Continuity and Innovation in the Aramaic Legal Tradition.

• Author: Wells, Bruce
• Position: Book review

Continuity and Innovation in the Aramaic Legal Tradition. By ANDREW D. GROSS. Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism, vol. 128. pp. xii 229. map. Leiden: BRILL, 2008. $142.

In this book Gross sets out to determine the degree to which one can speak of a discrete Aramaic legal tradition within the ancient Near East. As part of his investigation, Gross considers to what extent the legal traditions that have been preserved for us in Aramaic texts derive from traditions that were first given expression or documented in other languages, primarily Sumerian and Akkadian (he discusses Egyptian, Greek, and Hebrew texts briefly; he does not discuss Hittite texts). His conclusion is that the influences from other traditions together with developments internal to the use of Aramaic itself formed a distinct and long-standing legal tradition that one can identify in the extant Aramaic legal documents.

Gross focuses his study on three formularies or legal clauses that play important roles in Aramaic deeds of conveyance (mainly sales but including some gifts and bequests). They are 1) the acknowledgement-of-receipt clause, 2) the investiture clause, and 3) the warranty clause. Each formulary represents a legal idea expressed in particular terminology. Gross' analysis places greater emphasis on identifying where the terminology came from and less on the source of the legal ideas themselves. This raises the question of what constitutes a legal tradition: terms or ideas? Gross notes the issue (he says that legal formularies are where language and law converge) but does not address it fully. Gross' method is to analyze the structure and elements of each clause and to determine the degree of consistency that each exhibits both with clauses from other ancient Near Eastern deeds of conveyance (primarily cuneiform records) and with those from other Aramaic texts.

The Aramaic materials that Gross works with come in six corpora: 1) Aramaic texts on clay tablets from Mesopotamia during the Neo-Assyrian period; 2) the fifth-century (B.c.E.) papyri from Egypt (mostly from Elephantine); 3) the fourth-century (s.c.E.) papyri from Wadi ed-Daliyeh (found near Jericho); 4) the first-century (c.E.) Nabatean tomb inscriptions from Mada' in Saleh (or Salih; in north-west Saudi Arabia); 5) the second-century (c.E.) Judean Desert papyri from Wadi Murabba'at and Nabal Hever written in Jewish Aramaic and Nabatean Aramaic (in chapters 2-4 Gross treats the Jewish Aramaic...