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Making a Case
 Making a Case

The Practical Roots of Biblical Law

SARA J. MILSTEIN

1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

© Oxford University Press 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021942376

ISBN 978–0–19–091180–5

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190911805.001.0001

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
For my parents, with love
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure I.1 The famous diorite stela with the Laws of Hammurabi,
dating to the early second millennium BCE. Now
housed in Musée du Louvre, Paris, France.
Photo credit © RMN- Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY 8
Figure 1.1 The reverse of NBC 7800, an OB tablet preserving eighteen
model contracts of various types. Courtesy of the Yale
Babylonian Collection; photograph by Klaus Wagensonner 25
Figure 1.2 A fictional court case involving an inheritance dispute
that a man brought against his nephews (YBC 9839).
Courtesy of the Yale Babylonian Collection;
photograph by Klaus Wagensonner 29
Figure 1.3 A copy of the “Nippur Homicide Trial” (A30240,
joined to Penn Museum UM 55-21-436), a Sumerian
fictional case. Courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the
University of Chicago and the Penn Museum;
photograph by Susanne Paulus 33
Figure 1.4 The obverse and reverse of Middle Bronze Age
Fragment A of Hazor 18. Courtesy of the Israel
Exploration Society; photographs by Wayne Horowitz 42
Figure 4.1 Friedrich Delitzsch (1850- 1922), Professor of Assyriology
at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin and
Director of the Royal Museum’s Ancient Near East
Department, whose lectures on “Babel und Bibel”
provoked international controversy. Courtesy of
Wikimedia Commons 120
x L I S T O F I L LU S T R AT I O N S

Figure 4.2 Two copies of the OB scribal exercise known as

the Laws about Rented Oxen. Courtesy of the Penn
Museum, objects N 4938 (https://cdli.ucla.edu/P228949)
and N 5119 (https:// cdli.ucla.edu/ P231270) 126
Figure 4.3 The Sumerian Laws Exercise Tablet (YOS I 28/YBC 2177),
copied by the scribe Bēlšunu, dates to approximately
1800 BCE. Courtesy of the Yale Babylonian Collection;
photograph by Klaus Wagensonner 131
Map I.1 Map of the ancient Near East, with denotation of sites
that yielded law collections and/or legal-pedagogical
texts. Image designed by Martin Sauvage 3
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

if time is the most precious commodity that scholars have, it is all the
more remarkable when they give so generously of it. I am deeply grateful to
those who took the time to provide invaluable feedback on different chap-
ters: Lisa Cooper, Daniel Fleming, Martha Roth, Bruce Wells, Paul Delnero,
Gabriella Spada, K. Lawson Younger, Reinhard Müller, Andrew Gross,
and Juha Pakkala. I am especially grateful to Martha Roth and Gabriella
Spada: even though I had never met either of them, they were both quick
to offer feedback and warm encouragement. Gratifying exchanges like
these are what make me feel part of a community. Special thanks also go
to Paul Delnero and Daniel Fleming for reading the entire book and for
pushing me to sharpen my arguments in crucial ways. Paul, your sharp eye
always illuminates a new angle that I had overlooked. Dan, your provision
of space and time for thought to deepen allows me to think through new
ideas fearlessly. I also benefited much from conversations with Bruce Wells
and Reinhard Kratz. Bruce’s nuanced studies on biblical and Near Eastern
law are partly what inspired me to delve into this area in the first place, and
he has been nothing but welcoming, encouraging, and helpful. Reinhard
helped me tighten the argumentation in Chapter 2 and generously hosted
me in Göttingen, where the ideas in this book first took shape. Christoph
Levin was an enthusiastic guide to me in Munich and helped me access the
ample resources there. I also appreciate Bernie Levinson and Ted Lewis for
their incredible generosity and ongoing support of my career. I am grateful
to Reinhard Müller and Juha Pakkala for the countless stimulating and
xii ACKNOWLED GMENTS

inspiring exchanges over the last decade. Finally, many thanks to Martin
Sauvage for generously providing the excellent map that accompanies the
book; and to Susanne Paulus at the Oriental Institute of the University
of Chicago and Agnete Lassen at the Yale Babylonian Collection at Yale
University for kindly providing several of the images for the book.
Presenting this work at different stages has been vital. I am grateful to
the attendees at the workshop, “The Scribe in the Biblical World,” hosted
by Michael Langlois and Esti Eshel at the University of Strasbourg, for
their input on some of the content in Chapter 1. The attendees of the doc-
toral seminar at the University of Göttingen (hosted by Reinhard Kratz)
and the attendees of the workshop “Supplementation and the Study of
the Hebrew Bible” at Brown University (hosted by Saul Olyan and Jacob
Wright) provided crucial feedback on the arguments in Chapter 2. My col-
leagues in the Baltimore Biblical Colloquium also provided useful feed-
back on the arguments in Chapter 4.
I am grateful to Cynthia Read, Preetham Raj, and the staff at Oxford
University Press for expertly bringing another project to fruition. This pro-
ject has also benefited from funding from the Killam Foundation and the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. This funding
allowed me to hire my fantastic research assistant for this project, Nicole
Tombazzi, who is now a budding legal scholar in her own right. I am also
grateful to the staff and the 2018–2019 scholars-in-residence at the Peter
Wall Institute of Advanced Studies for challenging me to make my schol-
arship accessible and meaningful to a wider audience. Their openness to
the strange wonders of Near Eastern law fueled my excitement about the
project. Our year together was a gift. To my colleagues in the Department
of Classical, Near Eastern, and Religious Studies at the University of British
Columbia, I feel lucky to bask in your generosity, sense of humor, and pas-
sion for all things ancient. Special thanks to Tony Keddie, Leanne Bablitz,
and Kat Huemoeller for their enthusiasm and support of this project.
An earlier version of some of the arguments in Chapter 3 was published
as “Will and (Old) Testament: Reconsidering the Roots of Deuteronomy 25,
5–10,” in Writing, Rewriting, and Overwriting in the Books of Deuteronomy
and the Former Prophets: Essays in Honour of Cynthia Edenburg, ed. Thomas
ACKNOWLED GMENTS xiii

Römer, Ido Koch, and Omer Sergi, BETL 304 (Leuven: Peeters, 2019),
49–63. Earlier phases of some of the arguments in Chapter 2 were also
published in “Making a Case: The Repurposing of ‘Israelite Legal Fictions’
as Deuteronomic Law,” in Supplementation and the Study of the Hebrew
Bible, ed. Saul Olyan and Jacob Wright, BJS 361 (Providence: Brown Judaic
Studies, 2017), 161–81 and will appear in “The Origins of Deuteronomic
‘Law,’ ” Congress Volume Aberdeen 2019, International Organization for
the Study of the Old Testament, ed. Joachim Schaper, VTSup (Leiden: Brill,
forthcoming). I am grateful to these presses for granting me permission to
reprint some of this material.
During the pandemic, I have been most grateful for my family: without
your love I would be nowhere at all. To my partner in life, Aaron, your
supportiveness allowed this project to flourish and enabled me mirac-
ulously to keep my head above water. I could never thank you enough.
Aviva, Asher, and Ezra: I am grateful to you for all of the love and hugs
at a time when hugs were few and far between. Han and Mark, Josh and
Annie, Sally and Ron, Marni and Craig, and Tara and David: our bonds
are an anchor. Ell and Bill: you are my home away from home. I dedi-
cate this book to my parents, Alan and Audrey Milstein. Ma, your unwa-
vering attentiveness, insight, and ability to be present buoy me. Dad, your
boundless curiosity, devotion, and zest for life are inspiring. Our distance
is in miles (or kilometers) only.
 ABBREVIATIONS

AAAS Les Annales Archéologiques Arabes Syriennes

AASOR Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research
ABS Archaeology and Biblical Studies
AfOB Archiv für Orientforschung: Beiheft
AHw Wolfram von Soden, Akkadisches Handwörterbuch. 3 vols.
Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1965–1981.
Ai ana ittišu
AIL Ancient Israel and Its Literature
AION Annali dell’Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”
AJSR Association for Jewish Studies Review
AMD Ancient Magic and Divination
AOAT Alter Orient und Altes Testament
AoF Altorientalische Forschungen
AOS American Oriental Series
ATD Das Alte Testament Deutsch
AuOr Aula Orientalis
BBB Bonner biblische Beiträge
BDB F. Brown, S. Driver, and C. Briggs, The Brown-Driver-
Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon, Coded with Strong’s
Concordance Numbers. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1906.
Repr., 2003
BETL Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium
Bib Biblica
xvi A B B R E V IAT I O N S

BibMes Bibliotheca Mesopotamica

BiOr Bibliotheca Orientalis
BJS Brown Judaic Studies
BN Biblische Notizen
BZAW Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche
Wissenschaft
CAD The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the
University of Chicago. Edited by Martha Roth, et al. 26 vols.
Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago,
1956–2006
CANE Civilizations of the Ancient Near East. Edited by Jack
Sasson. 4 vols. New York, 1995. Repr. in 2 vols. Peabody,
MA: Hendrickson, 2006
CBQ Catholic Biblical Quarterly
CC Covenant Code
CDLJ Cuneiform Digital Library Journal
CHANE Culture and History of the Ancient Near East
CM Cuneiform Monographs
CNIP Carsten Niebuhr Institute Publications
CT Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets in the
British Museum
CUSAS Cornell University Studies in Assyriology and Sumerology
DJD Discoveries in the Judaean Desert
DMOA Documenta et Monumenta Orientis Antiqui
Emar Daniel Arnaud, Recherches au pays d’Aštata, Emar VI/3:
Textes sumériens et accadiens. OBO 20. Paris: Éditions
Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1986
FAT Forschungen zum Alten Testament
FRLANT Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und
Neuen Testaments
GMTR Guides to the Mesopotamian Textual Record
GSCC Groningen Studies in Cultural Change
HANE/M History of the Ancient Near East/Monographs
A B B R E V IAT I O N S xvii

HANEL A History of Ancient Near Eastern Law. Edited by Raymond

Westbrook. 2 vols. HdO. Section 1 The Near and Middle East
72. Leiden: Brill, 2003
HCOT Historical Commentary on the Old Testament
HdO Handbuch der Orientalistik / Handbook of Oriental Studies
HeBAI Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel
Hen Henoch
Ḫḫ ḪAR-ra = ḫubullu
HL Hittite Laws
HLFs Hebrew Legal Fictions
HSS Harvard Semitic Studies
HThKAT Herders Theologischer Kommentar zum Alten Testament
HUCA Hebrew Union College Annual
IEJ Israel Exploration Journal
ILR Israel Law Review
JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society
JBL Journal of Biblical Literature
JCS Journal of Cuneiform Studies
JCSSS Journal of Cuneiform Studies Supplemental Series
JEN Joint Expedition with the Iraq Museum at Nuzi
JEOL Jaarbericht van het Vooraziatisch-Egyptisch Gezelschap
(Genootschap) Ex oriente lux
JESHO Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient
JNES Journal of Near Eastern Studies
JSJ Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic,
and Roman Periods
JSOT Journal for the Study of the Old Testament
JSOTSup Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement
Series
LE Laws of Eshnunna
LH Laws of Hammurabi
LL Laws of Lipit-Ishtar
LOx Laws about Rented Oxen
LSTS The Library of Second Temple Studies
xviii A B B R E V IAT I O N S

LTT Law from the Tigris to the Tiber: The Writings of Raymond
Westbrook. Edited by Bruce Wells and F. Rachel Magdalene.
2 vols. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2009
LU Laws of Ur-Namma
MAL Middle Assyrian Laws
MC Mesopotamian Civilizations
MSL Materialen zum sumerischen Lexikon / Materials for
the Sumerian Lexicon. 17 vols. Rome: Pontifical Biblical
Institute, 1937–2004
NEB New English Bible
NHT Nippur Homicide Trial
OB Old Babylonian
OBC Orientalia Biblica et Christiana
OBO Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis
ÖBS Österreichische biblische Studien
OBML Raymond Westbrook, Old Babylonian Marriage Law. AfOB
23. Horn, Austria: Verlag Ferdinand Berger & Söhne, 1988
OECT Oxford Editions of Cuneiform Texts
OTS Old Testament Studies
RA Revue d’assyriologie et d’archéologie orientale
RE Gary Beckman, Texts from the Vicinity of Emar
in the Collection of Jonathan Rosen. HANE/M II.
Padova: Sargon srl, 1996
RSO Rivista degli studi orientali
SAAS State Archives of Assyria Studies
SCCNH Studies on the Civilization and Culture of Nuzi and the
Hurrians
SLEx Sumerian Laws Exercise Tablet
SLHF Sumerian Laws Handbook of Forms
SP Samaritan Pentateuch
TAPS Transactions of the American Philosophical Society
TBR Daniel Arnaud, with Hatice Gonnet, Textes syriens de
l'âge du Bronze Récent. Aula Orientalis Supplementa
1. Barcelona: Ausa, 1991
VT Vetus Testamentum
A B B R E V IAT I O N S xix

VTSup Supplements to Vetus Testamentum

WAW Writings from the Ancient World
WMANT Wissenschaftliche Monographien zum Alten und Neuen
Testament
WVDOG Wissenschaftliche Verfföffentlichungen der deutschen
Orient-Gesellschaft
YBC Tablets in the Babylonian collection, Yale University Library
YOS Yale Oriental Series, Texts
ZA Zeitschrift für Assyriologie
ZAR Zeitschrift für altorientalische und biblische Rechtgeschichte
ZAH Zeitschrift für Althebräistik
 Introduction

