Law, Power, and Justice in Ancient Israel

“This book represents the first social history of biblical law. It demonstrates how the legal system functioned within the society of ancient Israel. Although the starting point of the book is the social world of ancient Israel, it also informs the reader in a well-founded and reliable manner about the legal literature of the Hebrew Bible. In addition, it keeps in mind the archaeology of Palestine and the legal history of the Ancient Near East. A most welcome book.”
—Eckart Otto, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

“Making an important distinction between Israelite law and biblical law, this excellent, much needed study helps us recover the ‘living’ legal traditions of the greater part of Israel’s population: those dwelling in villages outside of the urban centers that produced the biblical text. Applying an ideological critique, Knight cogently demonstrates that the laws recorded in the Hebrew Bible primarily served the interests of the wealthy and powerful, even when they seemed to be alleviating the misery of the poor and marginalized. Highly recommended for those concerned about the intersection of law and power in ancient Israel.”
—Gale A. Yee, Episcopal Divinity School

“Are the biblical laws post-monarchic, literary creations reflecting the interests of urban elites and telling us little about how ancient Israelite and Judean societies negotiated power, regulated conflict and conceived justice? Building painstakingly on archaeological data and social-anthropological theory, Douglas Knight exposes the gap between biblical rhetoric and historical reality, examining the village, urban, and state contexts where all manner of human activities generated what we call ‘law.’ This book offers a new vision of the past as well as a critique of efforts at appropriating ‘biblical law’ in modern life.”
—Philip R. Davies, University of Sheffield

“The laws in the Bible have often been analyzed in one of two ways—by examining the relationship between the laws and their ancient contexts (socio-historical methods) or by investigating how the laws privilege some groups over others (critical-legal theory)—and these two ways are usually thought to be contradictory. In this creative work, Knight uses both of these approaches and shows them to be complementary. As a result, he offers an excellent treatment of the laws of ancient Israel and provides a significant methodological model for future scholarly discussions of these laws.”
—Cheryl B. Anderson, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary

“Douglas Knight goes beyond a careful reading of ancient texts to reconstruct a compelling and realistic picture of legal systems at work in the villages, cities, and cultic settings of ancient Israel. Knight develops plausible legal principles that enable him to speculate on the functions of law, power, and justice in this ancient time and place, and to illuminate the power and role of law in our own time and place.”
—D. Don Welch, Vanderbilt University

“Looking behind the biblical laws to the real world in which they arose, Douglas Knight uncovers the social, political, economic, and religious dimensions of the legal statutes and processes of ancient Israel. His aim and his accomplishment is to get at the “living laws” and the world to which they belonged. In so doing he provides the reader a fulsome picture of how the society out of which the biblical texts arose actually functioned across various strata and in often very different life settings. Knight’s book fills a large gap in the study of the legal systems of ancient Israel.”
—Patrick D. Miller, Princeton Theological Seminary

“Douglas Knight has written a superb study of the legal texts of the Hebrew Bible and of the practice of law in ancient Israel insofar as we are informed by the incomplete sources. The author attends closely to what biblical laws both state and imply about the success and failure of public power in actually achieving social justice. The employment of comparative social sciences to speculate creatively about the aspects of law in ancient Israel that are unattested in the text is a defining and distinctive feature of this arresting work.”
—Norman K. Gottwald, New York Theological Seminary