RECOMENDACIONES

The first step from tradition to Scripture was taken in the context of the codification of law. It can tentatively be dated to the end of the seventh century BCE, to the time of King Josiah. This development has gener-ally been interpreted as the adoption of Mesopotamian forms of legal codification dating back to the third millennium BCE.¹³However, this strikes me as incorrect. In Mesopotamia one is dealing not with law codes but rather with law books or legal literature. This distinction is of decisive importance.¹⁴

Legal literature (“law books”) is a genre of the literary transmission of knowledge (Wissensliteratur), which is the great specialty of cuneiform culture. A law book, however, is not a code and has no prescriptive, binding force. It is not “normative” but “informative.” Although it con-veys the necessary knowledge concerning how to make laws, it does not promulgate and enforce them. Laws are made and enforced by the king.

Legal literature may help him and his councilors in this task, but it does not restrict his freedom to legislate. One is dealing here with two funda-mentally different functions of writing. One is that of storage in the sense of an extension and externalization of memory.¹⁵The other is that of publication in the sense of an extension and disembodiment or “excar-nation”¹⁶of voice, of the performative utterance of the law-giving king.

The first function is served by legal literature, the second by royal decrees and edicts whose force rarely outlasts the reign of the king who edited them. The first function may be called “informative,” the second “per-formative.” The latter performs an act of speech in the medium of writ-ing.¹⁷The law code belongs to the realm of performative writing in the sense that it produces the legal order it describes. The law books, con-versely, are purely descriptive and informative. Although they teach jus-tice, they are never referred to as authoritative sources in lawsuits. The actual law is embodied in the reigning king, who must not be restricted in his legislative capacity by a book. Authority resides not in Scripture but in the king; where there is a king, there is no need for a law code. The wis-dom behind this principle of legal kingship, common both to Mesopota-mia and Egypt, seems to be that the legal culture of a society must always accommodate itself to the changing circumstances and contingencies of actual history as well as to the specificity of actual cases and problems.

Laws cannot be eternally valid; they must constantly conform to the his-torical circumstances of a changing world. Eternal validity is merely the

idea of justice that is thought to be embodied in the person of the king.

The king is the interface between two different and potentially conflict-ing principles, namely, law and history. In Hellenistic philosophy, which was already reacting against the rise of codified law, this principle of legislative kingship was termed nomos empsychos, or lex animata (animated law), the law incarnated in the king.¹⁸Conversely, the principle of legal codification must be understood as a step toward disembodying the law from its royal incarnation. If a law code is superfluous where there is a law-giving king, the king becomes superfluous where there is a law code.

This is the subversive point of the Torah in its incipient stage, its first step toward canonization. Although it has no parallels in Egypt and Mesopotamia, it does in archaic, proto-democratic Greece.¹⁹The dis-embodiment of the law has a revolutionary, anti-monarchical tendency.

The Torah replaces the law-giving king in his two aspects, both as the source of the law and as the interface between law and history.

This is the specificity of biblical legal codification. In Greece codified law is neither framed by a normative history nor attributed to God as the source of legislation. It is plausible that a connection exists between these two properties of biblical law, its revealed character and its em-beddedness in a sacred history (the Exodus from Egypt). The eternal va-lidity of the law requires a timeless normativity of its historical circum-stances, that is, the framing by means of a normative past. The master narrative of the Exodus story functions as a recontextualization of the law, which had become decontextualized by its disembodiment. The law-giving king embodies not only the law but also its historical context, its here and now. In the process of disembodiment, the law comes to be re-embodied in the 613 stipulations of the Torah and their “halakhic”

proliferation and interpretation; the historical context is re-embodied in the Exodus story, which gives the law its eternal meaning. The law makes sense only in connection with the framing story. If your son asks you, “Why are we doing this?” you respond, “Because we were slaves in Egypt.” The Torah does not require blind obedience. On the contrary, you are required to remember the story in order to understand the law and to obey it with an understanding heart. The story explains every-thing. It serves as determinative for the meaning of each of the various prescriptions. It replaces the actual context of the law as embodied within the person of the reigning king, with its historical context placed in the normative past. The visual evidence of the king and his various representations and representatives is replaced by a text that requires learning and remembering. Once again memory replaces vision.

In Mesopotamia and Egypt kingship was not the embodiment solely of legal authority but also of history, time, and chronological orienta-tion. The king-list provided the only means of reckoning time.²⁰The counting of years starts anew with every new king. History is equivalent to the actions of the king; and historiography is the annalistic recording of these actions. During times of interregnum, when there is no king, the years are counted in the Egyptian king-lists as “idle” or “empty” be-cause there are no actions that would fill them. The institution of the king-list is therefore replaced in the Bible with a list of generations (tole-dot ). This may be seen as a disembodiment of time and history, formerly embodied in the person of the king and the institution of kingship in the same way that legal codification must be interpreted as the disembodi-ment of the law.

If one looks for a historical situation that may have provided the de-cisive impulse in taking this first step of recording a legal tradition in textual form and of canonizing such a legal text, one can point to the time of the young king Josiah, when, according to legend, a book was found during restoration work in the Temple that was written by Moses himself and contained the Law of the Lord (2 Kings 22). This book is generally believed to be Deuteronomy, which is a codification of re-vealed Law, framed by a recapitulation of the Exodus story. The anti-monarchical tendency of the Deuteronomic school is well known and need not be demonstrated here.²¹

The political theology of the Deuteronomic tradition is subversive in two respects. First, it reduces the position of the Judaean king to that of a keeper of divine law whose legitimacy depends on the strength of his obedience to the law. Second, and even more innovatively, it replaces the traditional dependence of the Judaean king on his Assyrian overlord through the revolutionary idea of an alliance with God himself, not only overriding but even excluding every other alliance.²²This is the third and most decisive disembodiment. The Torah thus replaces the king in three ways: first, as the source of legislation by making God the source of the law and Scripture its “performative” codification; second, as the interface between law and history by embedding the law into a master narrative or a normative past; and third, as the overlord of a political al-liance by forming a treaty with God Himself.

Although in its general outlines the origin of this rather subversive political movement date back to the time of the first prophets in the eighth century, its final breakthrough can best be dated around 622 BCE, when there was both a release of Assyrian pressure and a young

king ruling Judah who was open to reform. The Josian reform, however, had not only legal but also cultic aspects:²³One is dealing here not only with politics but also with political theology. The worship of God as po-litical overlord and lawgiver requires a kind of monopolization and ex-clusivity that must be seen as first steps not only toward canonization but also toward monotheism.