[...]... even against individual members of the family itself The following chapters discuss the special rules developed by biblical law to maintain the link between property and family and to bend ownership of property to the goal of ensuring the family' s continuation The purpose of this introduction is to explain the context in which those special rules operated: the nature of biblical law, of the family as... then the family property passes to the outer circle of the family, who by the same token have the right to redeem that property if sold outside the family, to redeem members sold and thus bring them back into the family, and to avenge members killed, and thus bring back ('redeem') their blood into the family And again, the outer limit of the right of inheritance is the mSphh While in theory the mSphh... Assyrian Laws, Tablet B 1 18 Property and the Family in Biblical Law (gwrl); they shall inherit by the names of their ancestral tribes', while in Num 36.3 Zelophehad's brothers complain of their nieces: They will many someone of the (other) tribes of Israel and their inheritance will be deducted from our ancestral inheritance and added to the inheritance of the tribe to which they shall belong, and be... laws mentioned above reach only to the level of the mSphh Even in the case of the daughters of Zelophehad, which purportedly takes the tribe as the context of inheritance, the rule laid down was followed in practice by the daughters marrying their cousins (Num 36.11-12), that is, well within the confines of the mSphh On the other hand, the theoretical legal validity of the tribe in the context of inheritance... agricultural land At the same time, the principal economic unit was the family, which provided the framework for exploitation of the land and for distribution of the income from it Small wonder then, that the biblical law of property was concerned less with the efficient use and transfer of a commercial asset than with protecting the rights of the family to the source of their economic survival, not only against... dwelling but to the family assets under the father's control The further dimension of 'house' as inheritable property is emphasized by the prophet Micah in his protest against the seizure of family estates (2.2): They covet fields and seize them, Houses, and take them away; They oppress a man and his house, A person, and his inheritance Parallelism forms an important rhetorical device in this verse The. .. matter into whose hands it may pass Thus, in a loan, the lender remains the owner of the coins advanced (or rather, since they are fungible things, their value) until reimbursement, and if the borrower uses them to buy anything, it is the lender who becomes the owner of it until the money lent is repaid Likewise, in a sale, the vendor remains owner until receipt of an adequate price Therefore there... 'Machpelah and Hittite Law' , BASOR 129 (1953), pp 15-18 26 Property and the Family in Biblical Law assuming the Bnei Heth to be identifiable with the Hittites, adduces two provisions of the Hittite Laws (HL)1 which account for the course of the negotiations between Abraham and Ephron According to sees 46 and 47 of the Hittite Laws, purchase of part of a feudal tenant's landed property did not subject the. .. long as the family property remains intact; it is the decision to divide the property rather than the father's death which changes the structure of the family, breaking it up into a series of new, independent houses, each with its own head Division of the inheritance is carried out by lot,1 a custom prevalent throughout the ancient Near East In Old Babylonian documents recording the division of an inheritance... the family as a legal unit, and of ownership, and the normal pattern of inheritance of family property 1 Biblical Law The sources of law in the Bible consist only of isolated fragments, but fortunately for our understanding of them, the law that they represent stood in no such isolation Biblical law was part of a much wider legal tradition that extended across the whole of the ancient Near East Although . the family itself. The following chapters discuss the special rules developed by bibli- cal law to maintain the link between property and family . framework of the family and inheritance law within which the special rules discussed in the individual chapters operated. I have also updated the bibliography