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Outside of the Bible, all of the known Near Eastern law collections
were produced in the third to second millennia BCE, in cuneiform on
clay tablets, and in major cities in Mesopotamia and in the Hittite
Empire. None of the major sites in Syria that have yielded
cuneiform tablets has borne even a fragment of a law collection,
even though several have produced ample legal documentation.
Excavations at Nuzi have also turned up numerous legal documents,
but again, no law collection. Even Egypt has not yielded a
collection of laws. As such, the biblical texts that scholars
regularly identify as law collections represent the only "western,"
non-cuneiform expressions of the genre in the ancient Near East,
produced by societies not known for their political clout, and
separated in time from "other" collections by centuries. Making a
Case: The Practical Roots of Biblical Law challenges the long-held
notion that Israelite and Judahite scribes either made use of "old"
law collections or set out to produce law collections in the Near
Eastern sense of the genre. Instead, what we call "biblical law" is
closer in form and function to another, oft-neglected Mesopotamian
genre: legal-pedagogical texts. During their education,
Mesopotamian scribes studied a variety of legal-oriented school
texts, including sample contracts, fictional cases, short sequences
of laws, and legal phrasebooks. When biblical law is viewed in the
context of these legal-pedagogical texts from Mesopotamia, its
practical roots in a set of comparable legal exercises begin to
emerge.
When we encounter a text, whether ancient or modern, we typically
start at the beginning and work our way toward the end. In Tracking
the Master Scribe, Sara J. Milstein demonstrates that for biblical
and Mesopotamian literature, this habit can yield misleading
results. In the ancient Near East, "master scribes"-those who had
the authority to produce and revise literature-regularly modified
their texts in the course of transmission. One of the most
effective techniques for change was to add something to the
front-what Milstein calls "revision through introduction." This
method allowed scribes to preserve their received material while
simultaneously recasting it. As a result, numerous biblical and
Mesopotamian texts manifest multiple and even competing viewpoints.
Due to the primary position of these additions, such reworked texts
are often read solely through the lens of their final
contributions. This is true not only for biblical and cuneiform
texts in their final forms, but also for Mesopotamian texts that
are known from multiple versions: first impressions carry weight.
Rather than "nail down every piece of the puzzle," Tracking the
Master Scribe demonstrates what is to be gained when engaging
questions of textual transmission with attention to how scribes
actually worked. Working from the two earliest corpora that allow
us to track large-scale change, the book provides broad overviews
of evidence available for revision through introduction, as well as
a set of detailed case studies that offer fresh insight into
well-known biblical and Mesopotamian literary texts. The result is
the first comprehensive and comparative profile of this key scribal
method: one that was not only ubiquitous in the ancient Near East
but also epitomizes the attitudes of the master scribes toward the
literature that they produced.
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