Village Law and the Book of the Covenant

Abstract

"Of one thing we can be sure: BC in its present form does not coincide with village law. We confront the text now as literature, the product of urbanites. Even if it reflects laws that are thought to be the result of legal traditions brought by rural persons who relocated into cities, we are still faced with questions of how, by whom, and for what purposes the legal norms of various villages became recorded in their new social contexts."