as land and persons pledged, sold, or enslaved in direct consequence
of debt. They could apply to particular cities or to the population
as a whole; one manner of referring to them is to say that the king
has “established equity for the land.” While most of our informa-
tion, and actual texts, comes from the Old Babylonian kings, it was
a widespread practice, to which there are copious references from
all parts of the region with the exception of Egypt. The text of a
Hittite decree of Tudhaliyah IV, although mainly concerned with
administrative reforms, includes several debt-release provisions. The
Bible records a decree by Zedekiah in the sixth century releasing
debt slaves during the siege of Jerusalem ( Jer. 34:8–10). There are
references in litigation, letters and petitions to the effects of a debt-
release decree, but the most frequent mention is in contracts. A
clause is often inserted in the contract to ward offthe effects of a
decree, by stating that the transaction has taken place after the date
of the decree or affirming that it is outside the purview of the decree.
A petition from the Old Babylonian period reveals that a whole
administrative apparatus was established to execute the provisions of
the decree: peripatetic commissions of judges and high officials exam-
ined private contracts to determine whether they fell within the terms
of the decree or not (AbB 7 153).
Debt-release decrees are the clearest example of legislation as we
would understand it today, issuing directly from a sovereign and
applied by the courts. Their limitation from a modern point of view is
in their duration. Being for the most part retrospective in effect, they
did not do what legislation most typically seeks to achieve, namely
establish norms to control conduct in projected future situations.^131.2.4 Law Codes
The law codes are considered separately here for two reasons: firstly
because they are so important and secondly because it is a matter
of considerable debate among scholars whether they were normative
legislation at all.^14(^13) Two sets of laws in the Bible, Lev. 25:8–16, 23–54 and Deut. 15:1–2, pur-
port to do just this, providing for release of debts, land, and slaves in the future,
every seven and fifty years. The impracticality of these measures is obvious, and
most biblical scholars dismiss them as utopian.
(^14) The scholarship is reviewed in Fitzpatrick-McKinley, Transformation.. .; Renger,
“Noch einmal.. .”; and in the essays in Lévy, ed., Codification...
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