It has long been taken for granted that the Bible preserves several
“native” expressions of the Near Eastern law collection genre: Exodus
20–23, Deuteronomy 12–26, and the so-called corpus of Priestly law, es-
pecially Leviticus 17–26.1 The genre has its roots, of course, in southern
Mesopotamia, with the Laws of Ur-Namma, a work that dates to the late
third millennium BCE.2 Over the next five hundred years, law collections

1. More precisely, what scholars call the “Covenant Code” (after the phrase in Exod 24:7) is
commonly demarcated as Exod 20:22–23:19. The category of Priestly law includes what scholars
call the “Holiness Collection” or “H” (Leviticus 17–26).
2. All of the dates in this book use the Middle Chronology, and the dates for the law collections
correspond to those in Martha T. Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd
ed., WAW 6 (Atlanta: SBL Press, 1997). There is much debate regarding an absolute chronology
for Mesopotamia prior to the fourteenth century BCE, with competing proposals (“Ultra-
High,” “High,” “Middle,” “Low,” “New,” and “Ultra-Low”) that vary by more than 150 years.
The “Ultra-Low Chronology,” for example, situates the fall of the First Dynasty of Babylon in
1499 BCE, nearly a century later than the corresponding date for this event (1595 BCE) in the
Middle Chronology (Glenn M. Schwartz, “Problems of Chronology: Mesopotamia, Anatolia,
and the Syro-Levantine Region,” in Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Second
Millennium B.C., ed. Joan Aruz, Kim Benzel, and Jean M. Evans [New York: Metropolitan
Museum of Art / New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008], 450–52). According to Sturt
Manning et al., the latest dendrochronological measurements at Kültepe and Acemhöyük in
Turkey support the Middle Chronology (“Integrated Tree-Ring-Radiocarbon High-Resolution
Timeframe to Resolve Earlier Second Millennium BCE Mesopotamian Chronology,” PLoS
ONE 11.7 [2016]: e0157144 [doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0157144]). For alternatives, see also
Amanda Podany, “Hana and the Low Chronology,” JNES 73.1 (2014): 49–71; and Steven W. Cole,
“Chronology Revisited,” in Mesopotamian Pottery: A Guide to the Babylonian Tradition in the
Second Millennium B.C., ed. James A. Armstrong and Hermann Gasche, Mesopotamian History

Making a Case. Sara J. Milstein, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190911805.003.0001
2 MAKING A CASE

of a similar type—the Laws of Lipit-Ishtar, the Laws of Eshnunna, and

the Laws of Hammurabi—were produced in Sumerian and Akkadian. In
the second millennium BCE, the genre was also put to use by two groups
outside of southern Mesopotamia: the Hittites in Anatolia (modern-day
Turkey) and the Assyrians in northern Mesopotamia. In the cases of the
Laws of Ur-Namma and the Laws of Hammurabi, the production of a law
collection was tied to the king’s expansion of territory and his consoli-
dation of power. Other collections, such as the Laws of Eshnunna, the
Middle Assyrian Laws, and the Hittite Laws, were similarly generated by
powerful kingdoms in the ancient Near East. Leaving the Bible aside, it is
possible to state that all of the Near Eastern law collections were produced
in the third to second millennia BCE, in cuneiform on clay tablets, and
in major capital cities in Mesopotamia and in the Hittite Empire: Ur, Isin,
Eshnunna, Babylon, Hattusha, and Assur (see map I.1).3
The notion that more than five hundred years later, the kingdoms of
Israel and/or Judah likewise produced their own Hebrew law collections
is thus highly unexpected, to say the least. None of the five major sites in
Syria to have yielded troves of cuneiform tablets (i.e., Ebla, Mari, Ugarit,
Emar, and Alalakh) has borne even a fragment of a law collection, despite
the fact that these sites have yielded ample legal documentation of other
types. Excavations at the northeastern Mesopotamian site of Nuzi like-
wise have turned up numerous practical legal documents, but again, no
evidence of a law collection. Even Egypt has not yielded a collection of
laws, though some speculate that such collections did exist.4 As such, the

and Environment, Series II, Memoirs VI (Ghent: University of Ghent / Chicago: Oriental
Institute of the University of Chicago, 2014), 3–6.
3. It is not evident that the work that scholars call the “Neo-Babylonian Laws” constitutes a
law collection in the Near Eastern tradition. The text dates to the seventh century BCE and
is attested only in the form of a single tablet that originally contained fifteen to eighteen laws
(Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia, 144).
4. Given the elaborate nature of royal edicts, trial records, and other private legal documents
in texts from the Old Kingdom, some have surmised that a law collection probably did exist
(Richard Jasnow, “Egypt: Old Kingdom and First Intermediate Period,” in HANEL 1:93 n. 3).
References in some texts from the Middle Kingdom to thematic sets of laws imply the exist-
ence of limited groups of laws, if not an extensive collection (Richard Jasnow, “Egypt: Middle
Introduction 3

Hattusha
ak
lirm
K izi

CASPIA
metres
2000
1000
500

N
100
S

SE
0 A
RU
U

Tig
TA

E
ri
B

L
s
O
U R
Alalah Z

Ugarit Emar

bur
Nuzi Z
Assur A

Kha
G
SE A

es

Me-Turan R
ont

ala
O
N

Diy
Euphra
Or

t S
NEA

Tulul Khattab

es
RA

Hazor SYRO - Shaduppum

Sippar
ER
IT

A R A BIA N Susa
Jordan R.

Babylon
ED

Nippur
M

DESERT Isin
Uruk Larsa
City with law collection 0 50 100 km Ur
City with legal-pedagogical texts
Map: Martin Sauvage (CNRS, UMR 7041 ArScAn, Nanterre)

Map I.1 Map of the ancient Near East, with denotation of sites that yielded law collections
and/or legal-pedagogical texts. Image designed by Martin Sauvage.

biblical texts that scholars identify as legal corpora would represent the
only “western,” non-cuneiform expressions of the genre in the ancient Near
East, produced by societies that were not known for their political clout,
and separated in time from the aforementioned collections by centuries.5

Kingdom and Second Intermediate Period,” HANEL 1:256). Finally, some references to “laws”
in texts from the New Kingdom may suggest the presence of such a collection (Richard Jasnow,
“Egypt: New Kingdom,” HANEL 1:289).
5. Outside of the ancient Near East, it is also important to mention the early sixth-century
BCE laws of Solon, attributed to the Athenian archon Solon (available only in the form of later
quotations and reformulations in a range of later texts); the Gortyn laws, a late seventh-century
BCE collection of laws from Gortyn, Crete, that covers a number of civil and criminal topics
(inheritance, adultery, divorce, adoption, etc.) in casuistic format; and the mid-fifth-century
BCE Twelve Tables from Rome (available not as a complete text, but rather in the form of
hundreds of quotations and paraphrases of its laws). For a translation and commentary on the
Gortyn laws, see Ronald Willetts, The Law Code of Gortyn, Kadmos/Supplemente 1 (Berlin: De
Gruyter, 1967). For an overview of the Gortyn laws and their parallels to “biblical law,” see
Anselm C. Hagedorn, “Gortyn—Utilising an Archaic Greek Law Code for Biblical Research,”
ZAR 7 (2001): 217–42; and for a discussion of the legal sections of the Pentateuch in the con-
text of these three collections, see Gary N. Knoppers and Paul B. Harvey, Jr., “The Pentateuch
in Ancient Mediterranean Context: The Publication of Local Lawcodes,” in The Pentateuch as
4 MAKING A CASE

In addition, the biblical corpora contain much material that would have
no place in the Near Eastern collections: cultic regulations, ethical pre-
cepts, stipulations regarding judicial protocol, and harsh punishments for
failing to worship Yahweh alone. Notwithstanding these differences, schol-
ars have nonetheless retained the classification of these biblical texts—or
parts of them—as “law collections.”
With this monograph, I propose that the scribes of ancient Israel and
Judah neither made use of “old” law collections nor set out to produce a
law collection in the Near Eastern sense of the genre. They did, however,
put the conventions that are associated with the genre toward radically
new ends. These compositional processes involved repurposing and sup-
plementing different types of legal-pedagogical texts, the outlines of which
are still evident in Exodus 21–22 and sporadically in Deuteronomy 19–25.
When we view this material in the context of legal-pedagogical texts from
Mesopotamia, the practical roots of biblical law begin to emerge.

THE NEAR EASTERN GENRE OF THE LAW COLLECTION

The earliest expression of the law collection genre—the Sumerian Laws of

Ur-Namma of Ur (LU)—dates to around 2100 BCE, more than a millen-
nium after the emergence of writing in southern Mesopotamia.6 Although

Torah: New Models for Understanding Its Promulgation and Acceptance, ed. Gary N. Knoppers
and Bernard M. Levinson (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2007), 105–41. For examples of spe-
cific links between the Mesopotamian law collections and Roman law, see Raymond Westbrook,
“The Nature and Origins of the Twelve Tables,” LTT 1:21–71.
6. The most up-to-date edition of LU (omitting the prologue) is Miguel Civil, “The Law
Collection of Ur-Namma,” in Cuneiform Royal Inscriptions and Related Texts in the Schøyen
Collection, ed. Andrew R. George, CUSAS 17 (Bethesda, MD: CDL Press, 2011), 221–86. Prior
to this publication, all of the extant copies dated to the Old Babylonian period. Civil’s edition
focuses especially on the contents of a cylinder (MS 2064) that appears to date to the period
during or shortly after King Ur-Namma’s reign. The cylinder originally featured ten columns;
parts of eight of these are preserved (221). Scholars previously attributed the laws either to
Ur-Namma or to his son and heir, Shulgi. As Civil notes (221), however, the connection to Ur-
Namma is confirmed in the new cylinder in §E3b: “In the reign of Ur-Namma, the king of the
níg-diri-tax, after he had been enthroned by Nanna over the people, if the one [who sold] the
slave, [either] the slave’s owner or his(?) . . . , if he does not bring a ginabtum-officer, this man
is (declared) a thief ” (251–52).
Introduction 5

earlier Sumerian kings had propagated reforms that promised the eradi-
cation of social inequities, LU represented a new genre, one that would be
replicated in both Sumerian and Akkadian in southern Mesopotamia for
centuries.7 It is only fitting that King Ur-Namma would have been the first
sponsor of the genre. He founded the Third Dynasty of Ur and united the
city-states of southern and northern Mesopotamia for the second time
in history.8 The production of a law collection, with its promises to pro-
tect the vulnerable, would have signaled the king’s commitment to justice
throughout the entire area under his jurisdiction.
Although LU is rudimentary in comparison with its legal-literary heirs,
it already featured the main building blocks of the genre: a prologue laud-
ing the king’s relationship to the gods, his military prowess, and his com-
mitment to justice; a set of casuistic laws, grouped by topic and pertaining
to specific legal quandaries; and an epilogue promising curses on anyone
who dared to efface the inscription. This template was mirrored shortly
afterward in the Sumerian Laws of Lipit-Ishtar (LL), a work that dates to
about 1930 BCE and is attributed to King Lipit-Ishtar of Isin. Once again, a
set of casuistic laws was framed by a prologue and epilogue that linked the
king to the gods, emphasized his role as the enforcer of justice “in Sumer
and Akkad,” and promised curses on anyone who destroyed the work or
replaced Lipit-Ishtar’s name with his own. Like LU, the force of LL was
also communicated by its physical representation: in both cases, the orig-
inal monument was apparently inscribed on a stone stela.9 Next followed
the first Akkadian collection, the Laws of Eshnunna (LE). The work is

7. Two rulers of Lagash, Enmetana and Urukagina (read alternatively as Irkagina or

Uruinimgina) were known to have established edicts against social inequity and the abuse of
power (Claus Wilcke, “Mesopotamia: Early Dynastic and Sargonic Periods,” HANEL 1:141).
Though the genre of LU is unique, its prologue does draw on the Reforms of Urukagina (J. J.
Finkelstein, “Ammiṣaduka’s Edict and the Babylonian ‘Law Codes,’” JCS 15.3 [1961]: 104).
8. Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia, 13. My nomenclature throughout relies on Roth’s
designations.
9. Civil concludes that LU was evidently written on a stela because there is a list of offerings in
the prologue; such offerings are associated with these types of monuments (“Law Collection
of Ur-Namma,” 226). Regarding LL, Roth notes the existence of two fragments of a stone stela
that may have belonged to the original monument (Law Collections from Mesopotamia, 35 n. 1).
The king indeed states in the epilogue to LL that he “erected this stela” and makes reference to
a pedestal for it.
6 MAKING A CASE

known primarily from two tablets that were discovered at Tell Harmal (an-
cient Shaduppum) and dates to about 1770 BCE.10 LE lacks a prologue and
epilogue, but its date formula compels scholars to associate it with King
Dadusha, a ruler of Eshnunna, a powerful kingdom in the early second
millennium BCE. Although LE does not follow the template, its casuistic
laws echo the style and content of those in LU and LL. LE also exhibits a
heightened preference for clusters of law: that is, a basic legal scenario fol-
lowed by additional laws that modify certain factors, such as the status of
the person or the severity of the injury, so as to yield different outcomes.11
This “cluster format” would reach its apex with the Laws of Hammurabi, a
work that would come to define the genre.
The Laws of Hammurabi (LH) is of course associated with Hammurabi,
the great king of Babylon who reigned 1792–1750 BCE. When Hammurabi
inherited the kingdom of Babylonia from his father, Sin-muballiṭ, it was
relatively modest. In defeating and annexing a series of rival kingdoms,
including Larsa, Mari, Eshnunna, and Elam, Hammurabi managed to
build an expansive political empire. As with LU, the production of a law
collection seems to follow logically from the expansion and consolidation

