Injustice Made Legal: Deuteronomic Law and the Plight of Widows, Strangers, and Orphans in Ancient Israel.

• Author: Fox, Nili S.
• Position: Book review

Injustice Made Legal: Deuteronomic Law and the Plight of Widows, Strangers, and Orphans in Ancient Israel. By HAROLD V. BENNETT. The Bible in Its World. Grand Rapids, Mich.: WILLIAM B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING CO., 2002. Pp. xiii + 209. $28, [pounds sterling]19.99.

As implied by the title, this monograph focuses on the laws in the Deuteronomic Code that contain provisions applicable to widows, strangers, and orphans (Deut. 14:22-29; 16:9-15; 24:17-22; 26:12-15). What makes this study innovative is the author's methodology, which employs contemporary critical legal theory to contextualize and interpret the Deuteronomic laws. Critical legal theory holds that the aim of perpetrators of laws is to exercise institutional power to control groups in society. Bennett rejects commonly held notions that these laws functioned as remedies for the plight of vulnerable persons in Israelite society. On the contrary, he views the motives of formulators of the laws as exploitive and self-serving.

The book is organized in six chapters with useful summaries at the end of each: (1) Prolegomenon; (2) Texts and Terms: Delineating the Widow, Stranger, and Orphan and Identifying Their Socioeconomic Location; (3) Texts and Adjudication: Examining Innovations in the Widow, Stranger, and Orphan Laws in the Deuteronomic Code; (4) Texts and Interpretation: Deuteronomy and the Oppression of Widows, Strangers, and Orphans in the Biblical Communities; (5) Texts and Contexts: The Societal Matrices of the Widow, Stranger, and Orphan Laws in the Deuteronomic Code; (6) Conclusion.

As part of the investigation, the author carefully reexamines and subsequently modifies definitions of the terms 'almana, ger, and yatom based on biblical and comparative Near Eastern linguistic and contextual evidence. He also recreates, with some measure of success, the Sitz-im-Leben for the distribution of tithes, observance of pilgrimage festivals, and the laws on gleaning as they pertain to the Deuteronomic provisions for widows, strangers, and orphans.

Bennett's main thesis, that the Deuteronomic laws were created to benefit their creators, drives this study. He posits that legal injunctions pertaining to widows, strangers, and orphans arose as a result of political and economic policies of the Omride kings, who placed exorbitant demands on local peasant farmers and herders to support military endeavors and maintain state bureaucrats. This economic policy, in turn, broke any extant social welfare...