Abstract
Law, Power, and Justice in Ancient Israel (Library of Ancient Israel)
Douglas A. Knight
Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011. 305 pp. $32.00
Douglas A. Knight, Professor of Bible and Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University, seeks a new way of looking at biblical laws. Knight acknowledges, but declines to be bound by, conventional biblical scholarship that sees, for instance, the Covenant Code as belonging to the ninth or tenth centuries and Deuteronomy as the product of the late monarchy. He maintains that one must first separate the written biblical laws from what he terms “Israelite laws.” The former are recorded in literary form within the Hebrew Bible, while the latter, essentially existing in oral form, come closer to representing what people might actually be doing “on the ground.” The written laws and the customary oral laws are not necessarily the same. To recover the oral laws, Knight constructs detailed analytic models that suggest what kinds of laws might be expected among key social groupings, which for him are the village, that is, rural, city or urban, and cultic domains. He bases his models on ideas and insights gained from studies in sociology, anthropology, history, and archaeology.
Archaeology suggests that village culture was most typical in Iron I, with cities becoming dominant only during the monarchy period of Iron II. While laws were operative during all periods of history, Knight, following other scholars, posits that the Pentateuch was first written down in postexilic times. This was accomplished, he believes, in the Persian period, under Darius II or even later. Knight argues that the written laws reflected and favored the interests of the wealthy and powerful elites who resided in cities. He visualizes the rural or village classes as living in a subsistence mode, participating in the larger political and economic structure mainly to pay taxes, perform services, and supply resources. Village laws were always oral, and Knight sees the villagers living their life quite apart from the urban elites even during the monarchy period. The same can be said for religious practices, characterized by a contrast in villages between domestic cults in homes or local shrines and the major cults based in city temples and served by a professional priesthood. Knight lays out his theoretical concepts and research goals in Part I of the book (1–114), briefly summarized again in his epilogue (261–67).
Yet the written laws could nevertheless preserve elements of legal practices applicable both to rural as well as urban life. Knight therefore, on the basis of his models, needs to examine individual laws and attempt to assign them to the urban elites or to the poorer villagers, and in certain instances, when appropriate, to both classes. This analysis is done also for the written cultic laws, which for Knight largely belong to the urban culture. Knight's closer examination of the laws is the focus of Part II, where he looks at various subcategories of laws and places them in the contexts of villages, cities and states, and cult (115–257). Thus, for example, while incest and marriage rules applied overall, Knight proposes an urban context for Deut 22:23–27 where guilt in a city setting is greater than in the countryside. He also sees the high penalty as indicating “a context of relatively prosperous families, as would be found in the cities.” On the other hand, relations between children and their parents in old age must have been the same in urban as in rural settings. He assumes similarity in practices with respect to inheritance and the practice of adoption, but also suggests that the preferred share for the firstborn was a practice of wealthier families, who were interested in keeping large parts of their property in the hands of a single offspring (188–95, 148).
Knight writes and lays out his case persuasively in accordance with his theoretical models. Yet some important questions remain unexplored. For example: How was national cohesion maintained in the face of the profound social gulf he sees existing between city dwellers and villagers, with different legal systems and religious practices, and without the unity that might, for instance, come from some sort of tribal league (74–75)? Also, how to explain the close similarities between biblical and older ancient Near Eastern laws that are known from a variety of domains and historical periods? Knight makes occasional references to the non-biblical laws but does not fully explain their similarities, beyond assigning both to urban culture (154) and suggesting that the Israelites could have come into contact with some of those laws during the Babylonian exile (28). But even so, Knight's insights remain interesting and valuable; his book can be read with profit by non-specialists as well as by readers with deeper backgrounds.