Law and Gender in the Ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible

Ilan Peled

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000733457
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Bibbie

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.

Notes on textual quotations in Part I

This book contains textual quotations from original ancient Near Eastern sources. These sources were written in several different languages – Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite and Hebrew – and in two different scripts: cuneiform and alphabetic. Therefore, the method of quoting these textual sources requires clarification.

The Akkadian texts are presented in the book in bound script (normalization), even if the original text consisted of logograms; these are normalized into their Akkadian equivalents. A case in point is the sentence “The wages of a hired-worker are [wri]tten on the stele”. The transliteration of the original sentence is: á-bi ^lúḫun-gá ina^na4na-re-e [ša]-ṭe₄-er; however, it is quoted in the book in its normalized Akkadian form: idū agrim ina narê [ša]ṭer. The phrase idū agrim, “wages of a hired-worker”, appears in the original text in its logographic form á-bi ^lúḫun-gá, but in the book it is normalized into the phonetic Akkadian idū agrim.

Sumerian texts are presented in transliteration. Thus, the sentence “He caught her upon a man” is quoted as follows: ugu lú-ka in-dab₅. Non-transliterated isolated Sumerian/logographic terms within the body of the text are given in plain spaced script (e.g., sag), while Hittite terms within the body of the text are given in italicized script (e.g., wannummiya-).

Biblical quotations are presented in Hebrew script, not in Latin alphabetic rendering. Hence, the sentence “If your Hebrew brother or sister is sold to you” (Deut. 15:12) is quoted as follows: כִּי יִ מָּ כֵר לְ ךָ אָ חִיךָ הָ עִ בְ רִי אוֹ הָ עִ בְ רִ יָּה, rather than a transcription such as kî yimmākêr leḵā ’āḥîḵā hā‘iḇrî ’ōw hā‘iḇrîyāh. The biblical texts follow the Masoretic version.

Introduction

It is the year 1750 BCE. Not that anyone alive knows it, of course. In the glorious city of Babylon, capital of the Old Babylonian kingdom, the scribes of King Hammurabi are busy preparing a magnificent stele from a dark basalt stone. Carefully they carve into the stone a long and stylized inscription. Millennia later, this inscription will be discovered by archaeologists, and, once its secrets are deciphered, it will become known as “the Laws of Hammurabi”, the longest and most elaborate law collection from the ancient Near East. One of the statutes this collection contains orders the following: “If a man’s wife is caught lying with another male: they shall bind them and cast them into the water; if the wife’s master lets his wife live, then the king shall let his slave live”.¹

This was not the first time, nor the last, that a law collection from the ancient Near East addressed the issues of sex and gender and intervened in people’s family life. Identical rulings to the statute quoted previously appear in the Ešnunna, Hittite and Middle Assyrian Laws. Significantly, the Hebrew Bible as well displays a similar statute.

Are we to assume, therefore, that adultery was regarded as a punishable crime in the ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible? A statute from the Laws of Lipit-Ištar complicates the matter:

If a young married man has a prostitute from the street, the judges order him not to go back to that prostitute, afterwards he divorces his first-ranking wife (and) gives her the silver of her divorce settlement: he shall not marry that prostitute.²

As we see, a married man who had adulterous relations with a prostitute was not punished according to this statute. In case he subsequently divorced his wife, he was not allowed to marry the prostitute, but his adultery remained unpunished. The difference between this statute and the ones mentioned previously is simple: the gender of the supposed perpetrator. Law collections from all over the ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible decreed harsh punishments for adulterous wives but remained silent when it came to adulterous husbands. This simple example explicates what this book is all about.

The aim of this book is to examine how gender relations were regulated in ancient Near Eastern and biblical law. These two corpora are examined independently from one another and are then assessed vis-à-vis each other.

It is important to note from the start that this book does not confront questions of legal procedure or applicability. It does not aspire to describe how law was enforced in daily life and how – as a result – legal procedure affected gender relations. The book is restricted to the question of how formal law addressed gender-related matters, how it allegedly affected and regulated them, without examining whether and how it actually did. The highly complicated questions of the applicability of law are briefly discussed in the introduction of the book but are not subsequently pursued any further.

