Bedouin Culture in the Bible by Clinton Bailey

Author:Clinton Bailey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2018-11-28T16:00:00+00:00

Sentences

The sentences delivered by nomadic judges reflect conditions in the desert. Particularly, a people on the move cannot detain or jail violators, having no mobile installations for that purpose. Second, judges cannot issue sentences of physical punishment without their becoming a party to the conflict and thus subject to revenge. Only clansmen of the victims of murder, assault, or violations of a woman’s honor have the right to respond by inflicting physical harm, let alone blood revenge; such punishments are their right as a first resort and need no sanction from a judge.

Still, realizing that violations that come before a judge must be punished, Bedouin law uses material penalties, mainly in the form of fines, as the chief instrument for deterring violators and for setting proper standards of legal behavior. There are fines for theft, animal damage to crops, and the mistreatment of wives. In the case of theft, for example, the fines are compound, often four times the worth of the item stolen. Compound fines are also imposed to set standards of behavior, such as deterring physical assault on the defenseless (women, children, and cripples) or upholding the sanctity of a person’s natural security (for example, that of a host, a guest, a traveling companion, or someone asleep)—violations of which are ignominiously termed attacks of treachery.64

The Bible, too, contains punishments that suit the nomadic experience. In particular, we find almost no preexilic examples of incarceration in Israel until the ninth century BCE, when the Israelites are quite settled (1 Kings 22:27; 2 Chron. 16:10, 18:26; Jer. 37:15–16). The main form of biblical punishment is the fine. Often these are compound fines, especially those imposed for theft (Exod. 21:37; 22:1, 22:3, 22:6, 22:8; 2 Sam. 12:6). We also find heavy fines inflicted for fornicating with an unattached girl (Exod. 22:15–16; Deut. 22:29), slandering one’s wife (Deut. 22:13–19), and damaging sown crops (Exod. 22:4).

Another category of compounded punishments accounted for in Bedouin law, as noted, is for treacherous actions. While the Bible provides no specific examples of similar punishments, the many references to ignominy that attached to treachery in general (Exod. 21:14), to the violation of the helpless (widows, orphans, and strangers; Exod. 22:22–30), and to the demeaning of persons, such as by binding them (Exod. 21:16) or overpenalizing them (Deut. 25:3), indicate that the punishments for such offenses, though omitted in the verses mentioned, were probably great.

Compound fines are specified for another standard of behavior that arose from the condition of poverty and hunger in the arid desert, namely, mercy for hungry thieves, which Bedouin law and the Bible both mention. In the former, a hungry person coming upon someone else’s date palm is allowed to take with impunity enough dates to sate himself, on condition that he leaves the pits on the ground nearby and his tribal brand scratched alongside them. This is in contrast to a person’s cutting off a cluster of dates, which the law deems to be theft. Indeed, the treachery behind pillaging the fruit of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.