Lawgiving in the Ancient Near East

Lawgiving in the Ancient Near East offers a comprehensive study on the enactment of law from the mid-third to mid-first millennium BCE. This study analyzes the world's earliest legal collections and provides new insights into the prevailing regimes and elite justice as reflected in these collections.

Lawgiving in the Ancient Near East offers a comprehensive study on the enactment of law from the mid-third to mid-first millennium BCE. Unlike the biblical tradition, whereby all law emanates from Israel's divine sovereign, ancient Near Eastern kings were the most common agents to assume the moniker of 'lawgiver'. Their unrivaled access to the higher moral order of justice granted them a 'functional divinity' in the eyes of their subjects. Considering key theories about the origin, nature, and function of law, Dylan Johnson analyzes the world's earliest legal collections, not as isolated objects, but within the context of the legal regimes from which they emerge. His study offers new insights into the prevailing regimes and royal and elite justice as reflected in these collections. Questioning the assumption that lawgiving was a coercive attempt to monopolize legal authority, Johnson also develops new explanations that reveal the subjects of the law as social agents who helped construct and maintain legal power.