Hammurabi, Laws

The requirement of a “life for a life,” recalling the lex talionis, is provided when a man accidentally kills a pregnant woman in a brawl. While this consequence is generally explained as capital punishment or monetary repayment, its legal formulation in the Covenant Collection is suggestive of live, human, substitution.

A close look at the laws of assault recorded in Exodus’ Covenant Collection demonstrates that the author knew the Laws of Hammurabi and revised them to fit with Israelite legal and ethical conceptions.

Leviticus 18 includes an extensive list of prohibited sexual relations, including incest, but it does not mention relations between a father and daughter. How can this glaring omission be explained?

In the 14th century, R. Nissim of Marseilles suggested that God told Moses only the general command for the Mishkan and the laws in the Torah, and Moses himself wrote the details and attributed them to God as a way of glorifying God. A close look at many passages in Deuteronomy suggests that this was an early conception of Moses’ role in commanding the mitzvot.

Ezekiel challenges the divine (in)justice of intergenerational punishment, a concept that the Talmud notes appears in the Torah itself.

Thoughts on Torah Min HaShamayim

An Investigation of the Ideology Behind Deuteronomy 22:12-29

A Comparative Analysis

The word שור in Hebrew can refer to an ox or a bull, but which animal is the protagonist of the celebrated law of שור נגח, “the goring bovine”? 

Jewish and Christian tradition ascribes authorship of the Pentateuch to Moses in the 13^th century B.C.E. Is this what the Pentateuch itself implies about who wrote it and when?

The anomalous and paradoxical nature of the twelfth curse (Deuteronomy 27:26).

How do the laws of Leviticus 18 compare to the laws and practices of the Babylonians, Hittites, and Egyptians, and to the rest of the Bible?