Law and Religion in the Eastern Mediterranean

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.

Anselm C. Hagedorn is Privatdozent in Hebrew Bible/ Old Testament at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.; Reinhard G. Kratz is Professor for the Hebrew Bible/ Old Testament at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen and a member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

- Introduction - I - 1: Arlette David: The Sound of the Magic Flute in Legal and Religious Registers of the Ramesside Period: Some Common Features of Two 'Ritualistic Languages' - 2: Josef Wiesehöfer: Law and Religion in Achaemenidian Iran - 3: Michael Gagarin: Law and Religion in Early Greece - 4: F. S. Naiden: Gods, Kings, and Lawgivers - 5: Alejandro F. Botta: Hated by the Gods and your Spouse - 6: Andrew D. Gross: Law and Religion in the Eastern Mediterranean - 7: John F. Healey: Fines and Curses: Law and Religion among the Nabataeans and their Neighbours - II - 8: Bernard S. Jackson: Law and Religion in the Hebrew Bible - 9: Eckart Otto: The History of the Legal-Religious Hermeneutics of the Book of Deuteronomy from the Assyrian to the Hellenistic Period - 10: Reinhard G. Kratz: 'The peg in the wall': Cultic Centralization revisited - 11: Bruce Wells: Is It Law or Religion? Legal Motivations in Deuteronomic and Neo-Babylonian Texts - 12: Rachel Magdalene: Job's compositional history one more time: What its law might contribute - 13: Aharon Shemesh: 'For the judgment is God's' (Deut. 1: 17): Biblical and communal law in the Dead Sea Scrolls - 14: Irene Schneider: The Jurist as a Mujtahid - the Hermeneutical Concept of Abu l-Hasan Alial-Mawardi (d. 449/1058) - Index