The Bible's Break with Ancient Political Thought to Promote Equality--'It Ain't Necessarily so'

Joshua Berman’s well-written volume, Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought, places the discipline in his service by bringing the world of ancient Israel and the ancient Near East to much greater public availability. The book covers an enormous amount of ground in just under 250 pages. It discusses the political thought of the Hebrew Bible, which he brings into dialogue with the Hittite treaties of the second millennium, the various release edicts and andurāru (debt remission and manumission) proclamations of the first and second millennia, with a selection of the political thought of ancient Greece and Rome, and with the political goals of the founders of the American republic. The goal of the volume is laudable: to situate the Pentateuch in the history of Western political thought more broadly.1 The point is to get the Bible out from under the hegemony of the narrower analytical and historical questions that we in the guild of biblical scholarship normally ask: questions of dating, of the compositional history of the text, and of its relation to other biblical sources.