Neo‐Babylonian Trial Records By Shalom E.Holtz. Writings from the Ancient World 35. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2014. Pp. xvi + 272. Paperback $36.95; hardcover, $51.95.
2016; Wiley; Volume: 42; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/rsr.12311
ISSN1748-0922
Autores Tópico(s)Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies
ResumoThis recent addition to the series presents 50 texts from the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, spanning from the reign of Nebuchadnezzar through Artaxerxes I, with the latest text dated to 425 BCE. (Because the Babylonian legal culture was not much interrupted by the advent of Achaemenid rule, these texts are all considered culturally Neo-Babylonian.) Holtz does an excellent job introducing each text in brief span, unpacking and explaining the terse forms of the documents. To do this, he employs a wider knowledge of the NB legal corpus, which he treats much more expansively in his Neo-Babylonian Court Procedure (2009). But he also emphasizes the role of imagination, which he uses judiciously. The documents are grouped into “preliminaries to trials,” “completed trials,” and “trial dossiers.” The selection of texts is necessarily illustrative rather than exhaustive, and Holtz helpfully situates them within the wider world of NB administration as an “exciting” minority. The volume also includes all of the texts in normalized Akkadian form, which will make the volume more useful for students who are learning the language. The introduction to the volume is brief but helpful (and has been made freely available here: http://www.sbl-site.org/assets/pdfs/pubs/061535P-front.pdf). It usefully challenges certain older ideas about law in Mesopotamia, such as the idea that judges rarely if ever consulted written codes in making their decisions.
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