Further clarifications concerning the limitations of the present study are due. This book is by and large descriptive and, unlike some of my previous works, maintains a minimal engagement with theory – whether of law or of gender. A significant complication derives from the fact that modern research of law and gender deals with numerous issues that are simply irrelevant to the study of gender and law in the ancient world. We can note, for example, issues such as discrimination in employment opportunities, imprisonment and human rights, health or questions of gender and race. None of these issues have any relevance to ancient Near Eastern or biblical settings, and the methodologies applied for investigating such matters are unproductive for the present study. Even worse: applying irrelevant methodologies is not only unhelpful but, in fact, quite harmful and bound to mar the discussion with anachronisms, improperly applied in the wrong field of research. It is my hope that this book could be used in the future by scholars who are more interested in the theoretical aspects of the field, by using the study I present here as a basis for further elaborating the research of gender and law in the ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible.

It is beyond the scope of this book to present a thorough discussion of the complicated relationship between the worlds of the ancient Near East and of the Hebrew Bible. The reader may easily consult for these matters the vast and accessible literature on this topic. However, no attempt is made to suggest that direct contact necessarily existed between the two, causing similarities or demanding explanations for discrepancies. It is obvious that the ancient Israelites were influenced by their Mesopotamian counterparts and that the long-lasting legal tradition of Mesopotamia is echoed in the biblical laws as well. In this book I point – where possible – to cases addressed by both corpora, whether similarly or differently.³

Needless to say, the topic of ancient Near Eastern law has been investigated at length by many scholars. Gender in the ancient Near East is a vast topic, and though it has been drawing scholarly attention for a few decades now, much in this realm is still left to be discussed. The interface between these two fascinating fields, however, has never been treated exhaustively. In this book, the sphere of legislation is used as a prism to look through at gender dynamics in the ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible. Thus, some broader questions are examined concerning social, cultural and diachronic variations in the relationship between law and gender.

The cultural frame of this book encompasses the main Mesopotamian cultures – Sumer, Babylonia and Assyria – and at times compares them with the Hittite culture, which in many respects was peripheral to its Mesopotamian counterparts. Thus, the book offers a comparative cross-cultural perspective, considering various cultures of the ancient Near East. The ancient Near Eastern legal traditions are further assessed in this book in comparison with the pertinent evidence from biblical law. Thus, the cross-cultural and diachronic examinations the book offers stretch beyond the boundaries of Mesopotamia and Hatti.⁴

The structure of the book is explained in detail in what follows. It consists of two parts: the first presents thematic discussions, while the second contains the textual sources on which the said discussions are based. The first part is divided into four thematic chapters. Chapter 1 examines issues of equity and inequality between the genders, as evident in various specific topics. Chapter 2 deals with the bureaucratic systems of the palace and the temple, and with economy. Chapter 3 becomes narrower and examines the structure of the family. Chapter 4 explores more specific topics: morality, sex crimes and liminality.

The research framework, both chronologically and geographically, is based by and large on the pertinent sources used. As is explained in what follows in detail, these are official texts that were produced by the ruling elite – most frequently the royal circles – in delineating proper conduct, usually within the frame of a crime-and-punishment rationale: law collections and royal decrees. The earliest relevant records, therefore, derive from the late third millennium BCE (LUN), and the latest ones are roughly dated to the seventh century BCE (NBL).⁵ The geographical scope encompasses ancient Mesopotamia (Sumer, Babylonia and Assyria), Hatti and ancient Israel.

Previous research: a concise overview

No academic publication breaks new ground without relying – at least to a certain degree – on previous research. Indeed, the topics of law and of gender, as reflected in the writings of the ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible, have seen their fair share of academic study. In what follows, I merely mention the most significant relevant publications, and hence this overview of previous research should not be taken as an exhaustive bibliographical survey. All the works mentioned in this section have their own lists of previous literature, and the reader may consult these in case of need.

The academic research of the ancient Near Eastern law collections began with the discovery of the most famous of them all – the black stele of Hammurabi’s collection, found in 1901 and published the following year. More discoveries followed, which revealed other collections, some of which predate Hammurabi’s. Textual editions of each one of these collections were offered by different scholars, and at times a given collection’s editio princeps was improved by later editions as philological knowledge was enhanced and new textual copies were found. The authoritative editions commonly used today are found in Roth 1997, which includes previous literature. Updated editions to Roth’s are the following: Civil 2011 for LUN, Wilcke 2014 for LUN and LLI and Hoffner 1997 for HL. Each one of these publications also includes previous literature.

Biblical law has drawn scholarly attention for centuries, in fact millennia, as its research went hand in hand with biblical exegesis and interpretation but also had a life of its own. Supplying a list of pertinent studies will do injustice to all the numerous researches that will inevitably remain unmentioned. Many important works combined the two worlds of ancient Near Eastern and of biblical law, such as, to ...