10. Another fragment was found at Tell Haddad (ancient Meturan) (Dominique Charpin,
Writing, Law, and Kingship in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia, trans. Jane Marie Todd
[Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010], 72).
11. On the structure of LE, see Barry Eichler, “Literary Structure in the Laws of Eshnunna,” in
Language, Literature, and History: Philological and Historical Studies Presented to Erica Reiner,
ed. Francesca Rochberg-Halton, AOS 67 (New Haven, CT: American Oriental Society, 1987),
71–84. Eichler emphasizes the inclusion of “polar cases” with the maximum amount of varia-
tion in LE, as compared with LH and the Middle Assyrian Laws, both of which provide more
elaboration and/or additional laws (71–81). He concludes that LE is best understood as a “legal
textbook,” designed for teaching Mesopotamian legal thought and for “appreciating the com-
plexities of legal situations.” In this reconstruction, students would have had the opportunity
to debate the gray areas in between the polarized cases. The elaboration present in LH would
then reflect expansions that grew out of scholastic discussions regarding LE (81–84). Eichler’s
proposal is intriguing, but there is no way to determine with certainty that LE is either a legal
textbook in origin or in secondary use. Roth notes that there are only three attestations of
LE: two large tablets that preserve nearly complete copies of the collection and one student ex-
ercise with extracts (Law Collections from Mesopotamia, 58). She observes further that the date
formula that begins the text preserved on “Source A” is comparable to the beginning of royal
edicts and debt-cancellation edicts known as mīšaru-edicts; and the initial provisions of LE
concern the standardization of measurements, a topic that appears in the prologue to LU (57).
Introduction 7

of territory, though in this case on a much larger scale. It is widely recog-

nized that LH was composed toward the end of the king’s long reign, and
indeed, the epilogue looks ahead to (warn) the kings who will follow in
Hammurabi’s stead.12
The most famous exemplar of LH is an imposing 2.5-meter diorite
stela that is inscribed in archaic script and presented in horizontal bands
(Fig. I.1).13 Excavated at the site of Susa (in modern southwestern Iran)
in three separate pieces by the French Archaeological Mission in 1901–
1902, the stela now stands in the Louvre Museum in Paris. Prior to this
act of repossession, the stela was confiscated as booty and brought to the
Elamite capital of Susa either by the king Shutruk-Nahhunte I or his son,
Kutir-Nahhunte, in the twelfth century BCE, a testament to the power
that the monument still held after six centuries.14 Fragments of at least two
other stelae, most likely structures that once stood in the temples of other
Babylonian cities, were also found at the same site. LH was not repre-
sented only in the form of imposing monuments, however. Hammurabi’s
collection—or parts of it—was copied for centuries in schools and scribal
centers throughout Mesopotamia, with over fifty attestations to date.15 The
latest copy dates to the fifth century BCE and was found at a library in
Sippar, postdating the original masterpiece by over a millennium.16

12. Scholars draw this conclusion about the date of LH because the prologue refers to a number
of cities under his domain that Hammurabi was known to have captured late in his rule. Most of
Hammurabi’s military action was conducted in an intense four-year period prior to his thirty-
third year of rule (Marc Van De Mieroop, King Hammurabi of Babylon: A Biography, Blackwell
Ancient Lives [Malden, MA/Oxford: Blackwell, 2005], 79).
13. On the effect of this visual display, see the excellent discussion in Martha T. Roth,
“Mesopotamian Legal Traditions and the Laws of Hammurabi,” Chicago-Kent Law Review 71.1
(1995): 21–24.
14. Ibid. It is generally accepted that the stela was erected in Sippar, though Tallay Ornan
contends that it was originally erected in Babylon (“Unfinished Business: The Relief on the
Hammurabi Louvre Stele Revisited,” JCS 71 [2019]: 87).
15. Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia, 74; see also Roth, “Mesopotamian Legal
Traditions,” 19–20.
16. Charpin, Writing, Law, and Kingship, 81.
8 MAKING A CASE

Figure I.1 The famous diorite stela with the Laws of Hammurabi, dating to the early
second millennium BCE. Now housed in Musée du Louvre, Paris, France. Photo credit ©
RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

The top third of the “Louvre stela” displays an image of Shamash, the
god of justice, seated on his throne before the standing Hammurabi.
As Tallay Ornan emphasizes, the visual component—with its depic-
tion of Hammurabi and Shamash at eye level, Shamash’s furnishing of
Hammurabi with the symbols of power, and the physical parallels between
Introduction 9

the two figures—imbues Hammurabi with godlike status.17 The extensive

prologue then complements the visual by detailing Hammurabi’s devo-
tion to the many patron deities and temples within the city-states under
his rule. The nearly three hundred laws that follow cover a range of topics,
including obligations for soldiers, the rental and cultivation of land, debts
and interest-bearing loans, safekeeping of property, family law, torts, ox
rentals, hiring fees, slavery, and more, and in this context, serve to high-
light the king’s facilitation of justice. The epilogue is finally dedicated to
Hammurabi’s role as just king and protector of the people. It also identi-
fies the preceding provisions as the dināt mīšarim (“verdicts of justice”)
of the king. This claim prompted Fritz Kraus to regard LH as a set of
Urteilssprüche or Rechtssprüche (judgments) from cases that Hammurabi
had actually adjudicated; that is, they were descriptive, not prescriptive. In
turn, he characterized LH not as a code of laws but rather as “ein Werk der
babylonischen wissenschaftlichen Literatur” (a work of Babylonian scien-
tific literature), similar to the omen collections.18 Kraus’s “reclassification”
of LH was enormously influential, as exemplified in essays by Jean Bottéro
and Raymond Westbrook that compared the style and presumed devel-
opment of “other” scientific collections (respectively, the medical treatises
and omen collections) to the style and development of LH.19 Yet while
some, including Bottéro, upheld Kraus’s conclusion that the provisions of

17. Ornan, “Unfinished Business,” 89–92.

18. Fritz R. Kraus, “Ein zentrales Problem des altmesopotamischen Rechtes: Was ist der Codex
Hammu-rabi?,” Genava 8 (1960): 283–96. With this classification, Kraus pays homage to Benno
Landsberger, who in an earlier essay (“Die Babylonischen Termini für Gesetz und Recht,” in
Symbolae ad iura Orientis antiqui pertinentes Paulo Koschaker dedicatae, ed. Johannes Friedrich,
et al., Studia et Documenta ad Iura Orientis Antiqui Pertinentia 2 [Leiden: Brill, 1939], 219–34)
had observed that the Babylonians had no word for “law,” and in a pair of speeches delivered in
1950 and 1951 had more or less reached the same conclusion (Kraus, “Ein zentrales Problem,”
284). The classification of LH as a “code” dates back to the first edition of the work by Father
Vincent Scheil (Textes élamites-sémitiques, deuxieme Serie, Mémoires de la Délégation en Perse,
Tome IV [Paris: Leroux, 1902], 11–12).
19. Jean Bottéro, “The ‘Code’ of Ḫammurabi,” in Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning, and the
Gods, trans. Zainab Bahrani and Marc Van De Mieroop (Chicago/London: University of
Chicago Press, 1992), 156–84, esp. 169–79; Raymond Westbrook, “Biblical and Cuneiform Law
Codes,” in LTT 1:1–10, esp. 7–9.
10 MAKING A CASE

LH were not normative, others, including Westbrook, contended that LH

nonetheless served some sort of judicial function.20
If we leave aside the question of applicability, there is some evidence,
albeit limited, that certain provisions in LH are rooted in actual disputes.
There are over two hundred letters sent by Hammurabi, and many of them
deal with problems arising in the management of the royal domain that
required a decision from the king.21 Although they are rare in the collec-
tion, a couple of these letters do appear to parallel specific laws in LH and
potentially served as sources.22 Nonetheless, it is important not to take
Hammurabi’s “own” statement at face value, given its contextualization
in a work that is designed to glorify him at every turn. Not only must
a number of the laws in the clusters reflect scribal inventions, but it is
also clear that LH draws liberally on the contents of other collections.23 By

20. Bottéro also emphasized the fact that there were major lacunae in LH, casting doubt on its
role as normative in society (“‘Code’ of Ḫammurabi,” 161–64). He concluded that LH was not a
code but rather “a treatise, with examples, on the exercise of judicial power” (167). Westbrook
instead surmised that LH was a reference work that judges would have consulted for difficult
cases (“Biblical and Cuneiform Law Codes,” 10). For Godfrey R. Driver and John C. Miles, LH
reflects “a series of amendments to the common law of Babylonia” (The Babylonian Laws, vol.
1, Legal Commentary [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952], 41). Sophie Démare-Lafont takes a dif-
ferent tack, emphasizing the statement in the epilogue to LH that the “wronged man” facing a
lawsuit should consult the stela for his verdict and thus be granted reassurance. To her mind,
this statement indicates that a person who was living abroad and felt wronged by his local ju-
dicial system would have had the right to demand the application of LH and to appeal his case
before a Babylonian court (“Law Collections and Legal Documents,” in Handbook of Ancient
Mesopotamia, ed. Gonzalo Rubio [Berlin: De Gruyter, forthcoming]). Yet cf. Martha T. Roth,
who concludes that the statement indicates that the “wronged man” should bring his lawsuit
not before Hammurabi but before his stela, where he can offer prayer and blessings to the king
and thus be granted solace (“Hammurabi’s Wronged Man,” JAOS 122.1 [2002]: 45). In another
publication, see also Roth’s humble “confession” that she does not ever expect to know what the
law collections meant for their ancient scribes, judicial authorities, and for the mostly illiterate
population at large (“Mesopotamian Legal Traditions,” 13).
21. Charpin, Writing, Law, and Kingship, 19; see also Dominique Charpin, Hammurabi of
Babylon (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), 146.
22. For examples, see Bottéro, “‘Code’ of Ḫammurabi,” 165–66; and Charpin, Hammurabi of
Babylon, 155.
23. On this latter point, see, e.g., Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia, 71; Martha T. Roth,
“The Law Collection of King Hammurabi: Toward an Understanding of Codification and Text,”
in La codification des lois dans l’Antiquité: Actes du Colloque de Strasbourg, 27–29 novembre
1997, ed. Edmond Lévy, Travaux du Centre de Recherche sur le Proche-Orient et la Grèce
Antiques 16 (Paris: De Boccard, 2000), 16–17; Charpin, Writing, Law, and Kingship, 71–73; Barry
Introduction 11

my count, more than seventy laws in LH overlap with content in LU, LL,
and LE.24 These laws were not reproduced verbatim, however. Typically,
Hammurabi’s scribes appear to have revised older precepts and supple-
mented them with additional provisions, some of which reflect recurring
interests.25 In general, the clusters in LH are far more elaborate than those
in the preceding collections, and its provisions are typically more verbose.
In sum, LH is squarely rooted in its antecedents but simultaneously stands
as the most sophisticated and elaborate expression of the genre in history.
As alluded to above, although the law collection is most closely asso-
ciated with kingdoms in southern Mesopotamia, two other major powers
in the ancient Near East—the Assyrians and the Hittites—produced their
own takes on the genre. Scribes at the Assyrian capital of Assur gener-
ated what is known as the Middle Assyrian Laws (MAL), a set of four-
teen tablets with about 120 preserved laws. Although copies of MAL date

Eichler, “Examples of Restatement in the Laws of Hammurabi,” in Mishneh Todah: Studies in

