The IAS is pleased to cosponsor this talk, presented by the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies, by Professor Konrad Schmid of the University of Zurich.

With its notion of divine laws, the Torah stands out in its ancient Near Eastern legal context, since lawgiving was usually the task of kings, not of gods. From an historical perspective, the Torah's concept of God as lawgiver was not a given from the beginning of its literary and legal history, but developed over time. This talk will investigate the processes that enabled this notion to develop and will contextualize it within ancient Near Eastern and biblical legal history.