Trial by Ordeal in the Bible and the ANE, Tikva Frymer-Kensky, and unpublished manuscripts

There are treasures among the unpublished manuscripts of many a deceased scholar. I’m convinced this is the case with Tikva Frymer-Kensky, who was working on a book to be entitled The Judicial Ordeal in the Ancient Near East (see this piece by Seth Sanders here) before she left us prematurely in 2006 (academic obituary here). I have plenty to do, with a vocation to the pastorate, academic research and publishing, and blogging, not to mention teaching my 15 year-old daughter how to drive (what an experience), my six year-old daughter to lose herself in books (by nature and nurture, that’s exactly what she does), and the list goes on. But if I had more time on my hands, I would spend it going through the Nahum Glatzer archives related to Franz Rosenzweig at Vanderbilt (I once got a brief look at it - list of contents here, and was overcome with excitement), in the identification of unpublished materials by Frymer-Kensky that deserve some form of publication, electronic or otherwise, things like that.

Peter Leeson, who teaches at the Booth School of Business of the University of Chicago, 5807 Woodlawn Ave., just wrote a fabulous paper entitled “Ordeals” in which he argues that “medieval judicial ordeals accurately assigned criminals’ guilt and innocence.” They did this by leveraging medieval belief in iudicium Dei; said justice might be expressed through clergy conducted physical tests in which God condemned the guilty and exonerated the innocent.

How did that work, you may ask? How did the priests do it? More below the jump. This stuff is super-cool, and no one who wishes to exegete Numbers 5:11-31, a text which deals with rules to apply in the trial by ordeal of a suspected adulteress, can afford not to research the topic. As all papers should be, Leeson's paper is available for free online, and downloadable as a PDF. Go here.

The bibliography of Leeson’s paper is impressive, but it would have been a lot more impressive if he had taken a stroll to the Oriental Institute a few blocks away, on 1155 East 58th Street. There, he might have made his way to the library, struck up a conversation with the OI’s librarian, or a doctoral student, or a professor, and come up with a magnificent set of readings that would have provided depth to his analysis. Tikva Frymer-Kensky’s name would have come up, and he would have had no trouble putting his hands on a copy of her Yale dissertation on judicial ordeal in the Ancient Near East. A few more blocks away, at the Divinity School on 1025 E. 58th St., he might have been given handy access to Frymer-Kensky’s scholarly legacy on the topic.

What ANE evidence is there for the suggestion that people voluntarily subjected themselves to judicial ordeal to prove their innocence? Leeson deals with the medieval period, and suggests the following:

Medieval citizens’ belief in iudicium Dei created a separating equilibrium. Guilty defendants expected ordeals to convict them. Innocent defendants expected the reverse. Thus only innocent defendants were willing to undergo ordeals. Conditional on observing a defendant’s willingness to do so, the administrating priest knew he was innocent and manipulated the ordeal to find this. (p. 2).

According to Benjamin Foster, Shubshi-meshre-Shakkan, in the great and glorious composition entitled Ludlul bel nemeqi (summary by Alan Lenzi here; he quotes the relevant lines; buy Alan’s indispensable edition here), “goes through a river ordeal to prove himself guiltless” (Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature [3d ed.; Bethesda: CDL Press, 2005] 393). I'm not sure about that. But the topic is extraordinarily interesting. 

The legislation in Numbers 5:11-31 is not about a voluntary act on the part of the accused, but one wonders whether the overarching cultural presumption saw trial by ordeal as a typical means of determining guilt or innocence, rather than an exceptional one. Isn’t trial by ordeal, according to the common theology of the ANE, a paradigmatic method of deity to demonstrate guilt or innocence? Doesn’t this remain the template, overt or covert, of about half the films Hollywood produces?

I’m working on a basic bibliography on trial by ordeal. This is an utterly rich topic once one starts to see the tie-ins between theology, law, and media tropes in which life is seen as a test or trial.  

Comments

[Guest]

See this essay for reading the book of Job with this in mind too (add to your bibliography if you haven't already):

Kline, Meredith G. "Trial by Ordeal." Pages 81-93 in Through Christ's Word: A Festschrift for Dr. Philip E. Hughes. Edited by W. Robert Godfrey and Jesse L Boyd, III. Philipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1985.

[JohnFH]

Thanks, Guest. Whatever you have on this, I would appreciate it if you sent it this way.

[anthony loke]

philip johnston once presented a paper on ordeal in the psalms at the triennial tyndale conference in UK (2003?).

[JohnFH]

Thanks, Anthony. I'll try to find out more about that paper.

[alan lenzi]

Have you found Heimpel's article about the River Ordeal at Hit (RA 90 [1996], 7-18])? Bottero has worked on the issue, but Heimpel's ideas are probably more in line with the ancient reality. I think the River Ordeal in Mesopotamia sounds horrifying. And, if memory serves, apparently accused and accuser both may undergo it to settle a case.

BTW, I'm not sure I am convinced by Foster's idea that S-m-S undergoes the River Ordeal. But it seems reasonable. Given the broken lines at the end of Tablet III, we probably won't be able to clear up the matter until more evidence for Tablet III is found. 50 years after Lambert, there's been no significant additions to Tablet III.

