Author(s):
Otto, Eckart
[German Version] Following Exod 24:7, the law collection in Exod 20:22–23:13(19) is termed the Book of the Covenant. The oldest legal corpus in the Old Testament, dating to the middle to late monarchial period, although pre-deuteronomic, the Book of the Covenant was edited together from several originally independent, smaller, thematically self-contained collections, such as the collection on capital law (Exod 21:12–17), which deals with capital crimes, violence against one's parents, and kidnapping, the collection dealing with the law of bodily harm (Exod 21:18–32), at the center of which stands the talion “an eye for an eye,” and the collection dealing with restitution for material damages and losses (Exod 21:33–22:14). These collections, some of which may stem from legal scholarship tied to scribal education, were fused together in a first priestly theology redaction in Exod 20:24–22:26* under the solar aspect of the monarchial God YHWH as the merciful helper of the poor in legal matters, in which the ethics of protection for slaves (Exod 21:2–11), as well as for foreigners and the poor (Exod 22:22–26*), constitute a framework prefaced by the altar law (Exod 20:24–26). An additional collection of laws, dating to roughly the same period, in Exod 22:28–23:12 was edited in relation to divine property law (law of privilege) dealing with the separation of firstlings, firstborn, Sabbath and Sabbath year (Exod 22:28f.; 23:10–12) as a framework and utilizing a collection of legal rulings from case law (Exod 23:1–3, 6–8) and capped, ethically, with the commandment concerning solidarity with one's enemies (Exod 23:4f.). Both collections respond to the process of the economic differentiation of poor and wealthy classes in the monarchial period with a priestly ethos of solidarity and are, thus, parallel phenomena to the prophetic social critique. In resistance against the tendencies toward solidarity in the YHWH religion, which can be understood as accommodation to the neo-Assyrian hegemonial power, the genuinely Judaic theology of property prevails in the redaction of the Book of the Covenant, so that the combination of the collections into the Book of the Covenant, Exod 21…