Ritual and Regulation: A Legal-Economic Interpretation of Selected Biblical Texts
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Description
This article analyzes three texts of the “J” source in the Hebrew Bible – the creation and original sin of Adman and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the primal fratricide of Cain against Abel, and the binding of Isaac on Mount Moriah – from the standpoint of modern legal-economic methodology. I claim that these three texts contain a brilliantly articulated, remarkably coherent account of the cultic ritual of animal sacrifice that dominated religious practice in the society of ancient Israel. These texts not only provided a legitimating ideology for the sacrifice but also set forth legislation regarding entitlements, obligations, and proper conduct during the performance of the ritual. Interpreted along these lines, the Eden story can be seen to legitimate and explain the institution of animal sacrifice. The Garden is a mythologized retrojection into primordial days of the setting of a cultic shrine in Iron Age Israel. Within this setting, God creates man by a series of steps that are symbolically reversed in the cultic destruction of the sacrificial animal. Adam and Eve steal God’s food and are expelled from the Garden, events that are also reversed in the sacrificial ritual, in which the penitent offers human food to God in order to reestablish a connection with divine power. The story of Cain and Abel contains legislation concerning cultic obligations and entitlements. The text dictates that penitents bring first fruits to the altar, that meat offerings are preferred to grain, and that an offering may be rejected if inadequate. It even regulates details of the ritual itself, such as the proper direction of the penitent’s gaze. Above all, the story prohibits self-help sacrifice – the conduct of sacrificial rituals outside of the cultic shrines and by persons other than the priests who served at the shrine. The story of the binding of Isaac establishes the absolute obligation of members of the Israelite community to comply with the injunction to sacrifice and to do so without cavil. Further, the story legitimates the requirement that items of economic value be brought to the altar for sacrifice and commands penitents to be grateful that even more is not asked of them. Many of these interpretations of classic biblical texts are, to the best of my knowledge, original in the literature. While originality is no vice, in biblical interpretation or elsewhere, it is nevertheless a source of some diffidence. Many great minds have pondered these texts. If these thinkers have failed to note the connection with the sacrificial ritual, perhaps the connection itself is illusory. I have delayed publishing these ideas for a number of years out concern for this possibility. Nevertheless, over time I have become more convinced that the interpretations are conceptually coherent and plausible in terms of what we know of the social conditions in which the texts developed. The apparent originality of the interpretations, I believe, stems from the fact that they are informed by a modern discipline of legal-economic analysis that was not available to prior commentators. Legal-economic analysis provides a methodology for understanding the nature and functioning of social institutions in terms of the behavioral incentive that these institutions create for individuals in the society, including, importantly, individuals whose economic welfare depends directly on the functioning of the institutions themselves. As will be seen, the texts discussed in this article probably arose in a cultic setting and can be understood at least in part as serving the interests of the priests of the cultic sites in which the sacrificial rituals were performed. Thus, with due caution as to the dangers of reading one’s own theoretical model into the material, it appears to me that legal-economic analysis may have something valuable to add to the existing corpus of biblical interpretation, at least with respect to the texts under consideration here. I offer these interpretations at a level of meaning that the narratives can bear, without derogation of other interpretations. Subject to this caveat, I believe that a legal-economic analysis is a potentially valuable contribution to our understanding of these fundamental texts of Western culture. Section I of this article describes some of what is known about cultic sites in premonarchical Israel. Section II looks at the Eden story. Section III examines the Cain-Abel saga, and Section IV analyzes the binding of Isaac. Section V provides the conclusion.
Source Publication
Economics of Ancient Law
Source Editors/Authors
Geoffrey P. Miller
Publication Date
2010
Recommended Citation
Miller, Geoffrey P., "Ritual and Regulation: A Legal-Economic Interpretation of Selected Biblical Texts" (2010). Faculty Chapters. 2017.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/2017
