Law, Authority, and Interpretation in the Ancient World: The Origin of Legal Obligation in Early Judaism

This study draws from legal theory to help identify a development in the authority of written law that took place in early Judaism. Since the discovery of the so-called ‘Code’ of Hammurabi, Assyriologists generally agree that the ancient Near Eastern law collections did not function as binding law. The tens of thousands of legal records preserved indicate that the practice of law operated independently from the written codes. Consequently, scholars have been grappling with the question of when written law came to be treated as legally binding. Rather than starting with the question of when law became binding, however, this study begins by asking the question of what it means for law to be binding. Furthermore, drawing from legal theory, it develops a method for identifying instances in which legal texts were treated as binding by ancient interpreters. This study claims that when a written directive is treated as law, it produces a unique normative effect within its addressees. This normative effect can be identified by the manner in which the legal text is interpreted; when a text is being treated as binding law, its interpreters will treat it in a unique and identifiable way. Drawing from Joseph Raz’s Preemption Thesis, and Lon Fuller’s inner morality of the law, this study develops seven criteria for determining when a text is being treated as legally binding by an ancient interpreter. The bulk of this study applies these criteria to four instances of legal interpretation in early Jewish sources: 1) the Temple Scroll’s interpretation of the Torah’s Day of Atonement laws; 2) The Samaritan Pentateuch’s interpretive rewriting of a series of laws from the Pentateuch, particularly the goring ox laws of Exodus 21:28–37; 3) the interpretive reformulations of the Qumran penal codes from the Dead Sea scrolls’ rule texts; 4) the depiction of Torah-obedience in Ezra 9–10, Nehemiah 8:13–18, and Nehemiah 10. In the end, this study concludes that the scribes responsible for the interpretations of the Torah in the Temple Scroll and the Samaritan Pentateuch viewed the Torah’s laws as a source of binding obligation. By contrast, the scribes responsible for the changes to the Qumran penal codes did not view the rule texts as binding law. Finally, although the community depicted in the Ezra-Nehemiah Torah-obedience narratives viewed the Torah as legally binding, they did not interpret it as such. Rather, they relied on the expert in the law to make Torah declarations, rather than relying on text-interpretive consultation of the text. While these conclusions do not fully determine when written law came to be viewed as legally binding, they provide an important first step, and lay the methodological foundation for future study.Ph.D