Rethinking the Origins of Deuteronomic »Family Law«

A subset of biblical laws mostly concentrated in Deuteronomy 19 – 25 is marked by stylistic and linguistic parallels. Some propose that these units and others once circulated as a collection of family law, but their parallels to the Mesopotamian legal-pedagogical genre of fictional cases suggest that the biblical texts reflect an analogous group. Only later were these units supplemented and put to new ends, creating the illusion of a law collection in Deuteronomy.