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Covenant Code Essay

Decent Essays

Methodological Remarks

A legal text is part of the social history of a people. In the reading of Exod 21 and 221 there is a plurality of violence. Particularly, the Covenant Code makes visible several categories of women who suffer some kind of violence: slaves delivered by their master as a wife to another slave (21:3-5), daughters that are sold by their father (21:7-11), mothers that are slapped and cursed in the family (21 :15-17), slaves physically punished (21 :20, 21, 26-27), pregnant women that are injured (21:22-25), daughters seduced and violated (22:16-17), sorceresses that are executed (22:18), and widows that are oppressed and mistreated (22:21-23). In this literary set, the sorceress is the only one described based on her public actions. The other women are visualized based on their sexual function or social class.

Statement of the Problem

The Covenant Code is a legal literature of religious and social character. It is so called because it contains a set of legal procedures, ethical behaviors, social rules, and commandments that are related to the covenant (Exod 19:3-8). All of …show more content…

Hence, this research is not a study of violence against women in isolation, but is intended to demonstrate and characterize this reality as structured in the biblical text, mainly because this particular issue is silenced in studies of the Covenant Code Delimitation

Though violence appears in complex ways in the Covenant Code, this research will study only the violence against women recorded in Exod 21:4, 7-11, 20-21, 26-27. In this chapter, there is a legal literature block that is framed by two large narrative accounts found in Exodus 19 and 24. The frame determines the religious character of any literary set. This is one characteristic that distinguishes the Covenant Code from the other legal texts of the Ancient Near

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