Take your month-of-school.

1.

Welcome back to the Naked Bible Podcast. You might notice I have a bit of a cold this

week, but just bear with me. In the last episode, I turned our discussion of studying the

Bible to the area of literary genre, how knowing what type of literature within the Bible

you're looking at matters for interpretation. We began last time with a discussion of how

to intelligently read biblical narrative that was called close reading. In this episode, I want

to focus on the genre of law or legal literature. This genre will overlap in significant ways to

the earlier series on interpreting the Bible in light of its own context, that of the ancient

Near East for the Old Testament, and the Second Temple period for the New Testament. Now, legal

literature has a long history in the written materials of the ancient Near East. Law codes have

survived from ancient Near Eastern literature that predate the Old Testament by centuries. There's

a good deal of comparative legal material that can inform our reading of the Old Testament when

this genre is present. By a way, I have a brief overview. I'd like to quote selections from the

law, prophets, and writings blog where Rusty Osborne has provided a succinct summary. Two of

Rusty's observations are pertinent to the present discussion. He writes, ancient law codes

functioned as prescriptive or positive law, and were intended to be applied by the sovereign,

the king or the ruler, however, throughout his empire, the law was legally binding and meant to

be observed. He also writes, some have argued that ancient laws were characterized by a theory of

jurisprudence or applied law. As a result, legal codes became compilations of sentences passed

by judges and making the judges the authors of the law codes. In other words, what he's saying

there is that law codes in the ancient Near Eastern sort of like compilations of precedent,

...