished as two different laws, one of an association for a group as a whole, the other as an admission of an individual. The law of reproof is proven to be an independent legal procedure, rather than a preliminary stage of prosecution. The methodological division in this study of thought and practice provides a nuanced approach for the study of law in general, and religious law in particular.

Prescriptive law writings rarely mirror the ways a society practices law, a fact that raises special problems for the social and legal historian. Through close analysis of the laws of bailment (i.e., temporary safekeeping) in Exodus 22, Yael Landman probes the relationship of law in the biblical law collections and law-in-practice in ancient Israel and exposes a vision of divine justice at the heart of pentateuchal law. Landman further demonstrates that ancient Near Eastern bailment laws continue to influence postbiblical Jewish law. This book advances an approach to the study of biblical law that connects pentateuchal and ancient Near Eastern law collections, biblical narrative and prophecy, and Mesopotamian legal documents and joins philological and comparative analysis with humanistic legal approaches, in order to access how people thought about and practiced law in ancient Israel.

In The Authority of Law in the Hebrew Bible and Early Judaism, Vroom tracks the emergence of legal obligation in early Judaism. He draws from legal theory to develop a means of identifying instances in which ancient interpreters treated a legal text as a source of binding obligation.

Although most people acknowledge that Jesus was a first-century Jew, interpreters of the Gospels often present him as opposed to Jewish law and customs--especially when considering his numerous encounters with the ritually impure. Matthew Thiessen corrects this popular misconception by placing Jesus within the Judaism of his day. Thiessen demonstrates that the Gospel writers depict Jesus opposing ritual impurity itself, not the Jewish ritual purity system or the Jewish law. This fresh interpretation of significant passages from the Gospels shows that throughout his life, Jesus destroys forces of death and impurity while upholding the Jewish law.