How God Became a Lawgiver: The Place of the Torah in Ancient Near Eastern Legal History

Project Information

DIVLAW

Grant agreement ID: 833222

DOI

10.3030/833222

Project closed

EC signature date 9 April 2019

Start date 1 January 2020

End date 30 June 2025

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 2 500 000,00

EU contribution

€ 2 500 000,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITAT ZURICH
Switzerland

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - DIVLAW (How God Became a Lawgiver: The Place of the Torah in Ancient Near Eastern Legal History)

Reporting period: 2024-07-01 to 2025-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

While the notion of divine law developed in ancient times, it was not a quintessential feature of all ancient cultures. This idea came about as an historical process. Once in place, the idea of the law given by God decisively shaped the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic conceptions of religion and society. The relationships between human rulers, broader political entities, and the divine sphere provides fodder for debate around issues of political authority and legitimacy across religious and cultural boundaries.
Given the ongoing relevance of this concept, this project addresses some of the earliest recorded reflections on this interplay in history and evaluates the context, development, and early receptions of the formulation of divine law as they are found in the Ancient Near East, ancient Israel and Judaism, and ancient Greece.
Scholarship of ancient West Asia and the Bible traditionally viewed the divine law as part of the very beginnings of the Hebrew Bible, the “bedrock” of biblical tradition that distinguished it from its Near Eastern neighbors. Developments over recent decades have, however, rendered this view implausible. This project provides a new formulation of the development of divine law and its implications in the Hebrew Bible and antiquity in four steps. First, it elucidates the relationship between the divine and legal spheres in the ancient Near Eastern world that provide the context for the emergence of the notion of divine laws and to the conception of God as lawgiver. Second, it describes the steps involved in God becoming a lawgiver in the Pentateuchal texts of Exodus and Deuteronomy in the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods of early Jewish history. Third, it assesses this notion’s impact on ancient Judaism, evaluating the historical, social, and political contexts in which this concept was operative throughout Persian and Hellenistic Jewish communities. Fourth and finally, it contextualizes this development in the ancient world in comparison with parallel developments with ancient Greek polities and discourse that reflect on “divine law” in radically different ways

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

As the cultural backdrop informing the composition of the Hebrew Bible, the legal literature of the ancient Near East reveals a complex relationship between notions of divine agency in maintaining social order and the role of temporal rulers in actualizing this ideal. In assuming the role of the lawgiver, Mesopotamian kings and their scribes began to associate the fundamental purpose for which kingship existed with this task. On the one hand, this connection held kings accountable to the gods who had created them to render justice. On the other hand, it also set them apart from the rest of humanity. This project revealed that labelling Mesopotamian law as quintessentially anthropogenic (and biblical law as divine) is far too reductive. The boundaries between divine and human law were not always clear in the cultures of Sumer, Babylon, and Assyria. In their capacities as lawgivers, human kings were imagined to assume divine attributes and stand in closer proximity to the divine world than any other human being. Memories of this tradition also filtered their way into biblical texts, though the divine law of the Pentateuch mostly obscures memories of Israel’s and Judah’s kings as lawgivers themselves. Such ideas are nonetheless detectable and reinforce the project’s overarching assertion that the biblical concept of divine law is neither monolithic nor an essential element of Israelite religion from its earliest inception.
Clarifying the origins of the notion of divine law in ancient Israel and Judah has required a multi-faceted approach including conceptual, textual, and socio-historical elements.
The scope of divine law’s reception in early Judean communities was initially limited to cultic practices and group identity markers. Persian-period evidence from Egypt and the books of Numbers and Ezra points especially to the regulation of cultic practices like Passover. Yet even such postexilic communities grappled with the ultimate source of the law due to a received tradition that at times presented it as the law of the deity, but at other times the mediated law of Moses. Nor is the king’s role as lawgiver completely forgotten in these later periods, though his part transforms from a speaker of law to a faithful disseminator of Torah.
Comparative study of Greek and Hebrew cultures attests to a world order under divine responsibility indicating an overarching notion of cosmic justice that lies at the heart of the very notion of “divine law.” This idea introduces reflection on “laws of nature” or “natural law” in the use of legal vocabulary in Greek and Hebrew texts to describe natural or cosmic phenomena. As for the Hebrew Bible, the idea of “law of nature” emerges in later wisdom traditions focused on the creation account, which is reinterpreted through a legal imagery. Furthermore, the spheres of the divine and human law connect in both Greek and Hebrew Bible conceptions through the role of oracles as providing legitimation for the work of human lawmakers.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Scholars have traditionally depicted Near Eastern law as a system centered on the political authority of kings, with biblical law representing a radical break in attributing law to a divine source. With only a few exceptions, the almost complete subordination of biblical kings under the legal authority of Yhwh was an important innovation that set it apart from its Near Eastern neighbors, but it built on motifs and ideas that had circulated in the ancient Near East for millennia.
A systematic catalogue of foundational factors responsible for the conceptual development of divine law in ancient Israel and Judah during the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian epochs has led to a novel explanation for the gradual demotion of the active function of the king in the realm of law within the biblical texts. With regard to the influence of Pentateuchal law on society, this law hardly functioned like the modern Western understanding of “law” as “rule of law” governing property rights or criminal justice at any point in the Babylonian through Hellenistic periods. Rather, as found in recent anthropological studies of law, in Judean communities, law functions as a depiction of a more ideal society. Thus, there is a sharper break between the functional laws (e.g. royal decrees) of the Persian and Hellenistic Empires and Judean conceptions of Torah than previously anticipated, though the differentiation is fluid.
Comparative research shows substantial continuity between ancient Israelite religion and Greek conceptions of nature as a space shared between human and divine beings. The emergence of the Torah as a written law corpus of divine origin progressively impacted the notion of “natural law” itself: the insistence of late traditions on the correspondence between creation and law eventually led to the idea that the whole world is sustained by the Torah. By contrast, since the fifth cent. BCE, Greek authors refer to a core of religious or ethical principles recognized as universally valid, emanating from the gods, and occasionally labeled as “natural.” These norms are explicitly defined as unwritten, contrasting with the main written body of the city laws.

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