12 Peter Haas

moment to Karl von Savigny . Savigny , you will recall, argued that law was not the result of a transhistorical rationality but was rather embedded in the folk. It was to be seen as an expression of the deep genius of a culture, on a plane with other products of the creative imagination such as art and literature."Law,” says Savigny ,"has its existence in the common consciousness of the people." W.M. L. de Wette(1780-1849) carried these convictions over to the study of biblical law. He set out, like Savigny , to show that even the so-called Mosaic law was not really a product of a great classical"Golden Age" but actually reflects a later historical stage in the political development of the Israelite people.” Basing his argument especially on the presumed lateness of Chronicles, and on the concurrent assumption of the relative priority of the books of Samuel and Kings, de Wette claimed to be able to isolate an early stage of Israel 's legal and religious heritage in Samuel-Kings, and a later stage given expression in Chronicles.'” On the basis of this and other data, he concluded that the Israelite religion became progressively more complex and developed over time such that the more sophisticated laws ascribed to Moses must in fact be quite late. Conversely, the older material such as that found in the Pentateuch is largely mythical, and so must go back to such an ancient time that it is impossible to derive any reliable conclusions from it."

The point for our purposes is that for de Wette biblical law is no longer treated as divine revelation but as a human creation firmly embedded in the historical reality of its community, just as legal scholars were now claiming for Roman law. One could see a development in law— whether Roman or biblical— a development that reflects the ongoing religious, spiritual, and intellectual life of the folk from which it emerges. This was not taken to mean, at least among the theology faculty, that all law is equally good. De Wette makes sure to point out that, in his view, in fact the later articulations of Hebrew law fail again and again to reach the spiritual heights of the Mosaic legislation. But not all scholars of biblical law saw only