Assnat Bartor

Reading Law as Narrative: A Study in the Casuistic Laws of the Pentateuch Assnat Bartor

Casuistic or case law in the Pentateuch deals with real human affairs; each case law entails a compressed story that can encourage reader engagement with seemingly dry legal text. This book is the first to present an interpretive method integrating biblical law, jurisprudence, and literary theory, reflecting the current law and literature school within legal studies. It identifies the narrative elements that exist in the laws of the Pentateuch, exposes the narrative techniques employed by the authors, and discovers the poetics of biblical law, thus revealing new or previously unconsidered aspects of the relationship between law and narrative in the Bible.