Deuteronomy and Its Cultural Environment in Honor of Jeffrey H. Tigay, ed. Nili Sacher Fox,
David A. Glatt-Gilad, and Michael J. Williams (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2009), 365–400;
and Van De Mieroop, King Hammurabi of Babylon, 109. It is worth adding that the prologue and
epilogue to LH likewise demonstrate awareness of the frameworks for older collections, given
the overt overlap in themes and terminology. Interestingly, although Driver and Miles observed
that all but one-quarter of the laws in LE were reproduced in LH, they were disinclined to
conclude definitively that Hammurabi made use of older collections (Babylonian Laws 1:8–9).
24. The following demonstrate close parallels in form and content: LE §40 // LH §7 (man pur-
chases something without evidence); LL §12 // LE §50 // LH §19 (man detains a runaway slave);
LE §§12–13 // LH §§21–24 (theft and robbery); LU §31 // LH §§53–55 (man floods his neighbor’s
field); LL §10 // LH §59 (man cuts down another man’s tree); LU §32 // LL §8 // LH §§60–63
(gardener does not plant the land); LL §11 // LH §e (man fails to cultivate his land, leaving his
neighbor’s property vulnerable); LE §§36–37 // LH §§122–26 (man gives goods for safekeeping
and they are stolen); LU §14 // LE §§26–28 // LH §§127–32 (marriage, adultery, and assault);
LE §§29–30 // LH §§133a–36 (woman’s husband is captured or deserts his city); LU §9 // LH
§§137–43 (dissolution of marriage); LE §25 // LH §§159–61 (refusal to complete a marriage); LL
§31 // LH §165 (division of the paternal estate); LE §§42–47a // LU §§18–23 // LH §§196–208
(penalties for injuries); LL §§d–f // LH §§209–14 (man strikes a pregnant woman); LE §5 //
LH §§236–38 (boatman allows boat to sink); LL §§34–37 // LH §§247–49 (mishaps involving a
rented ox); LE §§53–55 // LH §§250–52 (goring ox); LE §3 // LH §§271–72 (cost of renting cattle
and a wagon); and LX §§j–k // LE §§7–11 + 14 // LH §274 (costs for hiring various workers).
This is not to say that LH is primarily based on recycled law, however. A number of precepts
deal with groups or roles that are wholly unique to LH, including merchants, soldiers, different
classes of priestesses, doctors, apprentices, veterinarians, builders, and others.
25. We thus see a notable emphasis in LH on oath-taking (see, e.g., LH §§9, 20, 126, 131, 266),
contracts (e.g., LH §§47, 52, 122, 123, 128, 151, 264), and proof for accusations (LH §§1, 2, and 127).
12 MAKING A CASE

to the eleventh century BCE, it is assumed to be based on fourteenth-

century BCE originals.26 Scribes at the Hittite capital of Hattusha produced
the Hittite Laws (HL), a collection of about two hundred laws that origi-
nated in the early Old Kingdom (1650–1500 BCE). The tablets were found
in the archives at Hattusha at the site of the Hittites’ “supreme court.”27
One copy of HL from the mid-second millennium (“the Late Parallel
Version”) then revises the laws, suggesting that the provisions were indeed
normative.28 Unlike LH, however, MAL and HL do not make ample use of
the precepts of the earlier collections, and neither one appears to have in-
cluded a prologue or epilogue. Rather, MAL and HL exhibit strongly local
interests and individual styles. Tablet A of MAL is particularly unique in
its focus on women, with nearly sixty highly detailed precepts that feature
women as either perpetrators or victims. Although fragmentary, the other
tablets are also apparently devoted to individual themes, including inher-
itance, agriculture, pledges and deposits, theft, false accusation, and the
like. HL includes a plethora of unique laws on damages to animals, plants,
and implements; “TUKUL”-obligations; and prohibited sexual pairings.29
In both cases, the uniqueness of the provisions, together with the find-
spot, suggests that MAL and HL served some sort of judicial function. In
short, both the Assyrians and the Hittites adopted the casuistic style and
cluster format of the genre, though neither group produced a collection in
precisely the same form as the southern Mesopotamian tradition.

26. Sophie Démare-Lafont, “Mesopotamia: Middle Assyrian Period,” HANEL 1:521.

27. Richard Haase, “Anatolia and the Levant: The Hittite Kingdom” (henceforth, “Hittite
Kingdom”), HANEL 1:620.
28. As Harry Hoffner, Jr. points out, the Old Hittite copies already point to a process of revising,
given the inclusion of the phrase “Formerly they did X, but now he shall do Y” in some provi-
sions. Curiously, other late copies revise only the wording but not the content (“Hittite Laws,” in
Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia, 214). See also Haase, “Hittite Kingdom,” 620.
29. The Sumerogram TUKUL can mean both “weapon” and “tool” (Haase, “Hittite Kingdom,”
633). The term refers to an obligation of holders of land to the state (Hoffner, “Hittite Laws,”
245). While LH does proscribe incest in several laws, the scope of prohibited sexual unions in
HL is far wider.
Introduction 13

In this company, it is thus especially curious that the only other Near
Eastern society to appear to yield anything close to the Mesopotamian
genre of the law collection would be ancient Israel/Judah.30 Exodus 21–22
and Deuteronomy 19–25 in particular feature topics similar to those in the
Near Eastern collections, such as physical damages, property damages, di-
vorce, and inheritance disputes.31 A number of the laws in Exodus 21–22
even parallel specific Mesopotamian provisions. Laws dealing with an ox
that gores either a person or another ox are represented in Exodus 21, LH,
and LE. The “famous” problem of an injured pregnant woman is attested in
Exodus 21 and in LH, MAL, HL, and LL. Exodus 21 also features a talionic
refrain (“Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, hand for a hand, foot for a foot”)
that loosely echoes the personal injury laws in LH §§196–205. Beyond
these and other points of overlap, Exodus 21–22 and Deuteronomy 19–25
display features that are characteristic of the Near Eastern collections: the
use of third-person casuistic format (i.e., a “protasis” outlining a particular
situation, followed by an “apodosis” stating the penalty or prescription);
clusters of related laws (obtained by modifying one or more factors in the
protasis); and a propensity for specific scenarios. The contents, moreover,
are introduced—and in the case of Deuteronomy, identified repeatedly—
as “laws” or “judgments” in their broader literary contexts. It is therefore
not surprising that these two units—or the larger blocks in which they are
embedded, Exodus 20–23 and Deuteronomy 12–26—are regularly treated
as Israelite/Judahite expressions of the Mesopotamian genre.32 This as-
sumption, however, requires a closer look.

30. It is worth noting, however, that the Middle Bronze Age city of Hazor also yielded two small
fragments of Babylonian laws that echo the personal injury laws in LH. For an edition of the
text, see Wayne Horowitz, Takayoshi Oshima, and Filip Vukosavović, “Hazor 18: Fragments of
a Cuneiform Law Collection from Hazor,” IEJ 62.2 (2012): 158–76. I treat this text at length in
Chapters 1 and 4.
31. Here I am largely in line with Raymond Westbrook, who notes that there are only about sixty
provisions within the Bible that pertain to what we would call law, with the most preserved in
Exodus 21–22 and Deuteronomy 21–22, and a smattering preserved elsewhere in Deuteronomy
15–25, Leviticus, and Numbers (“The Laws of Biblical Israel,” in LTT 2:317–18).
32. See, e.g., Westbrook’s claim: “We are therefore justified in seeing in the clusters of eve-
ryday law in the Torah law codes of the same type as their Near Eastern and Mediterranean
14 MAKING A CASE

THE PEDAGOGICAL ROOTS OF “BIBLICAL LAW”

Scholars have recognized, of course, that “biblical law” is unique in the

context of the “other” Near Eastern law collections. They have observed
that the biblical blocks are attributed to Yahweh, not a king; they in-
tersperse civil and criminal laws with parenetic instructions and cultic
regulations, often without transition; and they are embedded in a larger
narrative context that recounts the Israelites’ journey through the wil-
derness in the pre-monarchic period.33 These differences, however, have
not prompted a reclassification of the biblical content. Rather, the ge-
neral consensus is that once-independent law collections or portions of
such collections were taken up, adapted/supplemented, and reassigned to
Israel’s god.34 In this light, the differences between biblical law and the
Near Eastern collections are attributed to the Israelites’/Judahites’ inge-
nuity in adapting the genre, whether for literary or even subversive po-
litical purposes. For Deuteronomy, this ingenuity is partly understood in

counterparts, notwithstanding their intermingling with sacral laws and ethical rules” (“Laws
of Biblical Israel,” 320).
33. On the novelty of ascribing divine revelation to laws, see Bernard M. Levinson, Legal
Revision and Religious Renewal in Ancient Israel (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2008), 27–29. Specifically, Levinson states, “It was not the legal collection as a literary genre
but the voicing of publicly revealed law as the personal will of God that was unique to ancient
Israel” (27).
34. Building on the conclusions of Abraham Kuenen, Bruno Baentsch, Julius Wellhausen,
and Julian Morgenstern, Martin Noth identified the Covenant Code (CC) as an independent
book of law that was later inserted into the Pentateuchal narrative (see Exodus: A Commentary
[London: SCM Press, 1962], 173). This position has since been upheld by others; see, e.g., Lothar
Perlitt, Bundestheologie im Alten Testament, WMANT 36 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener-
Verlag, 1969), 157–58; Hans Jochen Boecker, Law and the Administration of Justice in the Old
Testament and Ancient East, trans. Jeremy Moiser (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House,
1980), 136; and Otto Eissfeldt, The Old Testament: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965),
218. Boecker, e.g., notes that “OT law” is inserted between the theophany in Exod 19:1–20:21
and the conclusion of the covenant in Exod 24:1–11, and in turn “is consequently understood
as divinely given law” (136). In a related vein, others suggest that the casuistic content within
CC (“Mishpatim”) circulated as an independent “lawbook” (see, e.g., Ludger Schwienhorst-
Schönberger, Das Bundesbuch [Ex 20,22–23,33]: Studien zu seiner Entstehung und Theologie,
BZAW 188 [Berlin: De Gruyter, 1990], 1–2; Frank Crüsemann, The Torah: Theology and Social
Introduction 15

the context of the scribes’ bold reuse of Near Eastern treaty terminology to
portray the Israelites’ covenant with and loyalty to their deity.35
With this monograph, I propose that the law collection genre may
not be the best analogue for the casuistic content in Exodus 21–22 and
Deuteronomy 19–25. Rather, I contend that these units are closer in form
and function to the Mesopotamian corpus of legal-pedagogical texts.36
In addition to generating law collections, royal edicts, and documents of
practice such as contracts and trial records, Mesopotamian scribes pro-
duced and copied a variety of legal-oriented pedagogical texts. As I outline
in Chapter 1, this material included sample contracts (“model contracts”),

History of Old Testament Law, trans. Allan W. Mahnke [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996],
165–66). Deuteronomy 12–26 (or parts of it) is then seen by some as representing a revision of
CC, which was later supplemented at both ends (see, e.g., Bernard M. Levinson, Deuteronomy
and the Hermeneutics of Legal Innovation [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997]; Norbert
Lohfink, “Zur deuteronomischen Zentralisationsformel,” Bib 65.3 [1984]: 297–329; and Eckart
Otto, “Aspects of Legal Reforms and Reformulations in Ancient Cuneiform and Israelite Law,”
in Theory and Method in Biblical and Cuneiform Law: Revision, Interpolation and Development,
ed. Bernard M. Levinson, reprint [Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2006], 192–96). Cf. John
Van Seters, however, who argues for the reverse (A Law Book for the Diaspora: Revision in the
Study of the Covenant Code [New York: Oxford University Press, 2003]). Alternatively, or in
conjunction with this standpoint, a number of scholars contend that the family-oriented laws
in Deuteronomy 21–25 originated as a once-independent collection prior to their inclusion in
Deuteronomy; see Chapter 2 for further discussion.
35. This position is associated especially with Eckart Otto, who argues that Esarhaddon’s
Succession Treaty in particular served as the source for Deuteronomy; see Chapter 2 for
discussion.
36. On the surface, this stance would seem to be in line with that of Otto (“Aspects of Legal
Reforms,” 160–62), who states matter-of-factly that the “predeuteronomistic” collections in
Exodus 20–23 and Deuteronomy 12–26 are rooted in “scholarly-judicial traditions of scribal
education” (160). Nonetheless, in my discussions of the content in Exodus and Deuteronomy, it
will become clear that I diverge from Otto with respect to my understanding of the pedagogical
roots of biblical law. While Otto attributes the casuistic content in Exodus 21–22 to disputes
between clans (see, e.g., “Town and Rural Countryside in Ancient Israelite Law: Reception and
Redaction in Cuneiform and Israelite Law,” JSOT 57 [1993]: 3–22), I conclude that this mate-
rial is rooted in a pedagogical exercise rooted in Babylonian law (see Chapter 4). Otto (along
with others) takes the clusters of law in Deuteronomy 21–25 to belong to an old collection of
family law, a position that I challenge in various ways (see Chapter 2, with ample references
to Otto’s oeuvre). I conclude, then, that while we both claim to perceive biblical law as rooted
in pedagogical contexts, our notions of this concept are fundamentally different. Nonetheless,
as is evident throughout this book (esp. Chapter 2), I appreciate many of Otto’s insights on
individual texts.
16 MAKING A CASE

fictional court cases, extracts from law collections, independent sequences

of casuistic laws, and legal phrasebooks with series of contractual clauses.
The bulk of it is in Sumerian and dates to the early second millennium
BCE in southern Mesopotamia, that is, the same geographical and chron-
ological context that yielded the law collections. Some of this material,
such as the model contracts, is amply represented and was integral to early
education, while other text-types are far less attested. Nonetheless, these
diverse texts exhibit numerous cross-references and evidently formed a
kind of sub-corpus within their educational context. These texts also fea-
ture abundant ties to law beyond the educational sphere, including both
the law collections and documents of practice. Provisions in the inde-
pendent sequences echo provisions in the collections; clauses in the model
contracts or the legal phrasebooks parallel clauses in actual contracts; and
the fictional cases feature contractual clauses and scenarios that appear in
the law collections.
Outside of the model contracts, the legal-pedagogical material has
received only limited attention in the otherwise robust subfield of
Mesopotamian scribal education.37 Unfortunately, there is no sourcebook
that gathers all of the evidence together, and a number of critical editions
of texts remain scattered in various journals and volumes. In turn, the
legal-pedagogical texts have been largely neglected by biblical scholars,
despite the considerable interest in Mesopotamian scribal education in
biblical studies over the last two decades. The stylistic, structural, and
thematic parallels between this content and “biblical law” have thus been

37. The study of scribal education has yielded a number of important monographs in
the last two decades. See esp. Paul Delnero, The Textual Criticism of Sumerian Literature,
JCSSS 3 (Boston: American Schools of Oriental Research, 2012); Alexandra Kleinerman,
Education in Early 2nd Millennium BC Babylonia: The Sumerian Epistolary Miscellany,
CM 42 (Leiden: Brill, 2011); Eleanor Robson, Mesopotamian Mathematics, 2100–1600
BC: Technical Constants in Bureaucracy and Education, OECT 14 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999); Niek Veldhuis, Religion, Literature, and Scholarship: The Sumerian
Composition of “Nanše and the Birds,” With a Catalogue of Sumerian Bird Names, CM 22
(Leiden: Brill, 2004); and Niek Veldhuis, History of the Cuneiform Lexical Tradition, GMTR
6 (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2014). See Chapter 1 for discussion of the scholarship on the
legal-pedagogical texts.
Introduction 17

scarcely recognized. One exception is Clemens Locher’s treatment of the

“slandered bride” laws in Deut 22:13–21. Locher observed that the style of
Deut 22:13–21 was similar to that of a Sumerian fictional case regarding
the assault of a slave-girl.38 Outside of this observation and its reitera-
tions in scholarship, however, the potential of the Mesopotamian legal-
pedagogical material to illuminate the origins of what we call biblical law
has remained dormant.
Knowledge of the Mesopotamian legal-pedagogical content has the ca-
pacity to reshape our understanding of both the origins and trajectory
of biblical law. In Chapter 2, I demonstrate that a set of casuistic laws
in Exodus and Deuteronomy exhibit stylistic and thematic parallels to
the colorful Mesopotamian pedagogical genre of fictional cases. These
“Hebrew Legal Fictions” (HLFs) include Deut 19:4–6, the case of an ac-
cidental manslayer; Deut 21:15–17, the case of a man with two wives, one
loved, the other hated; Deut 22:13–19, the case of a man who makes false
accusations against his wife; Exod 22:15–16 and Deut 22:28–29, two cases
of an assaulted virgin; Deut 24:1–4, the case of a two-time divorcee; Deut
25:5–10, the case of a widowed woman and her reluctant brother-in-law;
and Exod 21:7–11, the case of a daughter sold as a slave-wife. With this ar-
gument, I thus diverge from scholars who claim that these texts and others
once belonged to an old collection of “family law.” Close examination of
the HLFs indicates that all of them originated as independent texts. Only
at a later point were most of the HLFs supplemented with “laws” of a fun-
damentally different nature and incorporated into what would become
Deuteronomy. This development created the illusion of an old law collec-
tion in Deuteronomy, enabled by the use of the same methods of compo-
sition that are attested in the Near Eastern collections.

