Deed and the Doer in the Bible, The
Details and Description
Description
David Daube (1909–1999) was a world renowned biblical law scholar. He was a fellow at All Souls College at Oxford, and emeritus professor of law at Oxford as well as emeritus professor of law at University of California, Berkeley. Throughout his life and continuing today, scholars have hailed his important research on Roman law, biblical law, Hebraic Law, and ethics.
Daube produced dozens of books and published more than 150 articles in scholarly journals. Now, for the first time, his twenty Gifford Lectures, delivered in 1962 and 1964, will be available to the public. His first ten Gifford Lectures have been collected in The Deed and the Doer in the Bible: David Daube's Gifford Lectures, Volume 1.
The overall theme of Daube's Gifford Lectures is law and wisdom in the Bible. His wide-ranging deliberations reveal how complicated and profound the biblical text is. He analyzes deeds described in the Bible and considers, for example, what causes people to act in a certain way, the role of intent, why unintended deeds are sometimes punishable, and how the origin of a deed is determined. His lectures are aimed at professionals in the fields of biblical criticism, biblical history, ethics, and the history of law with respect to its roots in Old Testament traditions. Daube is a recognized master in these fields, and there are substantial applications to modern ethical and legal issues.
Table of Contents
Preface / vii
Abbreviations / xi
1. Causation / 3
2. Intent / 31
3. Error and Ignorance / 53
4. Passions / 92
5. Negligence / 115
6. Intellectual Authorship / 131
7. Attempt / 150
8. Collectives / 174
9. Women / 185
10. After the Deed / 209
11. Supplement to Women: The Language of Seduction in the Old Testament / 241
Notes / 261
Index of Sources / 293
Endorsements and Reviews
Reviews
Hebraic Political Studies—Vol. 4, No. 2
Altogether, Daube’s lectures provide many interesting insights that are relevant to scholars of ancient Judaism, rabbinic literature, the New Testament, and Roman law . . . The publication of these lectures is certainly to be welcomed and completes Carmichael’s compilation of Daube’s works.
Christian Century
David Daube is not well known or much acknowledged in the United States, even among scripture scholars. In Britain, however, he is recognized as a world-class scholar.
Daube requires great patience in reading, but the effort is worth it. It is, moreover, worthwhile to consider ways in which such scholarship might inform and enliven a congregation. Such reflection, under informed tutelage, might permit a congregation to be sober and slow in pondering the rich and complex ethical legacy that exposes the thinness of so much moral passion—left and right—in religious communities. For the most part church folk do not know that this stuff is in the Bible, and when they do, they imagine it to be irrelevant to contemporary life. But such a legacy concerns character formation—the generation of moral agents who can live responsibly and sanely in the midst of enormous moral complexity. Dumbing down is too easy. Daube not only does the hard work, he invites the reader to engage in equally hard work.
The wisdom of the tradition of the commandments is that they stay remarkably contemporary. In a world where financial and political string-pulling remain invisible, where wars can be fought through technology so that there never need be contact with the enemy, and where the rage of interpersonal violence is all around us in the public domain, these ancient issues persist and these ancient texts pertain. This legacy, when taken seriously, precludes the reduction of moral life to tendentious sectarianism. Daube invites a long view, for which faith may provide patience. — Walter Brueggemann, emeritus professor of Old Testament, Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia.
Book Review Digest
Daube was a rare combination of a legal scholar who relentlessly thinks like a lawyer and a Jew who is at home in traditional Jewish textual methods and who gives sustained attention to both the biblical text and the derivative rabbinic tradition. His capacity to find freshness in the texts he reads makes considerable demands upon his readers. Indeed, for those who are accustomed to scanning or reading for a summary, Daube’s patient teasing of texts will seem tedious and excessively attentive to detail. But it is in the details that he finds the important learnings; he is like a lawyer reading the fine print.