The Beginnings of Law

The story of Western law usually begins with Greece and Rome. This volume tells a longer one. The contributors examine the legal traditions of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and ancient Israel as integral to the development of legal thought – and trace how legal ideas circulated across the eastern Mediterranean long before Rome.

In legal history, the ancient Near East – including ancient Israel – has often been relegated to isolated and marginal positions. Scholarship has long been dominated by narratives that privilege Greece and Rome as the foundations of Western law, and the legal traditions of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Israel are frequently treated as historical curiosities rather than as integral contributors to the development of legal thought. Yet recent research across multiple disciplines urges a reappraisal: the ancient Mediterranean, particularly its eastern regions, should be understood as a fluid cultural sphere, where legal, social, and religious ideas circulated widely. This volume emerges from a conference dedicated to exploring various facets of pre-Roman legal history. By examining Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and ancient Israelite legal traditions in comparative and contrastive perspectives, the contributions reveal the role of these cultures in shaping legal concepts and show how these legal ideas left traces beyond their original contexts. These findings show law to be a complex, multidimensional phenomenon, intertwined with ethics, religion, politics, and social practice. Bringing together leading scholars from diverse fields, this volume offers fresh perspectives on ancient law and its societal functions, demonstrating the enduring value of studying legal systems outside classical paradigms. It invites readers to rethink not only the history of law but also the conceptual frameworks through which law itself is understood.

1. Introduction
2. Law and Legalism: Terminological and Conceptual Questions
Dylan Johnson: Lawgiving in Mesopotamia: The Advent of Legalism in Intellectual History - Kristin Kleber und Anna Kirchhefer-Lauber: Ancient Mesopotamian Law in Legal History - Bridging the Gaps. On the Potential of Inter- and Multidisciplinary Legal-Historical Research - Peter Altmann: What Does It Mean for Torah to Be Law in the Hellenistic Period?
3. Towards an Entangled Legal History of the Ancient Near East and the Mediterranean
Sophie Démare-Lafont: Rome and Babylon: An Impossible Legal Dialogue? - Reinhard Achenbach: Law in the Pentateuch and Legal Authority in Yehud during the Achaemenid Period - Sandra Lippert: Egyptian Jurisprudence in the Late and Hellenistic periods (7th-1st centuries BCE). How Legal Theory was Taught and Applied - Joachim Friedrich Quack: Roman-Period Egyptian Hieratic Fragments as Evidence of Pre-Roman Norms and Regulations?
4. Anthropology of Law
Jan Dietrich: Autonomous Agency in Archaic Israel and Greece: When Law Differs from Myth - Bernard Levinson: Why Origins Matter: The Enduring Relevance of Deuteronomy's Constitutional Monarchy
5. Law as Subtext in Non-Legal Contexts
Pamela Barmash: Hullaballoo Over Jeremiah: Shouting Match or Trial? - Lida Panov: Contract Law in Biblical Legal Narratives: Wage Agreements and Purchase Contracts in Gen 30:25-43 and Jer 32:6-15 - Bruce Wells: Legal Conundrums in the Narratives of Genesis
6. Synthesis
Fernanda Pirie: General Reflections on the Contributions

• Edited by Lida Leonie Panov
• Edited by Konrad Schmid