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Revised versions of 12 essays previously published in various sources.
If we look to the Bible for historical accounts of ancient life, we make a profound error. So contends Calum Carmichael in this original and incisive reading of some of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament’s most famous narratives. Sifting through the imaginative layers of these texts with an uncanny sensitivity and a panoptic critical eye, he unearths patterns connecting disparate passages, providing fascinating insights into how ideas were expressed, received, and transformed in the ancient Near East. Ranging from Jacob’s encounter with Leah to the marriage at Cana to Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well, these readings demonstrate the remarkable subtlety and sophistication of the biblical views on marriage, sexuality, fertility, impurity, creation, and love.
Publisher description
Interpreting the perennially perplexing sexual regulations of Leviticus 1820 in a radically new way, Calum M. Carmichael offers a key to understanding not only the texts themselves but also the nature of lawgiving throughout the Pentateuch. Carmichael identifies and offers solutions to puzzles such as why the lawgiver explicitly prohibits certain obviously wrongful acts (such as a son's intercourse with a mother), but not others (such as full brother with sister), why he censures children instead of adults in taboo couplings, and why rules not connected with incest (prohibiting Molech worship and intercourse with a menstruating woman) are included with rules about incest. Reading these laws ...
In this study of the nature and sources of biblical law, Calum Carmichael focuses on the intimate and little-appreciated relationship between two components of the Bible, namely that the legal material represents a form of commentary or extended exposition of the narratives. Approaching his topic from the basic premise that any society's laws do not necessarily relate to its practical problems, Carmichael challenges the long prevailing view that the body of biblical laws and ethical rules grew up in piecemeal fashion over many centuries, in reaction to specific social problems as they arose. Rather, the laws are a work of historical reconstruction, redacted during one relatively concentrated period by Deuteronomic and Priestly lawgivers.
In today's market economies, people constitute much of their identity in relation to the things they possess, and communities facilitate social intercourse and survival by means of property relations. What, if anything, might the study of the biblical religions contribute to thinking about and responding to the basic reality of "having"? In this book scholars in a variety of fields -- theology, ethics, economics, and biblical studies -- address in new and penetrating ways the meaning of "having" in religious and social life and offer a number of compelling answers to challenging questions about property and possession in our present, global age.
How to behave in the diaspora has been a central problem for Jews over the ages. They have debated whether to assimilate by adopting local customs or whether to remain a God-centered people loyal to their temporal rulers but maintaining the peculiar customs that separated them from their host nations. The question not only of survival, but of the basis for survival, is also a central problem in the Joseph stories of the Book of Genesis. The work shows its readers the grand alternatives of Judaism, instilled in two larger-than-life figures, so its readers can reassess for themselves the road Judaism did not take, and understand why Joseph though admirable in many respects, is left out of the ...
What makes one crime more serious than another, and why? This book investigates the problem of "seriousness of offence" in English law from the comparative perspective of biblical law. Burnside takes a semiotic approach to show how biblical conceptions of seriousness are synthesised and communicated through various descriptive and performative registers. Seven case studies show that biblical law discriminates between the seriousness of different offences and between the relative seriousness of the same offence when committed by different people or when performed in different ways. Recurring elements include location and the offender's social statue. The closing chapter considers some of the implications for the current debate about crime and punishment.
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 acti...