Quotes from “Law and Covenant”

By George Mendenhall (1954)

• There was no independent religious tradition in the pagan nations of the ancient world which had enough vitality and support to become the basis for a condemnation of royal policy while the king was still alive.#
  HistoryReligion
• Since the punitive acts of a god tend to be natural calamities such as plague, drought, and famine which strike the entire community, religious sanctions tend at least to reinforce, if not to produce, the concept of corporate responsibility which is a characteristic of the early stages of legal thought in the ancient world.#
  ReligionHistory
• It is not at all likely that the Code of Hammurabi was intended to displace all other legal traditions within the Empire. At least it is quite certain that it did not do so . . . Whatever the purpose of the code, it cannot have been positive law binding all judges in their decisions, but was simply description of a legal tradition resting, it is believed, largely upon earlier collections of laws.#
  HistoryLaw
• Babylonian language lacks any Idiom which could be translated as “against the law”‘ or “in accordance with the law,” i.e. the written codi”ed law.#
  HistoryLaw
• The one factor which held the [Israelite] tribes together at all was the religious bond which imposed upon them common religious obligations, not a common political law enforced by central authority.#
  HistoryLaw
• The law of an “eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth” was originally a measure of protection. It contrasted originally to the Song of Lamech (Gen. 4:23-24), and is simply the classical legal policy that legal responsibility is limited to the extent of injury done.#
  HistoryLaw
• In early Israel, history, cultus, and “law” were inseparable, and the history of Israelite religion is not the history of the gradual emergence of new theological concepts, but of the separation and recombination of these three elements so characteristic of Israelite religion, over against the mythological religions of their pagan neighbors.#
  ReligionHistory
• In the establishment of a[n Israelite] monarchy, the older religious traditions were both a tremendous asset in the feeling of unity they produced, and a tremendous liability in the very independence and autonomy under Yahweh which they fostered.#
  History