But he did not put to death the sons of the murderers, as it is writ-
ten in the book of the law (torah) of Moses, that God ordered: “Fathers
shall not be put to death for sons and sons shall not be put to death
for fathers.. .” (2 Kings 14:6 = 2 Chron. 25:4, citing Deut. 24:16).Somewhere within this transition also lies the whole conceit of the
Bible’s historical narrative, assimilating the paragraphs of several
codes to a single act of legislation, but projecting that act of legis-
lation back into the distant past. It is a conceit mirrored in con-
temporary Greek narratives, attributing the laws of particular cities
to the single legislative act of a heroic ancestor. The change in the
way law was regarded points to a revolution in ideas that takes us
beyond the strict limits of the ancient Near East, being centered
upon the Eastern Mediterranean in the mid-first millennium. For
the purposes of our history, it is the archaic system that we are con-
cerned to describe, a system that needs to be understood on its own
terms, without the overlay of later legal developments.1.3 The Archaic Legal System
1.3.1 Legal Science
The contribution of the “science” of the law codes should not be
underestimated. Statutes, in the form of edicts, orders, and decrees,
would have played only a minor role in the work of a court. As we
have seen, most would have dealt with narrow matters of immedi-
ate interest only; they were not a source of central tenets or basic
principles of the law. Likewise, the role of precedent is likely to have
been limited. Our only certain example, in the trial of Jeremiah
mentioned above, is a case from recent memory adduced as a per-
suasive analogy, not a binding rule. The bulk of the law would have
been customary, and it is here that the law codes, either in the writ-
ten forms that we possess or as a larger oral canon from which the
extant codes were drawn, could serve a vital function. Their achieve-
ment was to constitute an intellectualization of the amorphous mass
that would have been customary law. They concretized experience
in the form of individual but objectivized cases, extended its scope
by analogy and extrapolation (a method still used by jurists today,
especially in the Common Law tradition), and thus created a criti-
cal mass of paradigms which, collected in sequences, could infer, if
they could not express, underlying principles of law and justice. Thus
the parameters of liability for dangerous property, although they 21
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