38. Clemens Locher, “Deuteronomium 22,13–21 vom Prozessprotokoll zum kasuistischen

Gesetz,” in Das Deuteronomium: Entstehung, Gestalt und Botschaft, ed. Norbert Lohfink, BETL
68 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1985), 298–303; see also Locher’s more elaborate study,
Die Ehre einer Frau in Israel: Exegetische und rechtsvergleichende Studien zu Deuteronomium
22,13–21, OBO 70 (Freiburg, Switzerland: Universitätsverlag / Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1986), 93–109.
18 MAKING A CASE

When the HLFs are isolated as a set, their unique and shared fea-
tures come to light. One of these features, as detailed in Chapter 3, is the
similarities between the HLFs and contracts from the ancient Near East.
Although we lack access to whatever contracts the Israelites and Judahites
may have produced, excavations in Syria and Iraq have yielded thousands
of ancient contracts of all types, providing us with enormous insight into
the terminology and format that such documents exhibited. Parallels
between three of the HLFs and Late Bronze Age contracts from Emar
(modern-day Tell Meskene, Syria) and Nuzi (Yorghan Tepe in northern
Iraq) suggest that the scribes who composed the HLFs drew upon the ter-
minology and format of analogous types of contracts and/or lists of con-
tractual clauses. The case study for this hypothesis is Deut 25:5–10, a text
that shares striking parallels with a set of wills from Emar. Two other HLFs
(Exod 21:7–11 and Deut 21:15–17) also reflect the terminology and format
that appear in other Near Eastern contracts. Given the parallels between
the HLFs and the Mesopotamian fictional cases, I conclude that several
of the HLFs were likewise composed with the aim of either teaching or
practicing standard contractual clauses.
In Chapter 4, I demonstrate that Exod 21:18–22:16 is rooted in a dif-
ferent type of legal-pedagogical text: namely, a scribal exercise on the
theme of physical and property damages. Toward this end, I profile the
Mesopotamian legal-pedagogical practice of copying a limited sequence
of laws, as attested, for example, in the exercises that Martha Roth has
dubbed the “Laws about Rented Oxen” and the “Sumerian Laws Exercise
Tablet.”39 Both of these exercises exhibit overlap with and divergence from
laws in the collections, but neither one constitutes an “extract” per se.40
Parallels between these exercises and Exod 21:18–22:16 suggest that a sim-
ilar text-type lies behind the biblical block. This comparison helps account

39. Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia.

40. On the function of “extracts” (or “Type III” tablets) in Old Babylonian scribal education, see
Paul Delnero, “Sumerian Extract Tablets and Scribal Education,” JCS 62 (2010): 53–69. Delnero
demonstrates persuasively that scribes would break down literary compositions into roughly
four equal parts (or “extracts”) and learn them in succession prior to copying the complete
composition on a larger (“Type I”) tablet.
Introduction 19

not only for the limited focus of Exod 21:18–22:16 on physical and property
damages, but also for its disjointedness, ambiguities, and errors. It also ac-
counts for the fact that the units in Exod 21:18–22:16 overlap with provi-
sions known from LH but also diverge from them in substantial ways.
Rather than presume that the Israelites/Judahites omitted large swaths of
content from LH, selecting only the material on damages, I propose that
they had access to a legal-pedagogical exercise on this topic alone. Only
at a later point was this pedagogical exercise repackaged—evidently with
minimal internal adjustment—as (divine) law.
As I conclude in Chapter 5, the trajectories of the HLFs and Exod
21:18–22:16 were both similar and distinct. While the scribes respon-
sible for Exodus 20–23 preserved the old exercise (Exod 21:18–22:16)
intact and framed it at both ends, those who preserved certain HLFs in
Deuteronomy supplemented them with a set of additional “laws” that re-
peatedly prescribed the death penalty for civil, criminal, and theological
offenses. In certain cases, these additional units were standalone, while in
others, the scribes modified factors in the HLFs in order to produce osten-
sible counter-cases. Although both blocks of material are each presented
as “the laws/judgments” that Yahweh gave to the people, such claims do
not automatically render these blocks law collections in the Near Eastern
sense of the term. I conclude that the genre of the law collection not only
originated in southern Mesopotamia but remained a Mesopotamian/
Greater Mesopotamian phenomenon for the duration of its use in the an-
cient Near East.
I thus propose that the starting point for what we call “biblical law” is a
set of legal-pedagogical exercises that played a role in scribal education. Of
course, because the Israelites and Judahites wrote on perishable materials
in an unforgiving climate, we lack hard evidence of such scribal exercises.
In contrast, the Mesopotamians’ proclivity for the more durable medium
of clay tablets enables us to take stock of a robust Near Eastern corpus of
legal-pedagogical texts. Although not all of this material had parallels in
ancient Israel and Judah, it nonetheless provides a crucial foundation for
reassessing the pedagogical roots of “biblical law.” It is to this content that
we now turn.
 1

The Role of Legal

Texts in Mesopotamian
Scribal Education

This is truly a case of law school before lawyers.

—William Hallo

Over the past twenty years, Assyriologists have made substantial prog-
ress in reconstructing the contours of scribal education, especially for the
Old Babylonian (OB) period (2000–1595 BCE), for which there is consid-
erable evidence.1 Within this subset of robust scholarship, however, the
role of law and legal-pedagogical texts in scribal education has received
only subsidiary attention. There are indeed exceptions to the rule, partic-
ularly in the area of “model contracts,” that is, sample contracts that were
copied at an early phase in OB education.2 In terms of broader overviews,

1. The quotation in the epigraph derives from William W. Hallo’s Foreword to Walter R. Bodine’s
monograph, How Mesopotamian Scribes Learned to Write Legal Documents: A Study of the
Sumerian Model Contracts in the Babylonian Collection at Yale University (Lewiston, NY: Edwin
Mellen Press, 2014), ii. The statement is a bit of an exaggeration, but the evidence certainly
points to the presence of law in school, if not law school.
2. Two recent volumes provide fresh insight into this important pedagogical genre: Gabriella
Spada’s Sumerian Model Contracts from the Old Babylonian Period in the Hilprecht Collection
Jena, Texte und Materialien der Frau Professor Hilprecht Collection of Babylonian Antiquities
im Eigentum der Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena XI (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2018); and
Bodine’s How Mesopotamian Scribes Learned. In addition, Spada has edited twenty-five prisms
and tablets with model contracts from the Schøyen collection in a volume that also includes
editions of literary letters, a handful of fictional cases, and several other legal-pedagogical

Making a Case. Sara J. Milstein, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190911805.003.0002
The Role of Legal Texts in Mesopotamian Scribal Education 21

however, the most thorough treatment of law in scribal education remains

that of Martha T. Roth’s unpublished 1979 dissertation on the OB prism
that she later dubbed the Sumerian Laws Handbook of Forms (SLHF).3
Stephen Lieberman had planned to publish all of the available legal-
pedagogical material before his untimely death; unfortunately, no volume
has since filled the void. The lack of a single sourcebook has made it diffi-
cult to take stock of the function of legal texts in Mesopotamian scribal ed-
ucation and of their relationship to law beyond the pedagogical sphere. In
turn, it is not surprising that biblical scholars who otherwise have drawn
liberally on data for Mesopotamian education in their reconstructions of
Israelite scribal training have paid scant attention to the legal-pedagogical
texts.4 Although not all Mesopotamian scribes would have been exposed
to the full gamut of these texts, it is thus worth profiling the range of legal-
pedagogical texts that were in circulation, the potential role(s) that these
texts served, and their links to law more broadly.

AN OVERVIEW OF MESOPOTAMIAN
LEGAL- PEDAGOGICAL TEXTS

While legal-pedagogical texts were learned somewhat less widely than

other pedagogical genres, at least some scribes in the OB period and beyond

texts (“Old Babylonian Model Contracts and Related Texts,” in Andrew R. George and
Gabriella Spada, Old Babylonian Texts in the Schøyen Collection, Part Two: School Letters,
Model Contracts, and Related Texts, CUSAS 43 [University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2019],
73–145).
3. Martha T. Roth, “Scholastic Tradition and Mesopotamian Law: A Study of FLP 1287, a Prism in
the Collection of the Free Library of Philadelphia” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1979).
4. See, e.g. Karel van der Toorn, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); David M. Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins
of Scripture and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Christopher Rollston,
Writing and Literacy in the World of Ancient Israel: Epigraphic Evidence from the Iron Age, ABS
11 (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2010); and most recently, William M. Schniedewind, The Finger of the
Scribe: How Scribes Learned to Write the Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).
22 MAKING A CASE

were exposed to a rich and varied assortment of such texts. Although the
“unusable” aspects of OB scribal education have been emphasized, it is
important to note that some of the legal-pedagogical content was tied to
practical application.5 The Sumerian model contracts, for example, exhibit
much overlap with the content and form of actual contracts, some of which
continued to be written in Sumerian in the OB period. OB legal phrase-
books and certain fictional cases include Sumerian contractual clauses and
terms that likewise mirror those used in actual OB contracts. An exercise
with laws and related clauses on the topic of rented oxen exhibits paral-
lels both with actual contracts of hire and laws in the collections.6 When
this diverse content is examined as a whole, it becomes apparent that the
legal texts reflect a cultural matrix unto themselves, with copious cross-
references and abundant links to law beyond the educational sphere.
One caveat is in order. The conceptual categories profiled later (e.g.,
“model contracts,” “fictional cases”) do not always constitute separate
sources. Certain texts, such as SLHF, feature a combination of verbal para-
digms, contractual clauses, model contracts, and laws. On several occasions,
model contracts, contractual clauses, and/or fictional cases were copied on
the same compilation tablet, or Sammeltafel. In other cases, model contracts
were copied together with non-legal pedagogical texts, such as proverbs or
lexical lists. The occasional combination of these different text-types in a
single document indicates that the scribes must have viewed them as part of
the same educational package—and as such, so should we.

