Law and Religion in the Eastern Mediterranean : From Antiquity to Early Islam

How was it possible that Greeks often wrote their laws on the walls of their temples, but - in contrast to other ancient societies - never transformed these written civic laws into a religious law? Did it matter whether laws were inscribed in stone, clay, or on a scroll? And above all, how did written law shape a society in which the majority population was illiterate? This volume addresses the similarities and differences in the role played by law and religion in various societies across the Eastern Mediterranean. Bringing together a collection of 14 essays from scholars of the Hebrew Bible, Ancient Greece, the Ancient Near East, Qumran, Elephantine, the Nabateans, and the early Arab world, it also approaches these subjects in an all-encompassing manner, looking in detail at the notion of law and religion in the Eastern Mediterranean as a whole in both the geographical as well as the historical space. MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict Cover 1 Contents 8 List of Figures 10 List of Tables 11 List of Contributors 12 List of Abbreviations 14 Introduction 20 Part I 30 1. The Sound of the Magic Flute in Legal and Religious Registers of the Ramesside Period: Some Common Features of Two ‘Ritualistic Languages’ 32 2. Law and Religion in Achaemenid Iran 60 3. Law and Religion in Early Greece 78 4. Gods, Kings, and Lawgivers 98 5. Hated by the Gods and your Spouse: Legal Use of (omited) in Elephantine and its Ancient Near Eastern Context 124 6. The Aramaic Law of Sale Considered from the Papyrological and Rabbinic Evidence 148 7. Fines and Curses: Law and Religion among the Nabataeans and their Neighbours 184 Part II 206 8. Law and Religion in the Hebrew Bible 208 9. The History of the Legal-Religious Hermeneutics of the Book of Deuteronomy from the Assyrian to the Hellenistic Period 230 10. ‘The peg in the wall’: Cultic Centralization Revisited 270 11. Is It Law or Religion? Legal Motivations in Deuteronomic and Neo-Babylonian Texts 306 12. Job’s Compositional History One More Time: What Its Law Might Contribute 330 13. ‘For the judgment is God’s’ (Deut. 1: 17): Biblical and Communal Law in the Dead Sea Scrolls 366 14. The Jurist as a Mujtahid––the Hermeneutical Concept of Abu l-Hasan 'Ali al-Mawardi (d. 449/1058) 384 Index of References 416