Terminology
- Apodictic Law: absolute commands (“thou shalt not”)
- Casuistic Law: case studies / scenarios
- Lex talionis: retributive (“in kind”) justice
Issue: Literary Relationship to ANE Law Codes
- Many similarities
- Many differences
-
Many law codes which could serve as analogies or sources
- Required reading illustrates the above
- Optional reading (Wright) presents a new (controversial in scholarship) approach approximating the sort of claims you’d hear outside academia
Sarna
- Torah followed long-established, widespread, standardized patterns of Mesopotamian law
- ANE: Everyone had law codes
- Love covenant is unique
Wright
- Copied from the Hammurabi
- During the 8 century
Rebuttal Against Wright
- If copied, why lots of things are left out?
- There are better parallels but Wright wanted to prove the wholesale copy proposition
- Covenant Code are found in lots of other places
Issue: God’s Love Unique to Law Covenant
Moran (1963)
-
Covenantal love = obedience of vassal
- Relationship absent of love in God’s direction
- No specific parental metaphor
- Love could therefore be commanded
-
One-sided view (even in DOTP); first two points found in other biblical texts but not Deuteronomy
- Sees Hosea 11:1 (Osee), but misses Deut 7:7-8 because focused on ‘ahab (‘aheb, ‘ahaba)
McCarthy
- Disagreed with Moran that there was no father-son love metaphor in Deuteronomy
- Agreed that this parental relationship was basically one directional, lacking emotional element on God’s part
Lapsley (2009)
- Some needed push back in both respects
- Consider other terminologies allows for emotions in love
- Moran did not consider other words
- Deut 7:7-8 Israel’s election depends on God’s freely given love, the logic of which cannot be fully understood
- Hammurabi doesn’t have covenant love relationship with his people
- God’s love for humanity (unique)
- Important to biblical theology
- Scholars are not warm to the notion that the laws were copied wholesale from the source
- Find parallel in other texts