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well have served some official purpose. It is true that they exist in
an eleventh century copy of a fourteenth century original, but it is
not clear that this was a school activity. A further copy was made
in the seventh century for the library of King Assurbanipal.
Similar considerations apply to the Hittite Laws, whose text his-
tory is even more complicated. They exist in many copies, all appar-
ently from the royal archives. Four are Old Hittite, dating to the
sixteenth century; the rest are Middle Hittite or New Hittite (fifteenth
to twelfth centuries). There is thus some revision of language between
the versions. Certain versions also record changes in the law.
The biblical collections are placed in a narrative frame (the jour-
ney of the Israelites to the Promised Land and the revelation on
Mount Sinai) designed to establish their divine origin in the distant
past. Although it is unlikely that they were created together with the
frame narrative, the context in which the individual codes were orig-
inally compiled is not known. The manuscript witness itself cannot
be traced back further than the Dead Sea Scrolls of the first cen-
tury B.C.E.1.1.2.5 Lexical Texts
A form of intellectual activity for cuneiform scribes was the com-
piling of “dictionaries,” lists of Sumerian words and phrases together
with their Akkadian equivalents. These were collected in series, accord-
ing to subject matter—for example, lists of flora, fauna, and types
of stone—which came to form a canon of scribal learning. Among
the canonical series were lists of legal terms and phrases. These are
found in two main sources:- The lexical series ana itti“u (MSL 1), from the library of King
Assurbanipal (seventh century). Dedicated exclusively to legal mate-
rial, it contains many standard clauses that scribes might be expected
to use in drafting legal documents. It also contains small narratives
that provide an explanatory context to the clauses. - Tablets I and II of the canonical series ›AR.ra = ¢ubullu(MSL
5), most copies of which come from Assurbanipal’s library but which
has forerunners dating back to the early second millennium. Their
content overlaps that of ana itti“u.
An earlier variant of the same genre is a number of scribal exer-
cises in Sumerian from the early Old Babylonian period.^8 They con-(^8) See LOx, SLEx, and SHLF in Roth, Law Collections.. ., 40–54.
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