Love and Joy:Law, Language, and Religion in Ancient Israel.

• Author: Eichler, Barry L.

Imbued with Muffs' infectious love and joy for the biblical text - its language, imagery, emotion and message - this volume is an intellectual delight for all who study the Bible in its ancient Near Eastern context. The eight essays represent Muffs' major scholarly contributions to the field written after the publication of his Studies in the Aramaic Legal Papyri from Elephantine (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1969). The introduction, as well as chapters two and six, are newly published, chapter one has been translated by the author from an original Hebrew publication, and the remaining five chapters are previously published essays whose accessibility has been enhanced by the volume's exhaustive indices of subjects, words (Akkadian, Arabic, Aramaic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Ugaritic), text citations, and authorities.

In his foreword to the volume, Thorkild Jacobsen presents a personal and detailed appreciation of each of the essays; his insightful remarks stem from his vantage point as an outsider, as a student of Mesopotamia and its religion. Muffs' introduction is also highly personal as he introspectively traces the evolution of his own scholarly interests and methodologies in the study of law and religion.

The essays themselves are divided into three parts. Part one, "God and Man," begins with Muffs' study of prophetic intercession. In this chapter, "Who Will Stand in the Breach?" one encounters Muffs' major contribution to the study of biblical religion: his emphasis on the principle of the humanity of God. Muffs, in examining the roles of the great prophetic intercessors from Abraham to Ezekiel, clearly brings forth the autonomous personality of the prophet as an independent advocate, acting with total intellectual independence and freedom of conscience, who seeks to affect God. This portrayal underscores the anthropomorphic personality of the biblical God, laden with divine emotion, which Muffs views as complementing rather than as contradicting biblical monotheism. With this new concept of divine personality, the cosmic sphere, according to Muffs, now becomes "personal, moral, communicative, and loving" (p. 45). Muffs reflects upon the biblical views of sin and punishment, dividing them into three stages in the development of ancient Israel's moral sensibility, as well as upon the various modes of controlling divine anger. Chapter two, "As a Cloak Clings to Its Owner," explores the literary imagery describing the relationship between God...