[JohnFH]

Hi Alan,

Thanks for the tips.

You're just scared of water. Of course, so are a lot of people. Did you look at Leeson's article? I know it covers a different time and place, but it's fascinating.

[Nathan MacDonald]

Frymer-Kensky's dissertation is an impressive piece of work and, as you observe, widely available, though never published. The attempt to explain Numbers 5 by Leeson sounds rather similar to Brichto's HUCA attempt at a psychological explanation. Brichto, at least, is rather unconvincing.

On the subject of the medieval ordeal, the book by my St Andrew's colleague Robert Bartlett's Trial by Fire and Water (OUP) is very fine. He traces the theological arguments prior to 1215 showing how Numbers 5 was appealed to by supporters of the ordeal. Exegetically the text was ultimately treated as an exception and trial by ordeal rejected because it was a form of testing God. The seriousness with which Numbers 5 was dealt with in the medieval period seems to be absent in the later witching craze. I did a brief survey - far from exhaustive - but didn't find any evidence of appeal to scripture to justify the ordeal for witching.

As I recall the discussion, Frymer-Kensky's work could support the idea of voluntarily subjecting oneself to the ordeal. Where Leeson's argument might struggle would be the cases when two people submitted to the ordeal. As Frymer-Kensky shows this is the dominant form of the ordeal from the Nuzi period onwards. It does not seem likely that a priest could have assisted the innocent in the river ordeal. (Did they secretly provide flotation aids?)

I wonder (as it seems did Frymer-Kensky) whether Num 5 is best described as an ordeal or as a form of judicial oath? Note especially the comparison of Num 5 and the repeated Amen to Deuteronomy 27.

[JohnFH]

Hi Nathan,

Thanks for chiming in.

LOL flotation aids. For sure it would be ghastly if the chosen place were full of currents. I wouldn't put it past the Assyrians up on the Tigris. I would hope the opposite was the case. If it were, it wouldn't be floating or sinking, just plain drowning. I don't know enough about it to say, and it might be best not to generalize.

I'm inclined to think in terms of three or four concentric circles: the most extensive, a container metaphor in which all of life is perceived as a deity-supervised test/ordeal; the judicial process per se perceived as a trial in all senses (I remember well how that is the case, phenomenologically, in court cases I have witnessed and/or participated in, especially in the trial by inquisition format I remember from Italy); within that concentric circle, the judicial oath as a divine test; overlapping with that lesser encompassed circle, another in which I would put river, hot and cold, and poison ordeals.

Just thinking out loud.

[Alan Lenzi]

I haven't looked at L.'s article yet. But it sounds interesting. As for the River Ordeal in Mesopotamia, if Heimpel is correct about one of the important locations, Hit, the "water" was a mixture of noxious chemicals created by a bubbling up of petroleum. It may have killed people through ingestion or burned their skin via prolonged exposure. If he's right, the River Ordeal was not a swimming test.

[JohnFH]

Alan,

That would have been a huge incentive to settle out of court on the part of the accused. It would put the accuser at a huge advantage. Maybe a very un-level playing field was the goal. It would be important to test such a hypothesis across a variety of legal situations.

Leeson deals with medieval stuff, but it makes for a very interesting comparison.

If Hit is taken as paradigmatic, why would anyone except a Harry Houdini voluntarily undergo such a test? What does that do to our understanding of the Ludlul passage?

[Alan Lenzi]

There's really little to be said about the Ludlul passage until we actually get some context. That line and the lines surrounding it only come from a commentary text that cites Ludlul in order to explain obscure words (there are lots!). However, we are not sure that the commentary has cited adjacent lines. In most cases (where it is citing well-known text), it does not cite adjacent lines. So we're really not sure about the context at all.

By the way, there are a small number of documents that describe people jumping into Id, the Divine River. The reasons vary, I think. It's been a while since I read them.

As for what you said just above, it seems to me that the accused would have as much reason as the accuser to want to avoid the Ordeal. It was nasty for all. Mutually probable destruction might provide a deterrent. Also, if the accused survived, the accuser had everything to lose, literally, besides life. The accused would often receive the accuser's property (again, it memory serves).

[JohnFH]

I knew that both the accuser and the accused are known in some instances to be called on to undergo the ordeal together. But in the stuff I have handy in my study, it is not clear whether that seems to be the norm, based on documentation in hand.

But I'm sure you're right: where that was the case, MAD (mutually assured destruction) forced the conflict to be handled in more diplomatic ways.

[AJM]

I believe that Trial by Ordeal is integrated into Bryan Estelle's book on Jonah:
http://www.wtsbooks.com/product-exec/product_id/4112/nm/Salvation+Through+Judgment+and+Mercy:+The+Gospel+According+to+Jonah

Will you post this bibliography for us when you're done? It certainly is a rich topic. Thanks!

[JohnFH]

I certainly will. I have had many suggestions sent in, online and off, and won't get to it immediately.