Injustice Made Legal: Deuteronomic Law and the Plight of Widows, Strangers, and Orphans in Ancient Israel (review)

Hebrew Studies 45 (2004) 325 Reviews students (an excellent text book for a course), and scholars as an up-to-date summary on the thorny issues relating to Israel’s origins. Even if Dever does argue his viewpoint at times quite forcefully, he presents other opinions as well, leaving the reader with the option of expanding their own views and forming their own opinions. Aren M. Maeir Bar-Ilan University Ramat Gan, Israel maeira@mail.biu.ac.il INJUSTICE MADE LEGAL: DEUTERONOMIC LAW AND THE PLIGHT OF WIDOWS, STRANGERS, AND ORPHANS IN ANCIENT ISRAEL. By Harold V. Bennett. Pp. xiii + 209. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2002. Cloth, $50.00. Bennett’s main thesis in this book is that the biblical legislation concerning widows, strangers, and orphans (Deut 14:22–29; 16:9–12, 13–15; 24:17–18, 19–22; and 26:12–15) was not designed to protect these groups. Instead, its purpose was to co-opt these social sub-groups into a larger strategy of social transformation, which Bennett positions in the ninth century B.C.E. during the Omride administration. More to the point, Bennett suggests that “widows, strangers, and orphans were part of a strategy to regulate the behavior and to shape the ideas of local peasant farmers regarding the distribution of goods in ancient Israel…positioning intellectual elites to stave off potential uprisings by local peasant farmers in the North during the ninth century B.C.E.” (p. 11). He divides his study into six main sections, beginning with a prolegomenon that discusses the history of scholarship on the topic and his critique and counter-thesis together with methodological considerations (pp. 1–22). Methodologically, Bennett is heavily indebted to critical law theory (pp. 12–21) and social science research in general. Thus, morality or ethics are not necessarily categories based upon religious convictions or paradigms, but rather reflect social and economic realities of particular groups that may be used to reinforce or change their social status. In his discussion of relevant earlier studies dealing with the Deuteronomic Code, he only includes the works of Fensham (1962), von Waldow (1970), Craigie (1976), Mayes (1991), Malchow (1996), Epsztein (1986), and Crüsemann (1996). I missed from his bibliography relevant publications such as J. Gary Millar, Now Choose Life: Theology and Ethics in Deuteronomy (New Studies in Biblical Theology; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1998), particularly pages 99–146; Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., Toward Old Testament Ethics (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, Hebrew Studies 45 (2004) 326 Reviews 1983), pages 158–163; Waldemar Janzen, Old Testament Ethics: A Paradigmatic Approach (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster, 1994); and most recently (and interestingly going in a similar direction) Mark Sneed, “Israelite Concern for the Alien, Orphan, and Widow: Altruism or Ideology?,” ZAW 111.3 (1999): 498–507. More items could be added to this list and most of these authors would not concur with Bennett in his deconstruction of biblical law and ethics, particularly his rather radical isolation of biblical (or deuteronomic) law from theology. Bennett’s second chapter (pp. 23–71) deals with the Hebrew terms, a very brief history of scholarship, the different literary contexts of widow (√almānâ), stranger (gēr), and orphan (yātôm) in the Hebrew Bible and selected extrabiblical texts (including Mesopotamian, Phoenician, and Ugaritic material) and an assessment of the data. Following this, the author discusses (based upon Gottwald’s and Lenski’s works) criteria for identifying social strata and suggests that access to, and command over, economic resources as well as gender and age are among the most important of these criteria. He then goes on to describe historical and economical realities of ninth century B.C.E. Omride Israel (as far as that is possible!) and suggests that the Deuteronomic laws dealing with widows, strangers, and orphans should be ascribed to this period. For me, the “quantum leap” from supposed socio-economic realities to social characteristics of a particular period is difficult to follow and even more difficult to verify, particularly in view of the limited sources of extra-biblical material as well as the disputed nature of the dating issue in biblical studies. Bennett does not look in depth at the material culture...