The Laws of Delict in the Hebrew Bible and Their Ancient Near Eastern Forerunners: Analysing and Comparing Social Attitudes to Crime

Abstract

This article compares the ancient Near Eastern and biblical laws pertaining to delict. Since I offer an in-depth study elsewhere (Peled, forthcoming) of delict-related felonies attested in the different ancient Near Eastern law collections, the present article only touches upon this issue in brief, while focusing on the pertinent biblical laws. The main questions addressed here therefore relate to the manner in which biblical law treated different delicts, and to how similar or different the attitudes to delict were in the extant ancient Near Eastern and biblical legal corpora.