Inventing God's Law:

How the Covenant Code of the Bible Used and Revised the Laws of Hammurabi

Wright, David P.

Description: Most scholars believe that the numerous similarities between the Covenant Code (Exodus 20:23-23:19) and Mesopotamian law collections, especially the Laws of Hammurabi, which date to around 1750 BCE, are due to oral tradition that extended from the second to the first millennium. This book offers a fundamentally new understanding of the Covenant Code, arguing that it depends directly and primarily upon the Laws of Hammurabi and that the use of this source text occurred during the Neo-Assyrian period, sometime between 740-640 BCE, when Mesopotamia exerted strong and continuous political and cultural influence over the kingdoms of Israel and Judah and a time when the Laws of Hammurabi were actively copied in Mesopotamia as a literary-canonical text.

The study offers significant new evidence demonstrating that a model of literary dependence is the only viable explanation for the work. It further examines the compositional logic used in transforming the source text to produce the Covenant Code, thus providing a commentary to the biblical composition from the new theoretical perspective. This analysis shows that the Covenant Code is primarily a creative academic work rather than a repository of laws practiced by Israelites or Judeans over the course of their history. The Covenant Code, too, is an ideological work, which transformed a paradigmatic and prestigious legal text of Israel's and Judah's imperial overlords into a statement symbolically countering foreign hegemony. The study goes further to study the relationship of the Covenant Code to the narrative of the book of Exodus and explores how this may relate to the development of the Pentateuch as a whole.

Subjects: Bible, Hebrew Bible / Old Testament, Pentateuch, Exodus, Ancient Near East, Literature

Review by Frank H. PolakRead the ReviewPublished 5/15/2010Citation: Frank H. Polak, review of David P. Wright, Inventing God's Law: How the Covenant Code of the Bible Used and Revised the Laws of Hammurabi, Review of Biblical Literature [http://www.bookreviews.org] (2010).

Review by Joel S. BadenRead the ReviewPublished 7/10/2010Citation: Joel S. Baden, review of David P. Wright, Inventing God's Law: How the Covenant Code of the Bible Used and Revised the Laws of Hammurabi, Review of Biblical Literature [http://www.bookreviews.org] (2010).

David Wright

David Wright, Graduate Program Chair for 2009-10, is professor of Bible and Ancient Near East, offers courses on Hebrew Bible; biblical and Near Eastern ritual, law and history; and Northwest Semitic languages (Aramaic, Ugaritic, Northwest Semitic dialects) as well as courses on comparative Semitic linguistics and Hittite.

His research specialties are primarily Near Eastern and biblical ritual and law in comparative perspective. He is author of “Inventing God's Law: How the Covenant Code of the Bible Used and Revised the Laws of Hammurabi” (Oxford University Press). This book argues that the biblical law collection in Exodus 20:23-23:19 was created as a response to Neo-Assyrian imperialism in Israel-Judah around 700 BCE and used Hammurabi's collection as a model for both its casuistic and apodictic laws.

Wright is also author of “The Disposal of Impurity: Elimination Rites in the Bible and in Hittite and Mesopotamian Literature” (Scholars Press, 1987) and “Ritual in Narrative: The Dynamics of Feasting, Mourning, and Retaliation Rites in the Ugaritic Tale of Aqhat” (Eisenbrauns, 2001). He was also chief editor of "Pomegranates and Golden Bells: Studies in Biblical, Jewish and Near Eastern Ritual, Law, and Literature in Honor of Jacob Milgrom" (Eisenbrauns, 1995).

http://www.brandeis.edu/departments/nejs/faculty/wright.html