David P. Wright – författare

In this book David Wright draws on three of his influential published essays to create a boldly revisionist account of the origin of the so-called Covenant Collection of the Torah (Exodus 20:23-23:19). He argues that this body of law depends mainly on the Laws of Hammurabi and to some extent on other cuneiform law collections, that it is chiefly the work of a single author, that it is to a significant degree the result of intellectual interaction with the author's sources rather than a collection of Israelite/Judean legal traditions, and that it may have had a politically ideological purpose, somewhat similar to that of the Laws of Hammurabi. Wright presents his argument in three parts. Part One lays out the evidence for the Covenant Collection's dependence of the Laws of Hammurabi and other Akkadian law collections, and argues that the time frame for this dependence was in the Neo-Assyrian period (8th century BCE). Part Two explores the techniques and logic used by the author who composed the Covenant Collection. Part Three discusses the larger issues arising from these conclusions, including the degree to which the work reflects Israelite/Judean legal customs, the purpose and ideological nature of the work, other redactional models of the work, the Collection's connection to the larger Sinai narrative, and other biblical literature that appears to have been influenced by Mesopotamian ideas, perhaps in the Neo-Assyrian period. In addition to advancing our understanding of the Covenant Collection itself, Wright's groundbreaking work offers a new basis for the study of the history of biblical law.

Most scholars believe that the numerous similarities between the Covenant Code (Exodus 20:23-23:19) and Mesopotamian law collections, especially the Laws of Hammurabi, which date to around 1750 BCE, are due to oral tradition that extended from the second to the first millennium. This book offers a fundamentally new understanding of the Covenant Code, arguing that it depends directly and primarily upon the Laws of Hammurabi and that the use of this source text occurred during the Neo-Assyrian period, sometime between 740-640 BCE, when Mesopotamia exerted strong and continuous political and cultural influence over the kingdoms of Israel and Judah and a time when the Laws of Hammurabi were actively copied in Mesopotamia as a literary-canonical text. The study offers significant new evidence demonstrating that a model of literary dependence is the only viable explanation for the work. It further examines the compositional logic used in transforming the source text to produce the Covenant Code, thus providing a commentary to the biblical composition from the new theoretical perspective. This analysis shows that the Covenant Code is primarily a creative academic work rather than a repository of laws practiced by Israelites or Judeans over the course of their history. The Covenant Code, too, is an ideological work, which transformed a paradigmatic and prestigious legal text of Israel's and Judah's imperial overlords into a statement symbolically countering foreign hegemony. The study goes further to study the relationship of the Covenant Code to the narrative of the book of Exodus and explores how this may relate to the development of the Pentateuch as a whole.

This book is a collection of essays on purificaton and atonement in the Hebrew Bible that provides new insights into the discussion of these ideas by looking at the values of sociological and anthropological approaches to the topics. The collection also examines multivalence and polyvalence in ritual and asks to what extent it is possible to speak of the function or meaning of ritual, even within the highly systematic priestly texts.

The first comprehensive history of New College, celebrating the story of theology at Edinburgh over the past 150 years. Raises important questions about the future relationship between church and university.