Model Contracts

Although not all ancient legal transactions would have required documen-
tation, thousands of texts from Mesopotamia indicate that scribes from the

5. See, e.g., Piotr Michalowski’s comments in “The Libraries of Babel: Text, Authority, and
Tradition in Ancient Mesopotamia,” in Cultural Repertoires: Structure, Function, and Dynamics,
ed. Gillis J. Dorleijn and Herman L. J. Vanstiphout, GSCC 3 (Leuven: Peeters, 2003), 105–
29: “Once they graduated, the newly minted scribes would have little use for their Sumerian, as
they would be working mostly with the more familiar Akkadian language” (110–11).
6. Roth, “Scholastic Tradition,” 15.
The Role of Legal Texts in Mesopotamian Scribal Education 23

third millennium BCE on were employed to produce all types of written

contracts: marriage and divorce contracts, adoptions, loans, hires, sales,
rentals, wills, and so on. It is thus logical that model contracts were an in-
tegral part of OB elementary education, for they provided scribes with the
skills for drawing up a range of functional contracts.7 Indeed, in one text,
a scribe boasts of his ability to write “contracts for formalizing marriages
and for business partnerships; for selling houses, fields, and slaves; for
deposits of silver; for leasing cultivation fields or palm-groves; and tablets
for contracts of adoption.”8 About 350 model contracts are known, though
only a limited number have been published. Not all of the published texts
are provenanced, but the ones that are demonstrate ties to Nippur, Larsa,
Isin, Ur, Tulul Khattab, and Sippar.9 The sources are varied and include
Types I, II, III, and IV tablets; prisms; and cylinders.10 In certain instances,

7. Stephen Lieberman identified two modes of instruction: the “paradigmatic” approach, in

which one learned a series of words, phrases and clauses; and “pattern practice,” when a stu-
dent copied a series of sample legal and administrative records. The model contracts would
fall under the latter category (“Nippur: City of Decisions,” in Nippur at the Centennial: Papers
Read at the 35e Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Philadelphia 1988, ed. Maria deJong
Ellis, Occasional Publications of the Samuel Noah Kramer Fund 14 [Philadelphia: University
Museum, 1992], 129–30).
8. Charpin, Hammurabi of Babylon, 14. The citation is from the composition “Edubba D,” also
known as “Scribal Activities” or “The Dialogue between an Examiner and a Student.”
9. Spada notes that the model contracts in the Hilprecht Collection are almost entirely from
Nippur (Sumerian Model Contracts, 3). Bodine does not specify the provenance of the tab-
lets he translates, but notes that a large quantity of model contracts were found at House F
in Nippur, a rich site that has yielded fourteen hundred tablets alone (How Mesopotamian
Scribes Learned, 7; on House F, see Eleanor Robson, “The Tablet House: A Scribal School in Old
Babylonian Nippur,” RA 95.1 [2001]: 39–66). The tablets in the Schøyen collection are mostly
without archaeological provenance, but on the basis of the texts themselves, Martin Schøyen
estimates that about 90% of the OB tablets come from Larsa (“Statement of Provenance,” in
George and Spada, Old Babylonian Texts, viii). In “Two Old Babylonian Model Contracts,”
CDLJ 2 (2014), Gabriella Spada provides a list of published model contracts with their prove-
nance (1 n. 6); see also Spada, “I modelli di contratto nell’edubba paleo-babilonese: un esempio
di contratto di adozione,” AION 72 (2012): 133–48, and “I Want to Break Free: Model Contracts
Recording Slave Self-Emancipation,” in dNisaba za3-mi2: Ancient Near Eastern Studies in Honor
of Francesco Pomponio, ed. Palmiro Notizia, Annunziata Rositani, and Lorenzo Verderame,
dubsar 19 (Münster: Zaphon, 2021).
10. As is typical, the prisms that Spada surveys have a hollow central axis so that they could
either be handled on a stick or suspended from the ceiling and turned horizontally (Sumerian
Model Contracts, 74). Miguel Civil analyzed collections of lexical tablets and categorized them
into four formats, Types I–IV. Type I tablets are large, multi-columned tablets that were copied
24 MAKING A CASE

only one model contract is preserved on a tablet.11 In other cases, multiple

model contracts are preserved on a tablet or prism, either on their own
(Fig. 1.1) or on the same tablet with proverbs or lexical lists.12 Others ap-
pear with fictional cases or together with legal provisions.13 The eclectic
OB prism SLHF includes six model contracts together with verbal para-
digms, contractual clauses, and a handful of laws.14
Unlike actual contracts, model contracts typically lack witnesses, seals,
and dates. Some model contracts refer to the omitted witnesses with ge-
neric statements (“the witnesses, its month, and its year”).15 Bodine points
to a number of other potential indicators of their pedagogical Sitz im

by advanced students. Type II are large “teacher-student copies,” with different exercises typ-
ically written on the obverse and reverse. The obverse (“II/1”) featured a model composition
written in the left column by the teacher, with room in the right column(s) for the student to
copy it multiple times. The student then used the reverse (“II/2”) to copy a text that he had previ-
ously learned. Type III are single-column extracts of compositions, and Type IV are lenticular-
shaped tablets that consist of two to four lines of composition and show signs of inscription
by teachers and students (“Old Babylonian Proto-Lu: Types of Sources,” in The Series lú = ša
and Related Texts, ed. Miguel Civil and Erica Reiner, MSL 12 [Rome: Pontificium Institutum
Biblicum, 1969], 27–28; Ea A = nâqu, Aa A = nâqu, with Their Forerunners and Related Texts,
ed. Miguel Civil, with the collaboration of Wilfred G. Lambert and Margaret W. Green, MSL 14
[Rome: Pontificium Institutum Biblicum, 1979], 5–7; and with the identification of additional
tablet types for later periods, Miguel Civil, “Ancient Mesopotamian Lexicography,” CANE
4: 2308). Civil classified prisms as Type I tablets; Steve Tinney later identified prisms as a sepa-
rate category (“On the Curricular Setting of Sumerian Literature,” Iraq 61 [1999]: 159–72).
11. For example, NBC 8630 and YBC 12074; see Bodine, How Mesopotamian Scribes Learned, 41–44.
12. The combination of model contracts and proverbs or lexical lists is attested on Type II
tablets, typically with one genre occupying the obverse and the other occupying the reverse.
Regarding tablets that combine model contracts with lexical lists, see Spada, Sumerian Model
Contracts, 60.
13. MS3176/5 combines model contracts with four fictional cases (Spada, “Old Babylonian
Model Contracts and Related Texts,” 95–106). The combination of model contracts and legal
provisions (specifically from the exercise known as Laws about Rented Oxen, to be discussed
later) is attested only in N963 and the school prism CUNES 52-10-148; see Spada, “A New
Fragment of the ‘Laws about Rented Oxen’ and the Sumerian Verb bu-us2,” RSO 91 (2018): 11–18.
14. The text is of unknown provenance, but Roth surmises that it may have originated in
southern Babylonia (“Scholastic Tradition,” 25).
15. Bodine, How Mesopotamian Scribes Learned, 161. There are exceptions to the rule, however.
Some model contracts include a date but no witnesses (Bodine, 162) and a prism with seventeen
model contracts lists a date (month and year name) with one to three witnesses at the end of
each contract; one of the witnesses is often the scribe (Spada, “Old Babylonian Model Contracts
and Related Texts,” 75).
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 It was an impossible room—I may say it at once—quite the typical
tawdry boudoir of an ex-coryphée. She was not there, I was relieved
to find, in person; but her multiplied presentment simpered and
abashed one from a dozen places on walls and mantelpiece.
“Claudine” (she might have been a hair-wash, and enjoyed the same
sort of popularity) posed, for all the blind purposes of vanity, in the
tights and kid boots of a past generation. Looking from queer old
daguerreotypes, in skirts like curtailed crinolines; ogling from
wreaths, her calves, crossed to display their strength, in disfiguring
proportion with the thin bosom above, she seemed to make an
outrage of the dear ungainly sanctities which appeal to us, in
pegtops and voluminous skirts, from the back parts of our albums.
There are certain people who, with the best intention in the world to
be held sweet, are unsavoury; and Aunt Mim was one of them. All
the more wonder that such fruit could be born of her stock.
For she was certainly attractive, was the girl—pure and pretty and
unaffected. I had to own it grudgingly to myself, as I bowed to her,
and turned interrogatively to my friend.
He had gone to the back of her chair, where she sat away from the
open window. There was some discarded work in her lap, and in her
eyes some look of a vague sadness and bewilderment.
“Nanny,” he said softly, “this, Mr. Verender, is my great friend—my
counsel out of Court. Will you just do this for me—make him yours,
too? Will you try to explain to him, while I go away, what you find it
so hard to explain to me—your sense of the something that keeps us
apart?”
I made an instant but faint demur. Nanny, as faintly, shook her
head.
“O,” he said, “but he will listen to you, I know! Because I am
unhappy, and you are unhappy, and I love you so, Nanny, and he is
my best friend. Try to explain to him, dear, the difficulty of your case.”
This novel enlargement on our relations, his and mine, vaguely
annoyed me.
“Why should there be any?” I put in impatiently. “Our friend can
give you great social and other advantages, Miss Nolan. If he is
decided on this course—you don’t dislike him, I think—forgive me, I
can see no reason for objection on your part.”
 She rose, as if scared, to her feet. He put a hand on her shoulder.
“Hush!” he said. “Be just to me, and try to tell him.”
He left the room and the house; and I was in two minds about
following him. Was ever man put in a more ridiculous position? Yet
the look of the girl gave me pause. She seemed to me to be yet only
half awake; and indeed, I think, that is something to understate the
case.
“Well,” I said stumblingly, as she stood before me. “You heard
what he said, Miss Nolan?”
I was not sympathetic. I knew it. Perhaps, having once asserted
myself, I might have grown so. But she would not give me the
opportunity. In the meantime, I did not feel the less the full force of
this mismatch.
She put her hand in a lost way to her forehead.
“I will try,” she said, in a low voice, “because he asked me. There
—there was a great trouble—O! it was so far back. I can’t remember
it—and then everything went.”
“He is willing, it appears, to take that interval, that trouble, on
trust,” I said. “He only asks you, it seems, to repay his confidence.
What you are is what he desires. Cannot you consider yourself new-
born into his love?” (I positively sneered the word to myself.)
“There is something stands between us,” she only murmured
helplessly.
“He doesn’t admit it for himself,” I insisted irritably. “It might be the
ruin of his career, of his position, as foreseen by his friends. I
suppose he wishes to assure you that that counts for nothing with
him, if by any chance the bar between you lies in your dim
consciousness of such a sentiment.”
I had been brutal, I admit it. I can only palliate my behaviour by
confessing that it was intended to sound the first note of my moral
surrender to the appeal of those poor, pain-troubled eyes. Now, at
least, I had got my shaft home. She looked up at me with a light of
amazed knowledge in her face.
“Thank you,” she said. “I knew there was a right reason; and all
the time I have been hunting for a fancied one.”
I suffered an instant reaction to dismay. I had had no right
whatever to make this point. Whatever my private opinion of
Valentine’s folly, I had allowed myself to be accredited his
ambassador.
“Come; it is no reason at all,” I said. “There is no such thing as a
misalliance in love” (I threw this atrocious sop to my own panic). “If
only the practical bar between you could be as easily disposed of.”
“The practical bar?”
She turned upon me with a piteous pain in her voice. I had opened
a door of release to her, I suppose, and before she could escape
shut it again in her face. I was stumbling weakly on an explanation,
when suddenly from somewhere above the baby began to wail.
Instantly her face assumed the strangest expression—a sort of
exalted hardness. She put up her hand, listened a moment, then,
without another word, glided from the room. I am ashamed to say
that I seized the opportunity to put an instant period to my visit.
I expected to meet Valentine loitering without; but to my relief he
did not appear. So I went on my way fuming. What right had the man
to try to inveigle me into seeming to sanction his idiotcy by claiming
me its advocate? He wanted to buy justification, I suppose. There
are certain natures which cannot properly relish their own grief or
happiness unless a witness be by to report upon them. Such was
Valentine’s, I thought; and the thought did not increase my respect
for my friend. I fancied I had already plumbed the shallows of that
pretentious reserve, and was angry and half contemptuous that he
had so soon revealed himself to me. There was certainly something
attractive about the girl; but—well, he had not been the first to
discover the fact, and, when all was said, his infatuation showed him
a fool in my eyes.
That evening, when I was sitting alone writing, she suddenly stood
before me. My first shock of amazement was followed by a glow of
fury. I felt that I was being persecuted.
“Well, what is it?” I said harshly.
“I only wanted to tell you,” she said low, panting as if she had run;
“I wanted you to tell him that—that I know now what it is. I found out
the moment I left you; and I came to say—but you were gone.”
“Well?”
“It is the child, sir.”
“Yes, you are quite right—it is the child.”
 No sooner had I said it, than I felt the weight of my self-
commitment. Had she discovered—remembered all? Did she
conceive the impediment as associated with some scandal attaching
to the ineffable Aunt Mim? or was the baby, in her clouded soul, but
an unattachable changeling, which had come to disrupt the kind
order of things and brand their household with a curse?
“Yes, it is the child,” I said, and leaned my forehead into my hand
while I frowned over the problem.
She made no answer. When I looked up at the end of a minute,
she was gone.
I started to my feet, and went up and down. I made no attempt to
follow. “It is better,” I thought angrily, “to let this stuff ferment in its
own way. I could have given no other answer.”
At the twentieth turn I saw Valentine before me, and stopped
abruptly.
“Well,” he said; “were you able to get it out of her?”
“What?” I asked defiantly.
“The reason—the impediment, you know?” he answered.
“Sit down, Valentine,” I said. “I will tell you the truth. I hinted that
the mésalliance might be her unconscious consideration.”
“She is not so proud,” he said quietly; “though I’m unworthy to
buckle her little shoe for her.”
I positively gasped.
“O! if that’s your view! But, anyhow, she was seeming to accept
mine, when the infant hailed her, and she left me, and I bolted. You
put too much upon me—really you do, Val; and here’s the sequel.
Ten minutes ago she appeared in this room and told me that she had
discovered the reason—the real one this time.”
“And it was?”
“The baby—no less.”
“What! Does she——?”
“I don’t know from Adam. I was thinking over my answer; and
when I looked up, she was gone.”
“And you gave her no reply?”
“O yes! I told her I entirely agreed with her. I had to be honest.”
“Verender! You must come with me!”
“Go with you!”
 “You’ve called the tune; you must pay the piper.”
“I don’t know what you mean. I’ll see you—cremated first!”
He stared at me a moment, his teeth showing, his eyes rounding
in the dusk, his fists clinching and unclinching; then he, too, was
gone. And I went and stood at the window, slinking into the curtains,
and feeling myself the most abused cur in all London.

