Prawo o bodącym wole w Biblii i w Starożytnej Mezopotamii

Abstract

Regulations concerning the goring ox can be found in three law collections from the Ancient Near East, the Laws of Eshnunna, Laws of Hammurabi and the Code of Covenant in the Bible (Ex 20:22-23:33). The paragraphs which speak of this issue appear in two groups, those which describe accidental or expected injury or death of a man or another ox. One should mention that the smallest concern in the matter is revealed by the famous Laws of Hammurabi which speak only about the threat which might be faced exclusively by a man. The other two collections contain regulations concerning injures of both men and animals. What is important, the regulations of all the three legal monuments show common features, although it is surprising that the closest similarity in the matter in question can be found between the Laws of Eshnunna and the Code of Covenant. This is so in spite of the fact that the two collections were drafted in areas distant from each other and one came into existence more than a thousand years earlier than the other. Both laws treat the damage done by the dangerous beast in very similar way and the only difference is that that in case of homicide ‘guilty’ animal is the be stoned in the Code of Covenant, which was a religious penalty not found in Mesopotamia. In both collections (LE par. 53, Ex 21:35) the difference does not appear in the case of a damage of another ox by the gorer and so they do not differ at all from each other in this respect. This is quite surprising since there is no proof that the Laws of Eshnunna were known in the first millennium BC and so any direct influence of the Mesopotamian law on Biblical regulations does not seem possible. On the other hand it is thus quite noteworthy that the Code of Covenant shows little similarities with the regulations of the Laws of Hammurabi which were well known in the first millennium which is proved by numerous copies unearthed in modern Babylonia (Iraq). One should notice that in contradiction to the Laws of Eshnunna and the Code of Covenant the Babylonian Laws do not speak of damage of an animal by the dangerous ox. This fact and a philological analysis testify that the Biblical regulations were not drafted under direct inspiration of the Laws of Hammurabi, but they could be composed in the way to show similarities to the Babylonian collection, although we do not find paragraphs which might have been exact pattern for them. This is proved in particular by the fact that the Bible uses notions which are loaned from Akkadian which the Biblical author must have known himself. The conclusion expressed above proves that the transfer of some legal and literary traditions from Mesopotamia to Ancient Israel was not done by anonymous traditions or simple shift of patterns, but it appeared along the will of the authors of biblical text who used important compositions which belonged to other cultural traditions because they wanted to make their own collection more prominent.