ABSTRACT
This chapter evaluates the cultural background of the literary genres and legal concepts found in the biblical law collections by comparing the structures, aims and authority of the Pentateuchal law collections against those found in both the Ancient Near Eastern and Greek worlds. Law collections dealt exclusively with corrective justice, that is, the listing of criminal and civil infractions and their punishment. Law collections retrospectively recorded general judicial practices under a king's reign, as found in scribal collections, but lacked prescriptive force, contained no references to public readings, ritual ceremonies or oaths whereby the people swore to obey the laws and did not represent a form of social contract binding on either the king/people. All available evidence appears to point to the biblical laws as a product of Jewish reading of Greek legal and political writing in the Hellenistic Era, supplemented by the incorporation of literary artifacts of Ancient Near Eastern law and curse language from the distant past.
