Studies in the Book of the Covenant in the Light of Cuneiform and Biblical Law (Vetus Testamentum, Supplements, 18)

The publication of the ancient Laws of Hammurapi in 1902, emerging from excavations carried out in Susa and previously at Niniveh, ushered in a new era in the study of ancient Near Eastern laws. To begin with, there was a need to interpret these Babylonian laws in their cultural setting, to translate and relate them to the thousands of records and contracts already unearthed in the ancient cities of Sumer, Babylonia, and Assyria. The field of study widened further with the subsequent discovery, during the twentieth century, of other law collections, both older and younger than the Hammurapi Laws, written in Sumerian, Akkadian, and Hittite. Scholars eventually came to realize that these ancient law collections, which were written over a period of centuries, from c. 2100 to 560 B.C.E., were not “codes” in our modern sense of foundational legislation or regulation. They appear, rather, mostly to be corpora of existing norms presented in the form of cases, and compiled by palace and temple scribes, who comprised a small, literate minority among much larger bureaucracies working for such major institutions.