The Birth of the Lemma: The Restrictive Reinterpretation of the Covenant Code's Manumission Law by the Holiness Code (Leviticus 25:44-46)

Abstract

The jubilee laws of the Holiness Code contains a previously unrecognized restrictive reinterpretation of the Covenant Code’s law requiring manumission of the Hebrew slave (עבד עבר) after six years of service. This case, which involves studied lemmatic citation and reformulation of the earlier law, has important implications for contemporary pentateuchal theory, where the question of the dating of the Holiness Code relative to the other literary sources has been reopened during the last quarter century. The reasons why this case has escaped the attention of scholarship are equally significant. The Septuagint translator failed to recognize the reuse of two technical legal idioms relevant to manumission law and misconstrued the syntax and punctuation of the Hebrew Vorlage of Leviticus 25:44, 46. That ancient misunderstanding has had a lasting impact upon the way this unit has subsequently been understood. Seeing the text in its own light opens up a significant new perspective on the sophistication of the Holiness Code and its literary relation to the other pentateuchal sources. The techniques for legal reinterpretation employed in Leviticus 25 include the use of the Wiederaufnahme and pronominal deixis. These techniques, as well as their larger goal of textual reapplication, reveal an emergent form of the methods that are well attested in the pesher and other more formalized exegetical literature of the later Second Temple period. That they occur here in a text that presents itself as revelatory rather than as exegetical, however, raises a series of fascinating hermeneutical issues.