Impractical Laws, Part II

Last night, I finished Moshe Weinfeld's Social Justice in Ancient Israel and in the Ancient Near East. Today, I want to follow up on yesterday's post, Impractical Laws?. The relevant pages are 156 and 177.

In my post yesterday, I discussed the scholarly view that the Torah's remission of debts every seven years and the Jubilee were impractical laws and were not practiced in ancient Israel. Weinfeld says this about these laws and the one freeing Hebrew slaves every seventh and fiftieth year:

The background of these laws is ancient and they are rooted in the reality of the Ancient Near East, but they are permeated with idealistic-utopian elements, as one can learn from Leviticus 25:20-42 and Deuteronomy 15:7-11. We find a similar situation in Mesopotamia, where there was no accord between the laws and the legal documents which reflected the actual conditions. In Israel, as in Mesopotamia, the collections of laws were edited by scribes whose object was to present the desirable rather than the actual and hence the gap between the laws and the legal documents, which reflected the actual reality.

On page 177, however, Weinfeld states that these laws were practiced "in tribal society of the pre-monarchical period," but that "during the monarchical period, when the patriarchal-tribal framework continually weakened, it became increasingly difficult to maintain these institutions." Weinfeld makes the same sort of argument that Mark Smith does about polytheism in ancient Israel (see God's Size, Differences, Three Stages, Moving to the City, Dying and Rising Gods, the King as God, Renegade Priest in Eden): changes occurred in Israelite religion as Israelite life shifted from rural to urban. And I still have the same sort of question: If urban areas of the ancient Near East remitted debts and allowed people to return to their lands, why couldn't ancient Israel when she became more urban?

Weinfeld says that Israel under the monarchy still nodded to these institutions. Zedekiah, for example, freed Hebrew slaves and claimed he was following the Torah, even though there's no indication that it was the seventh year when Zedekiah did this; rather, Zedekiah covenanted to free the slaves out of political motives (Jeremiah 34). When Zedekiah re-enslaved them, God through Jeremiah accused him of violating the law about the seventh year. According to Weinfeld, righteous kings in Israel tried to follow the principle of remission of debt, even though they didn't obey the strict letter of the law.