For a fortnight this state continued in me, through alternations of

depression, self-accusation, and savage bursts of rebellion. On the
sixteenth day a brief note, begging me to call at his rooms, reached
me from Valentine.
“I won’t go,” I swore through my teeth, feeling an inclination to tear
the paper in them; and five minutes later was on my way.
“He shall justify me to myself,” I had thought. “I’ll let my conscience
be his footstool no longer.”
The fellow lived en prince in Piccadilly. I found him in the midst of
a litter—boxes and packages and strewed floors—evidently on the
eve of a journey. He greeted me, twinkling, in high excitement—not a
trace of grievance or embarrassment in his manner.
“Leave those things, Phillips,” he said to his staid valet. “We’ll
finish by and by.”
The man left the room; and his master took me by the sleeve,
while I held myself in reserve—unconsciously, at the same time,
softening to his geniality.
“We’re off to Capri—Egypt,” he said, “following our late summer
with the swallows.”
“You and—Phillips?” I asked.
“I and my wife,” said he, with a laugh. “Hush! She’s seeing the
baby to sleep.”
He could say it without a blush; and they had been married, as I
came to learn, just a week! He led me on tiptoe to a distant room,
and bade me look through the opened door. Nanny, crowned, proud
as any young queen, with conscious maternity, was bent, singing
softly, above a little cot. The sight of her—Val’s wife—restored me at
once to my self-respect. I had done nothing after all, it seemed, but
help to precipitate an event I deplored. My shout had brought down
the avalanche. Henceforth my position was to be that of the amused
onlooker.
He let me stare; then led me away with all his old affectation of
pregnant mystery. We went out together—I don’t know why—into the
Green Park. It seemed remote and silent, and the better shadows of
night were beginning to troop under its trees. Then he spoke to me,
as follows:
“Verender, you have a right to know. You remember what you told
me that evening? I wasn’t just to you, perhaps. I foresaw issues to
which you must necessarily be blind. The baby stood between us,
you said. It did, but not in the way you meant to imply. I am its
father.”
I listened perfectly silent, and very grave, as we stepped on
together.
“I will say of, not for, myself,” he continued, “that I had known
nothing of the fruits of a little moonlight idyll out in that Kent village. I
was hop-picking, as she was, but for a worser reason. Our encounter
in B—— Hospital was my first intimation of the truth. Till that moment
I had never considered, at least had been careless of, a sequel; had
never, of course, had a shadow of thought to identify the patient with
my victim. Then in a moment—Verender, her helplessness found all
that wasn’t bad in me. She didn’t know me—the curtain was too
thick. I determined to woo and win, as a stranger, what was already
my own. Was I right?”
I nodded. “Yes, you were right.”
“Then came the strange part,” he said—“a sort of
subconsciousness of an impediment she could not define. It was her
dishonour, Verender—my God! Verender, her dishonour!—that found
some subtle expression in the little life introduced into her home. She
always feared and distrusted the child; and I tell you I lived in horror
that some day her witlessness would arm her gentle hand to do it a
hurt. For she wanted to come to me, Verender, she wanted to come,
and it was as if she couldn’t, and nobody would tell her why.
“You told her, you old rascal! And with what result, do you think?
When I followed her, I found her gone—she had taken the baby from
its cot, and hurried out. The old harpy was there, raving and gobbling
beyond reason. I had her down on her knees to confess. She
admitted that the girl had come in, in a fever to proclaim her
knowledge of the bar which separated us. Nanny had rounded upon
her, it appeared, and accused her, Aunt Mim, of wantonly causing
the scandal which had brought this shadow into her life. And then—
perhaps it wasn’t to be wondered at—Auntie exploded, and gave up
all.”
“The truth?”
“All of it but what the old hag herself didn’t know—the name of the
villain. That, circumstances had kept from her, you see. She let
loose, did Auntie—we’ll allow her a grain of justification; to have her
forbearance turned upon herself like that, you know!—and screamed
to the girl to pack, and dispose of her rubbish somewhere else. And
Nanny understood at last, and went.”
“Where?”
“Ah, where? That was the question. I’d only one clue—Skene and
the river; but I seized upon it, and my inspiration proved right. She’d
gone instinctively to the only place where, it seemed, her trouble
could be resolved. You see, she hadn’t yet come to identify me with
it. But I followed, and I caught her in time.”
He hung his head, and spoke very low.
“I took the next train possible to Skene. Verender, I’m not going to
talk. It was one of those fainting, indescribable experiences, like the
voice in the burning bush. Cold dawn it was, with a white bubbling
river and the ghost of an old moon. She had intended to commit it to
the water—the fog wasn’t yet out of her brain—and then, all in an
instant, the mother came upon her, and the memory of me; and she
ran to cast herself in instead, and saw me coming.”
There followed a long interval of silence.
“And Aunt Mim?” I asked drily, chiefly to keep up my character.
He laughed.
“O! we’ve added an honourable moiety to a dishonourable
pension, and settled her,” he said.
Another silence followed.
“Well, I apologize,” I said grumpily.
 THE SOUL OF THE PROFESSOR
John Stannary hungrily paced his laboratory, awaiting an expected
advent. A brilliant coronal of candles, concentrated within a shade
and pendent from a black beam over the dissecting table, regularly
identified him as he came within its radiance, and as regularly, when
he had passed without it, returned to its scrutiny of the empty slab
beneath, as if it were trying to trace on that blank surface the
unwritten hieroglyphics of his development. Yet, if each of its half-
score fiery tongues had been as polyglot as the Apostles’ tongues of
flame, it could have found among them all no voice to dispute his
lifelong consistency with himself. From the hard, ungracious child,
who had rejoiced to discomfit the love which sought to hedge him;
from the cynic schoolboy, to whom to awaken and analyze pain in
the living had been the only absorbing sport; from the
unimpassioned student, who had walked the hospitals like a very
spectre of moral insensibility; from the calculating libertine, whose
experimental phase of animalism had been as brief as it was
savage; from the lust of life, soon spent, to the bloodless analysis of
its organic motives; from the soulless child to the virile monster of
science; from nothingness to a great early reputation, to honours, to
a fine house, to his present self and condition, in short, Professor
Stannary’s progress had been entirely and unerringly consistent. He
was one of those born to account for results, not by any means with
a view to clearing the stream of tendency by cleansing its source. On
the contrary, he never would have hesitated further to contaminate it,
could he by so doing have evolved some novel epidemic. His fight
was not to win Nature to God, but to the laboratory; and, if he had a
conqueror’s ambition, it was to die gloriously upon a protoplast, at
that beginning of things which his fathers had struggled through
æons to forget. To have called him a dog nosing back for a scent,
would have been to libel the sorriest of mongrels with an inch of tail
to wag at a kind word. Yet he had routled so much, nevertheless,
that his eyes were inflamed, and his features pimpled, and his nose
itself sharpened as with much whetting on carrion. And, still
unappeased, he paced his shambles that evening like a caged
ravening jackal.
In those early decades of the nineteenth century,
anthropophagous science, especially when non-official, was often
hard put to it for a meal. The “ringing grooves of change” were
sounding; discovery was a new-risen star; ghoulish explorers
shouldered one another in their struggle for the scientific pabulum
which the grave afforded. But the supply, die as men would, was
unequal to the demand. The hospitals kept their own; the others, à
contre-cœur, must keep the resurrection-men. They pulled the blinds
down on their consciences; they were willing to accept the least
plausible of explanations, for the Cause was paramount. But, indeed,
we are all casuists when we want to justify our lusts to ourselves.
Still the material lacked, only, according to the universal law of
necessity, to evolve its more desperate instruments of supply. And
then at last, hard-driven, first one, and after him another and another,
had the panic courage to pull up those blinds, and let in the light on
some very shocking suspicions—with the result that Burke was
hanged in Edinburgh, and Bishop and Williams in London.
Professor Stannary was not of these white-livers. He pulled up no
blind, for the simple reason that he had let none down. He would
have diagnosed conscience as a morbid disease characterized by a
diathetic condition, and peculiar to fools of both sexes and all ages.
He would have said that to ask any question in this world was to
invite a lie, and that in all his thirty years’ experience he had found
none but the dead to answer back the unswerving truth. Well, if they
did? Did it matter to them, being dead? But it mattered greatly to the
cause of science to get at the truth; and he, for one, was certainly
not going to question the means so long as the results came to
justify them.
While yet, however, the blinds were down and the pitch-plaster but
an ugly suspicion, the competition for material had not so ceased of
its keenness but that Professor Stannary had found himself checked,
one day, under the very near-conquered crest of a physiological
peak, for want of the final clue to that crowning achievement—a clue
which, like Bluebeard’s key, turned upon nothing so intimately as
dead bodies. Step by step he had reasoned his way to this position,
only, when within touch of the end, to find himself held up, tantalized,
irritated by an inability to proceed farther until a nice necessity
should be provided. His material, in fact and in short, had given out
at the psychologic moment. His laboratory was already a museum of
shredded particles—the pickings from much inevitable waste of dead
humanity. There needed only the retraversing of certain nerves, or
ducts, or canals to put the finishing touches to a great discovery. And
then—the summit, the tribune, as it were, from which he was
engaged to announce on the morrow to the Royal Society the
triumphant term to his investigations.
Already, pacing to and fro, eager and impatient, in the silent room,
he foresaw himself the recipient of the highest honour it was in the
power of that body to bestow. He was not above desiring it. He was
not himself so superlatively rational but he could covet applause for
knocking yet another long nail into the coffin of irrationality; could
expect the recognition of the world for his services in helping to
reduce it, its passions and its hopes and its pathetic fallacies, to
some mathematical formulæ. There is nothing so incomprehensible
to the men of science as the reluctance of the unscientific to part
with their doting illusions. To be content to rejoice or sorrow in things
as they seem, and not to wish to know them as they are—that, they
think, is so foolish as to justify their hardest castigation of the folly. At
least so thought John Stannary, as, with his lips set sourly, he
paused, and consulted his watch, and listened for a sound of
expected footsteps shuffling down the hang-dog passage which
skirted that wall of the house, and into which his laboratory door
conveniently opened.
Not a whisper, however, rewarded him. He put his ear to the
panels. Even then, the surf-like murmur of distant traffic—or the thud
of his own excited heart, he could not tell which—was the only
articulate sound. He glanced up angrily at the shortening candles
before resuming his tramp. As he passed to and fro, from dusk to
light, and into dusk again, he seemed to be demonstrating to a
theatre of spectral monstrosities the hieroglyphics of that same
empty slab. For the central core of radiance, concentrating itself with
deadly expectancy upon its surface, had, nevertheless, its own
ghostly halo—a dim auditorium, tier over tier, peopled with shadows
of misbegotten horrors. Sets of surgical steel in the pit, arrayed
symmetrically on a table as if for a dinner party of vampires;
nameless writhed specimens on cards or in bottles, standing higher
behind the dry sleek of glass; over all, murderous busts in the
gallery, the dust on their heads and upper features giving them the
appearance of standing above some infernal sort of footlights—with
such shapes, watchful and gloating in suggestion, was the man
hemmed in. They touched his nerves with just such an emotion as
the ordinary citizen feels towards his domestic lares; they affected
him in just such proportion as he was moved by the thought of the
possible manner in which an order he had given to some friends of
his that morning might be executed. That is to say, his feeling
towards these dead members, as towards the means taken by
others to procure him the use of them, was utterly impersonal. He
had had at this pass a great truth to demonstrate. “A body, this night,
at any cost,” he had simply ordered, and had straightway shut the
door on his caterers. He had had no thought of scruple. His
responsibility in these matters was to the ages; never to the
individual.

