7.6 Social Justice^47
A special feature of the ancient Near Eastern systems was the inter-
vention of the king or the courts to unravel valid contracts of loan,
pledge, or sale, in order to relieve the social consequences of debt.
Intermittent royal decrees canceled existing debts and sale or pledge
transactions judged to be dependent on them. These were solemn
acts of general application (“the king has decreed justice for the
land”), although exceptions were made, such as for commercial loans
or debts owed to foreigners. We have seen above how sale of fam-
ily members as debt slaves also gave rise to a right of redemption
or of release after a period of service. The right of redemption also
applied to family land sold under pressure of debts.
Interference in contractual rights on this basis was neither uni-
versal nor systematic and where applied, might be hedged with excep-
tions and qualifications. As a principle of justice, however, it was
universally recognized.- C D
8.1 Sources
Most of our knowledge of criminal law derives from the law codes,
since criminal cases, if recorded at all, were seldom preserved in
legal archives. This gives rise to two problems.
Firstly, the evidence is very unevenly distributed between the soci-
eties of the region, even more so than for other branches of the law.
Those sites which have only produced private archives are particu-
larly bereft of information. On the other hand, criminal law pro-
vides the most striking examples of the common intellectual tradition
reflected in the law codes. The same cases recur from code to code,
occasionally in almost identical language, or in recognizable variants.
Standard situations, such as the goring ox and the rape of a betrothed
woman, provide the strongest evidence for a canon of scholarly prob-
lems that was passed on from system to system.
Secondly, since the law codes were theoretical documents, it is
difficult to know how far they represent the law in practice. The(^47) Westbrook, “Social Justice...”
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