DISSERTAZIONI DI DOTTORATO
2024-2025

OCAÑA GAMIZ Javier

Credit and Debt in the Old Testament in the Light of Ancient Near Eastern Legal Documents

Mod.: Prof. Peter Dubovský, S.J.

 The subject of study in this doctoral dissertation is the legal obligations between private actors in ancient Israel. The dissertation seeks to enhance the understanding of several Biblical passages pertaining to the legal phenomenon of credit and debt, and to attempt a systematic exposition of the law of obligations underlying them. These objectives present various challenges, that are philological, historical-critical, intertextual, and legal-analytical in nature, thus requiring the use of multiple methods. Notably, this includes the methodology of comparative law. In fact, establishing the law of obligations in ancient Israel is a difficult endeavour due to insufficient data and the frequent ambiguity of the relevant Biblical texts. On the other hand, our picture of the law of obligations in other areas of the ancient Near East is rather more complete. Accordingly, a vast number of ancient Near Eastern legal records is examined in order to shed light, with due caution, on the Old Testament legal terminology and substantive law.

 With these considerations in mind, chap. 1 addresses the terminology expressing the state of being bound by a legal obligation. A substantial portion of the chapter is devoted to discussing the Hebrew verb נשׁה I/נשׁא I, generally meaning “to have a debt claim”, and its derivatives. The frequent use of this set of terms to express the existence of a legal obligation, coupled with the near absence of terms referring to obligations as debts, indicates that the ancient Israelite mindset primarily perceived obligations as credit. In other words, obligations were conceptualized chiefly as rights held by the creditor (debt claims) rather than as duties owed by the debtor (debts).

 Building on chap. 1, chaps. 2 and 3 examine securities for obligations in ancient Israel. Regarding real securities, chap. 2 establishes a neat distinction between contractual pledge (expressed by the root ערב I and its cognate nouns) and distress (designated by חבל I and עבט II and their cognates). Notably, distress, i.e. the seizure of assets as pledges from a defaulting debtor after the settlement term has elapsed, is far more present and represents the only real security regulated in the Law. This is particularly striking given that this legal institution, well attested in 2nd millennium B.C. Mesopotamia, is entirely absent from the vast corpus of legal records from the same area dating from the 1st millennium.

 Finally, chap. 3, dealing with suretyship, is largely dedicated to clarifying the dynamics of the verb ערב I, when signifying “to stand surety, guarantee”, and the legal idiom תקע כַּף\יָד , meaning “to strike palm/hand”, and thus denoting the formal gesture performed to enter a suretyship agreement. This analysis enables a consistent interpretation of the Biblical passages concerning suretyship, which leads to some conclusions in terms of substantive law. Chiefly, ancient Israelite guarantee is, as a rule, characterized by the subsidiary liability of the guarantor, who may stand surety for the debtor at any stage of the legal obligation.