Leading evangelical scholar John Walton surveys the cultural context of the ancient Near East, bringing insight to the interpretation of specific Old Testament passages. This new edition of a top-selling textbook has been thoroughly updated and revised throughout to reflect the refined thinking of a mature scholar. It includes over 30 illustrations. Students and pastors who want to deepen their understanding of the Old Testament will find this a helpful and instructive study.

Five Pentateuchal texts (Lev 24:10-23; Num 9:6-14; Num 15:32-36; Num 27:1-11; Num 36:1-12) offer unique visions of the elaboration of law in Israel's formative past. In response to individual legal cases, Yahweh enacts impersonal and general statutes reminiscent of biblical and ancient Near Eastern law collections. From the perspective of comparative law, Dylan R. Johnson proposes a new understanding of these texts as biblical rescripts: a legislative technique that enabled sovereigns to enact general laws on the basis of particular legal cases. Typological parallels drawn from cuneiform and Roman law illustrate the complex ideology informing the content and the form of these five cases. The author explores how latent conceptions of law, justice, and legislative sovereignty shaped these texts, and how the Priestly vision of law interacted with and transformed earlier legal traditions.

Der Autor bespricht in seiner Studie alle bekannten literarischen Quellen zu Moab aus dem 1. Jahrtausend v.Chr. Die Texte aus Moab selbst werden eingehend untersucht. Ausserdem werden die Notizen aus agyptischen und neuassyrischen Quellen sowie das Alte Testament ausgewertet. Uber den Umweg der Sihon-Tradition haben die biblischen Autoren Moab aus dem nordlichen in den sudlichen Landesteil verlagert. Das eigentliche Kernland Moabs war aber zu allen Zeiten nordlich des Arnon. Schliesslich werden die archaologischen Daten fur eine Rekonstruktion der Geschichte Moabs im 1. Jahrtausend v.Chr. herangezogen.Der Durchgang durch die Quellen zeigt, dass ab dem 9. Jahrhundert v. Chr. im nordlichen Moab nationalstaatliche Tendenzen auszumachen sind. Die verschiedenen Ethnien im Gebiet von Moab wurden in der Folgezeit geeint. Archaologisch zeigt sich, dass die Besiedlung des sudlichen Moabs vermutlich von einer starken Zentralmacht im Norden organisiert wurde. Erst nach dem Verlust der Nationalstaatlichkeit erodiert auch das Zusammengehorigkeitsgefuhl der Bewohner. Eine staatlich verfasste Gesellschaft hat es ab der persischen Zeit in Moab fur lange Zeit nicht mehr gegeben.

This volume examines how gender relations were regulated in ancient Near Eastern and biblical law. The textual corpus examined includes the various pertinent law collections, royal decrees and instructions from Mesopotamia and Hatti, and the three biblical legal collections. Peled explores issues beginning with the wide societal perspective of gender equality and inequality, continues to the institutional perspective of economy, palace and temple, the family, and lastly, sex crimes. All the texts mentioned or referred to in the book are given in an appendix, both in the original languages and in English translation, allowing scholars to access the primary sources for themselves. Law and Gender in the Ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible offers an invaluable resource for anyone working on Near Eastern society and culture, and gender in the ancient world more broadly.

The first comprehensive survey of the world's oldest known legal systems, this collaborative work of twenty-two scholars covers over 3,000 years of legal history of the Ancient Near East. Each of the book's chapters represents a review of the law of a particular period and region, e.g. the Egyptian Old Kingdom, by a specialist in that area. Within each chapter, the material is organized under standardized legal categories (e.g. constitutional law, family law) that make for easy cross-referencing. The chapters are arranged chronologically by millennium and within each millennium by the three major politico-cultural spheres of the region: Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia and the Levant. An introduction by the editor discusses the general character of Ancient Near Eastern Law.

This striking new contribution to gender studies demonstrates the essential role of Israelite and Near East law in the historical analysis of gender. The theme of these studies of Babylonian, Hittite, Assyrian, and Israelite law is this: What is the significance of gender in the formulation of ancient law and custom? Feminist scholarship is enriched by these studies in family history and the status of women in antiquity. At the same time, conventional legal history is repositioned, as new and classical texts are interpreted from the vantage point of feminist theory and social history. Papers from SBL Biblical Law Section form the core of this collection.