Biblical law, royal decrees and jurisdiction: linguistic and historical perspectives

This introductory essay sets the research topics addressed in this volume, namely the study of the processes of adaptation and rewriting of law in the Hebrew Bible, in the Septuagint and in the broader context of the legal traditions of the ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman milieu. It highlights, moreover, the potential that a contrastive analysis of different corpora (especially the Septuagint and Judeo-Hellenistic literature), provides to this line of research, considering that in this period not only the Jews had to deal with foreign powers and different legal systems, both in Judea and in the diaspora, but also that the question of the type of authority exercised by Jewish law became increasingly central and salient in the discourse of its interpreters. Finally, it examines the specific contribution of each article to the set research questions.