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.

This is a study of the interrelationships between the formulary traditions of the legal documents of the Jewish colony of Elephantine and the legal formulary traditions of their Egyptian counterparts. The legal documents of Elephantine have been approached in three different ways thus far: first, comparing them to the later Aramaic legal tradition; second, as part of a self-contained system, and more recently from the point of view of the Assyriological legal tradition. However, there is still a fourth possible approach, which has long been neglected by scholars in this field, and that is to study the Elephantine legal documents from an Egyptological perspective. In seeking the Egyptian parallels and antecedents to the Aramaic formulary, Botta hopes to balance the current scholarly perspective, based mostly upon Aramaic and Assyriological comparative studies.

Outside of the Bible, all of the known Near Eastern law collections were produced in the third to second millennia BCE, in cuneiform on clay tablets, and in major cities in Mesopotamia and in the Hittite Empire. None of the major sites in Syria that have yielded cuneiform tablets has borne even a fragment 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 as law collections represent the only "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. Instead, what we call "biblical law" 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, including sample contracts, fictional cases, short sequences of laws, and legal phrasebooks. When biblical law is viewed in the context of these legal-pedagogical texts from Mesopotamia, its practical roots in a set of comparable legal exercises begin to emerge.

This work considers the story behind papyri discovered in 1960 in the Cave of Letters by the Dead Sea. The archive contains various contracts and deeds entered into by a Jewish woman named Babatha, daughter of a land owner named Shim'on, at the end of the first century.

This comparative handbook is intended to provide scholars of the New Testament with detailed, systematic and accurate resources concerning the Judaic context of the gospel of Mark. It aims to serve as a powerful tool to assist the reader - and commentator - in understanding and commenting on the gospel of Mark. Introductions are provided to help with issues of dating and the development of the literatures concerned. Possible interpretations are also presented, where suitable.

This volume constitutes the proceedings of the March 7, 2008 Ranieri Colloquium on Ancient Studies at New York University, dedicated to "The Dead Sea Scrolls at 60: The Scholarly Contributions of NYU Faculty and Alumni." These studies offer a sampling of the extensive research conducted by three generations of NYU faculty, students, and alumni, in a range of domains pertaining to the scrolls and documents discovered in the Judean Desert since 1947, including Hebrew language, religious thought, and law.

In Language Contact, Colonial Administration, and the Construction of Identity in Ancient Israel, Boyd offers the first book-length incorporation of language contact theory with data from the Bible. It allows for a reexamination of the nature of contact between biblical authors and the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Achaemenid empires.