could not be defined, could at least be demarcated by juxtaposing
cases where there was liability for the goring ox with ones where
there was not, or by juxtaposing the penalties for a goring ox with
those for a vicious dog and a collapsing wall. In this way, they pre-
sented the court not with a text to be interpreted but with a font
of wisdom to be accessed. We do not know whether they lay directly
before the judges or influenced them indirectly as part of the expected
knowledge of the educated. In either event, they offered contempo-
rary courts and rulers a middle ground between a vague sense of
justice and mechanical rules.1.3.2 Continuity
It is generally assumed by scholars that the law must have changed
and developed considerably over so long a period of time as is cov-
ered by this History. Such assumptions should not be made without
examining closely the evidence, for fear of falling into the trap of
anachronism. Modern law changes at a frenetic pace, but only in a
desperate attempt to keep up with the pace of technological, eco-
nomic, social, and ideological changes in society as a whole. Moreover,
an immense investment of intellectual resources is dedicated to the
task of reform, through jurists, officials, and institutions.
Different conditions prevailed in the ancient Near East. The ear-
liest legal records come from highly structured Bronze Age urban
societies that had already been in place for hundreds of years. Their
basic features underwent no radical change for the next three mil-
lennia, nor did their social or economic structure, in spite of repeated
invasions and new demographic elements. Technologically, the Persian
empire was little more advanced than the Sumerian city states, save
for the smelting of iron.
The same is true of intellectual development. The invention of
writing may have had some impact on the law, but if so, it predates
our legal records and did not continue to have any noticeably inno-
vative effect. (As we have seen, the written word remained auxiliary
to the spoken in legal practice.) The proto-science that we have dis-
cussed was already well established at the beginning of the third mil-
lennium. One achievement that remained beyond the grasp of a
casuistic-based jurisprudence was radical reform or restatement of
the law. The ability to express the law differently through definition,
categorization, broad statements of principle and similar intellectual
tools is required and, as we have seen, such tools were lacking for22
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