By Bernard S. Jackson

This booklet explains and illustrates quite a few semiotic concerns within the learn of biblical legislations. starting with a assessment of appropriate literature in linguistics, philosophy, semiotics and psychology, it examines biblical legislations by way of its clients, its medium and its message. It criticizes our use of the thought of 'literal meaning', on the point of either phrases and sentences, who prefer to determine which means built by means of the narrative pictures that the language inspires. those photographs might come from both social event or cultural narratives. Speech functionality is necessary, either within the negotiation of the legislation and the narratives of its conversation. Non-linguistic semiotic phenomena, using different senses and concerning such notions as house and time, additionally have to be taken into consideration. For the early biblical interval, a minimum of, conceptions of legislations established upon smooth versions have to be changed via the proposal of 'wisdom-laws'. among the problems addressed throughout the argument are the constitution of the Decalogue, the function within the legislation of (Greenberg's) 'postulates', 'covenant renewal' and 'talionic punishment'.

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Many of those forms of sense perception that Hallpike finds strongly represented in 'primitive' societies—such as the 33. Elsewhere (at p. 1. Cf. Bruner's 'instrumental conceptualism' (1966: 319-24). 1. 34 Hallpike's work alerts us to the developmental importance of the transition from orality to literacy, and at the same time to the persistence within literacy of earlier patterns of cognition—what Ong has referred to as 'oral residue' (1982: 115). All the more important, within the study of biblical law, that we should seek to distinguish the phenomena that belong to the period of orality from those that are generated by incipient literacy.

He seeks to elucidate those characteristics that seem to be most distinctive and prevalent in the thought processes of such peoples. ' (vii). Central to this view is an argument about the relationship of language to thought, of writing to language, and of the role in primitive societies of symbolic systems other than language. ' (47). It is largely false to assume that 'the cognitive processes employed in problem solving, learning, and in our interaction generally with people and things are linguistic in nature' (67).

But if I say: 'I justify,' I do not thereby perform an act of justifying. Rather, justification may be a perlocutionary effect of what I say by way of justification (Austin 1975: Ch. 9). In the biblical text, however, justification does appear as an illocutionary speech act, given the narrative context. Because this is a report of divine speech, the very act of classification—unsupported by reasoning, but carrying the weight of divine authority—constitutes also its own justification of the legal conclusions.

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Studies in the Semiotics of Biblical Law by Bernard S. Jackson
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