A low tap sounded at the door. He was there in three strides, and
opening swiftly, let in two men, the one shouldering a sack, the other
hovering about his comrade in a sort of anxious moral support.
Professor Stannary, without a word, pointed to the table. The
laden one, as mutely, shuffled across, backed, heaved his burden
down, and stood to take off his hat and mop his brow. He was a
burly, humorous-looking fellow, with a sort of cheerful popularity
written across his face—an expression in strong contrast with that of
the other, who, tall and stealthy, stood lank behind him, like his
shadow at a distance, watching the persuasive effect of his principal
on the customer. It was he who had closed the door gently upon
them all as soon as they were in, and now stood, his teeth and
eyeballs the prominent things in him, softly twirling his hat in his
hand.
“Take away the sack,” said the Professor quietly.
 The burly man obeyed, sliding it off like a petticoat; and revealed
the body of a young woman. Lowering and rubbing his jaw, the
Professor stood some moments pondering the vision. Then he
turned sharply.
“You are late. I expected you sooner.”
“The notice was short, sir,” answered the man coolly. “These ’ere
matters can’t be accommodated in a moment. As it is she’s warm. I
bought the body off of——”
The other interrupted him—
“I don’t want to know. You can hold your tongue, and take your
price, and go.”
“Short and sweet,” said the man.
He laughed, and his friend laughed in echo, putting his long hand
to his mouth as if in apology for such an unpardonable ebullition of
nature.
“As to the price,” said the former, “taking into consideration the
urgency, and the special providence, so to speak, in purwiding, at a
moment’s notice too, this ’ere comely young——”
A certain full chink of money stopped him.
“Thankee,” he said, after a short negotiation. “I’ll own you’ve done
the handsome, sir, and we’ve no cause to complain. Not but what I
had to give——”
“Good night!” said the Professor.
Not till they were gone, locked out, and the very trail of their filthy
footsteps hidden under the black droppings of the night, did he turn,
for all his impatience, and regard the body again.
“Nancy,” he murmured to himself; “yes, it’s Nancy.”
Into the vast study of biology it is perfectly certain that a personal
knowledge of biogenesis must enter. Here, too, the individual must
be sacrificed to the cause. Well, by virtue of that phase in his career
before-mentioned, he had already once made of Nancy a holocaust
to science. If the fruits of that sacrifice had been to be found in a
ruined life, a social degradation, a gradual decline upon infamy, what
was it all to him? As german to the general subject as the dead
specimens on his walls was the living specimen of his passion. Ex
abusu non arguitur ad usum. Still, it was a strange coincidence that
she should come thus to consummate his work.
 Looking upon her frozen face, he was aware of certain tell-tale,
rudely-erased tokens about the mouth. He never had a doubt as to
what they signified. It was a rude kiss that of the pitch-plaster, more
close and savage than any he himself had once pressed upon those
blistered lips. So, the murderous beasts had gone the short way to
supply his urgency! Would they have taken it none the less, he
wondered, if they could have known in what relation their victim once
stood towards their employer? Very likely. Very justly, too, could they
believe him consistent with himself.
Nevertheless, though he had no conscience, though he had too
often scored that fact on human flesh with a knife to be in any doubt
about it, it was notable that, as he moved now, perfectly cold and
collected, to make some selection of tools from the table hard by, he
was registering to himself a vow, mortal to some folks, that no effort
of his should be lacking to help bring certain vile instruments to their
judgment—so soon as his disuse of them should find warrant in a
fuller supply of the legitimate material.
As he groped for what he wanted, a sparrow twittered somewhere
in the dark outside. He started, and dwelt a moment listening. Birds!
the little false priests of haunted woods, who sang their lying
benedictions over every folly perpetrated in their green shades! Why,
he had loathed them, even while he had been making their loves the
text for this early experiment of his in rustic nature. They had been
singing when——grasping his knife firmly, he returned to the table.
Something had happened there. For one moment the blade shook
in his hand. To his practised eye there were signs—the ghostliest,
the most remote—but signs still. A movement—a tremor—the
faintest, faintest vibration of a soul, unreleased, struggling to return
to the surface—that was what he felt rather than saw. He recalled
the hasty character of the deed; he thought of the shock, of the
suspended trance into which such a deed might cast a sensitive
subject. Mastering himself, with the dry firm will of an operator, he
walked once more unhurriedly to the instrument table, and made a
further selection.
The sparrow twittered again. Birds in the wood—small
procuresses to Sentiment! What a trollop she was, that Sentiment!
He had known ethereal creatures go from picking the bones of
stuffed larks, to moralize sweetly on the song of nightingales under
the moon. For himself, barring his natural asceticism, he would have
no remorse whatever in devouring nightingales. Such emotions were
born of surfeit, and the moral of them all was that a bird in the
stomach was worth two, or two hundred, in the bush. The one was
the decoy which brought the many into notice. Why, he himself,
when flushed with passion——
Harder than steel, hard as flesh can be, he stepped back to the
table.
Yes, there was no longer doubt about it. He must decide quickly.
Decide! What was there in all his life to warrant in him a moment’s
indecision? His pledge to to-morrow was paramount over his pledge
to yesterday. It was by very virtue of the past that he owed
everything to the future. The Cause was himself, bone of his bone,
flesh of his flesh. As she had made herself one with him, so must
she consummate the gift. He chose to believe, even, that she would
not hesitate could she know. He grasped his knife.
Her hair! He had said some foolish things about it once. In a
sudden fury he seized it, and sliced it off close by her head, and
flung it aside. She looked strangely innocent and boyish thus shorn.
He had a momentary grotesque thought that he would excuse
himself to himself by pretending that she was a boy. It passed on the
instant. What excuse was necessary? He remembered how once, to
his idle amusement, when she had fancied herself secure of him,
she had coveted greatness for his future. Well, it was within his
grasp at length, and by her final means.
Damn the sparrow! What was there in all the murky town to tempt
his twittering? He had blunted his knife’s edge on the hair. He must
fetch another.
As he came back with it, the bird seemed to flutter and cry out
against his very door. In a swift access of passion he strode to it, and
opened. Whether old, or wounded, or poisoned in the drooping fog,
there lay the little thing, gasping, with outspread wings, upon the
pavement. One moment the Professor hesitated; then, crushing out
the tiny shrieking life under his foot, he relocked the door and
returned with a firm step to the table.
*****
 His treatise, read the next day before an august body, was said
masterly to resolve an intricate and long obscure physiologic
problem.
It brought him additional and great honour, and, what he prized
above all, that gift of the Society’s gold medal, which is only granted
to discoveries of the first importance. But then, it must be
remembered, he had given his soul to the Cause. The stain of its
sacrifice was yet red on the stones outside his door.
 A GHOST-CHILD
In making this confession public, I am aware that I am giving a
butterfly to be broken on a wheel. There is so much of delicacy in its
subject, that the mere resolve to handle it at all might seem to imply
a lack of the sensitiveness necessary to its understanding; and it is
certain that the more reverent the touch, the more irresistible will
figure its opportunity to the common scepticism which is bondslave
to its five senses. Moreover one cannot, in the reason of things, write
to publish for Aristarchus alone; but the gauntlet of Grub Street must
be run in any bid for truth and sincerity.
On the other hand, to withhold from evidence, in these days of
what one may call a zetetic psychology, anything which may appear
elucidatory, however exquisitely and rarely, of our spiritual
relationships, must be pronounced, I think, a sin against the Holy
Ghost.
All in all, therefore, I decide to give, with every passage to
personal identification safeguarded, the story of a possession, or
visitation, which is signified in the title to my narrative.

Tryphena was the sole orphaned representative of an obscure but

gentle family which had lived for generations in the east of England.
The spirit of the fens, of the long grey marshes, whose shores are
the neutral ground of two elements, slumbered in her eyes. Looking
into them, one seemed to see little beds of tiny green mosses
luminous under water, or stirred by the movement of microscopic life
in their midst. Secrets, one felt, were shadowed in their depths, too
frail and sweet for understanding. The pretty love-fancy of babies
seen in the eyes of maidens, was in hers to be interpreted into the
very cosmic dust of sea-urchins, sparkling like chrysoberyls. Her soul
looked out through them, as if they were the windows of a water-
nursery.
She was always a child among children, in heart and knowledge
most innocent, until Jason came and stood in her field of vision.
Then, spirit of the neutral ground as she was, inclining to earth or
water with the sway of the tides, she came wondering and dripping,
as it were, to land, and took up her abode for final choice among the
daughters of the earth. She knew her woman’s estate, in fact, and
the irresistible attraction of all completed perfections to the light that
burns to destroy them.
Tryphena was not only an orphan, but an heiress. Her
considerable estate was administered by her guardian, Jason’s
father, a widower, who was possessed of this single adored child.
The fruits of parental infatuation had come early to ripen on the
seedling. The boy was self-willed and perverse, the more so as he
was naturally of a hot-hearted disposition. Violence and remorse
would sway him in alternate moods, and be made, each in its turn, a
self-indulgence. He took a delight in crossing his father’s wishes, and
no less in atoning for his gracelessness with moving demonstrations
of affection.
Foremost of the old man’s most cherished projects was, very
naturally, a union between the two young people. He planned,
manœuvred, spoke for it with all his heart of love and eloquence.
And, indeed, it seemed at last as if his hopes were to be crowned.
Jason, returning from a lengthy voyage (for his enterprising spirit had
early decided for the sea, and he was a naval officer), saw, and was
struck amazed before, the transformed vision of his old child-
playfellow. She was an opened flower whom he had left a green bud
—a thing so rare and flawless that it seemed a sacrilege for earthly
passions to converse of her. Familiarity, however, and some sense of
reciprocal attraction, quickly dethroned that eucharist. Tryphena
could blush, could thrill, could solicit, in the sweet ways of innocent
womanhood. She loved him dearly, wholly, it was plain—had found
the realization of all her old formless dreams in this wondrous birth of
a desire for one, in whose new-impassioned eyes she had known
herself reflected hitherto only for the most patronized of small
gossips. And, for her part, fearless as nature, she made no secret of
her love. She was absorbed in, a captive to, Jason from that moment
and for ever.
He responded. What man, however perverse, could have resisted,
on first appeal, the attraction of such beauty, the flower of a radiant
soul? The two were betrothed; the old man’s cup of happiness was
brimmed.
Then came clouds and a cold wind, chilling the garden of
Hesperis. Jason was always one of those who, possessing classic
noses, will cut them off, on easy provocation, to spite their faces. He
was so proudly independent, to himself, that he resented the least
assumption of proprietorship in him on the part of other people—
even of those who had the best claim to his love and submission.
This pride was an obsession. It stultified the real good in him, which
was considerable. Apart from it, he was a good, warm-tempered
fellow, hasty but affectionate. Under its dominion, he would have
broken his own heart on an imaginary grievance.
He found one, it is to be supposed, in the privileges assumed by
love; in its exacting claims upon him; perhaps in its little unreasoning
jealousies. He distorted these into an implied conceit of authority
over him on the part of an heiress who was condescending to his
meaner fortunes. The suggestion was quite base and without
warrant; but pride has no balance. No doubt, moreover, the rather
childish self-depreciations of the old man, his father, in his attitude
towards a match he had so fondly desired, helped to aggravate this
feeling. The upshot was that, when within a few months of the date
which was to make his union with Tryphena eternal, Jason broke
away from a restraint which his pride pictured to him as intolerable,
and went on a yachting expedition with a friend.
Then, at once, and with characteristic violence, came the reaction.
He wrote, impetuously, frenziedly, from a distant port, claiming
himself Tryphena’s, and Tryphena his, for ever and ever and ever.
They were man and wife before God. He had behaved like an
insensate brute, and he was at that moment starting to speed to her
side, to beg her forgiveness and the return of her love.
He had no need to play the suitor afresh. She had never doubted
or questioned their mutual bondage, and would have died a maid for
his sake. Something of sweet exultation only seemed to quicken and
leap in her body, that her faith in her dear love was vindicated.
But the joy came near to upset the reason of the old man, already
tottering to its dotage; and what followed destroyed it utterly.
The yacht, flying home, was lost at sea, and Jason was drowned.
 I once saw Tryphena about this time. She lived with her near
mindless charge, lonely, in an old grey house upon the borders of a
salt mere, and had little but the unearthly cries of seabirds to answer
to the questions of her widowed heart. She worked, sweet in charity,
among the marsh folk, a beautiful unearthly presence; and was
especially to be found where infants and the troubles of child-bearing
women called for her help and sympathy. She was a wife herself,
she would say quaintly; and some day perhaps, by grace of the good
spirits of the sea, would be a mother. None thought to cross her
statement, put with so sweet a sanity; and, indeed, I have often
noticed that the neighbourhood of great waters breeds in souls a
mysticism which is remote from the very understanding of land-
dwellers.
How I saw her was thus:—
I was fishing, on a day of chill calm, in a dinghy off the flat coast.
The stillness of the morning had tempted me some distance from the
village where I was staying. Presently a sense of bad sport and
healthy famine “plumped” in me, so to speak, for luncheon, and I
looked about for a spot picturesque enough to add a zest to
sandwiches, whisky, and tobacco. Close by, a little creek or estuary
ran up into a mere, between which and the sea lay a cluster of low
sand-hills; and thither I pulled. The spot, when I reached it, was
calm, chill desolation manifest—lifeless water and lifeless sand, with
no traffic between them but the dead interchange of salt. Low
sedges, at first, and behind them low woods were mirrored in the
water at a distance, with an interval between me and them of
sheeted glass; and right across this shining pool ran a dim, half-
drowned causeway—the sea-path, it appeared, to and from a lonely
house which I could just distinguish squatting among trees. It was
Tryphena’s home.
Now, paddling dispiritedly, I turned a cold dune, and saw a
mermaid before me. At least, that was my instant impression. The
creature sat coiled on the strand, combing her hair—that was
certain, for I saw the gold-green tresses of it whisked by her action
into rainbow threads. It appeared as certain that her upper half was
flesh and her lower fish; and it was only on my nearer approach that
this latter resolved itself into a pale green skirt, roped, owing to her
posture, about her limbs, and the hem fanned out at her feet into a
tail fin. Thus also her bosom, which had appeared naked, became a
bodice, as near to her flesh in colour and texture as a smock is to a
lady’s-smock, which some call a cuckoo-flower.
It was plain enough now; yet the illusion for the moment had quite
startled me.
As I came near, she paused in her strange business to canvass
me. It was Tryphena herself, as after-inquiry informed me. I have
never seen so lovely a creature. Her eyes, as they regarded me
passing, were something to haunt a dream: so great in tragedy—not
fathomless, but all in motion near their surfaces, it seemed, with
green and rooted sorrows. They were the eyes, I thought, of an
Undine late-humanized, late awakened to the rapturous and troubled
knowledge of the woman’s burden. Her forehead was most fair, and
the glistening thatch divided on it like a golden cloud revealing the
face of a wondering angel.
I passed, and a sand-heap stole my vision foot by foot. The vision
was gone when I returned. I have reason to believe it was
vouchsafed me within a few months of the coming of the ghost-child.
On the morning succeeding the night of the day on which Jason
and Tryphena were to have been married, the girl came down from
her bedroom with an extraordinary expression of still rapture on her
face. After breakfast she took the old man into her confidence. She
was childish still; her manner quite youthfully thrilling; but now there
was a new-born wonder in it that hovered on the pink of shame.
“Father! I have been under the deep waters and found him. He
came to me last night in my dreams—so sobbing, so impassioned—
to assure me that he had never really ceased to love me, though he
had near broken his own heart pretending it. Poor boy! poor ghost!
What could I do but take him to my arms? And all night he lay there,
blest and forgiven, till in the morning he melted away with a sigh that
woke me; and it seemed to me that I came up dripping from the sea.”
“My boy! He has come back!” chuckled the old man. “What have
you done with him, Tryphena?”
“I will hold him tighter the next time,” she said.
But the spirit of Jason visited her dreams no more.