Botschaften deiner Engel und Himmelswesen: In Verbindung mit der unsichtbaren Kraft (German Edition)

in mnchen Ausgabe Nr. 23/2013

---

Books download epub Bayesian Cognitive Modeling: A Practical Course by Michael D. Lee in Danish PDF. Google books plain text download The Lesbian Polyamory Reader: Ipod download book audio The Message of Social Psychology: Free downloads ebook from pdf Psychology: Online books in pdf download Fear and Hope: Download ebook for kindle pc Anatomie d'une peinture: A Practical Course by Michael D. Lee in Danish PDF.

Google books plain text download The Lesbian Polyamory Reader: Ipod download book audio The Message of Social Psychology: Free downloads ebook from pdf Psychology: Online books in pdf download Fear and Hope: Download ebook for kindle pc Anatomie d'une peinture: French ebooks free download pdf The Science of Evil: Ein kurzer Ausblick wird den Beitrag beschliessen. Was ist mit blindem Einsatz gemeint? Deutlich zu erkennen ist, dass mit den vormodernen antiken Verwendungsweisen sogleich und ohne weitere Diskussion auf die griechische Antike fokussiert wird.

Sie hat folgenden Aufbau 5: Archaische und klassische Zeit 3. Platon und Aristoteles 4. Dionysios von Halikarnass, Philon 6. Lukrez und Seneca 7. Kullmann, Antike Vorstufen des modernen Begriffs des Naturgesetzes, in: Hartbecke beginnt mit den Vorsokratikern und diskutiert v. Ebenso erkennbar wird die blinde Zugangsweise in Lexikonartikeln: Der blinde Zugang in bezug auf den Orient ist also vergleichsweise gut in der westlichen Wissenschaftsgeschichtsschreibung verankert.

In gewissen Umrissen lassen sich der Begriff und die Sache Naturgesetz aber doch bei den Vorsokratikern bzw. Eine Begriffsuntersuchung Philosophie der Antike 30 , Stuttgart: Hartbecke, Geschichte des Naturgesetzbegriffs: Historisch-systematische Analysen eines wissenschaftlichen Grundbegriffs, Paderborn: Naturgesetzlichkeit, Naturgesetz, HWP 6 ,. Deutlich allerdings ist auch, dass die Rechtsvorstellung hier dynamisch und nicht deterministisch gedacht ist: Auch Heraklit spricht nicht explizit von Naturgesetzen, aber er erkennt einen das All durchwirkenden Logos B Und all diese Substanzen sc.

Der Begriff ist metaphorisch J. Reclam, , 72f, vgl. Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker hg. Neben den Vorsokratikern und Platon stehen vor allem die Stoiker im Ruf, eine naturgesetzliche Ordnung des Kosmos vertreten zu haben: Die Stoiker verstehen sc. Doch ist mit S. The stoics are often assumed to have grounded their determinism on the idea of an all-encompassing set of laws of nature, similar to some modern theories of determinism, and that such a concept lies behind Philopator s principle.

The assumption of such laws is an essential feature of those theories of determinism that are based on universal regularity. However, as we have seen earlier 4. Futhermore, as I said above, we have no signs that Philopator developed a concept of empirical laws of nature. Stoicorum veterum fragmenta, Berlin: Clarendon Press, , Der Gesetzesbegriff spielt bei ihm keine Rolle, aber er wendet doch immerhin die Wissenschaftsbegrifflichkeit auf die gedanklichen Anstrengungen des Alten Orients an.

Ja, man kann sogar feststellen, dass sich hier eine eigene Subdisziplin der Wissenschaftsgeschichte etablieren konnte, so dass immerhin auch das Buch des Altphilologen K. Auch das umfangreiche Werk des Pariser Wissenschaftshistorikers A. Untersuchungen zur Geschichte einer Fragestellung Philologus Suppl. Leistung und Grenze sumerischer und babylonischer Wissenschaft, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, , Siehe Anm.

Pichot, Die Geburt der Wissenschaft. In einer demokratischen Gesellschaft, die sich ihre Gesetze selber gibt Wissenschaftliches Denken kann nur in demokratischen Gesellschaften entwickelt werden und florieren, und erst Griechenland hat die Demokratie erfunden. Die Entdeckung von Naturgesetzen aber ist an das Aufkommen der Demokratie gekoppelt, was nun einmal in Griechenland der Fall war. Dass aber etwa die kosmologischen Aus Ebd. Das Bewusstsein um die Errungenschaften v. Zilsel, der von bis lebte. Krohn herausgegeben worden, darin findet sich auch eine biobibliographische Skizze zu Zilsel von J.

Nur schon diese Untersuchungsspanne ist bemerkenswert: Krohn; stw , Frankfurt am Main: Sie bestehen aus einigen wenigen Passagen der Bibel und des Corpus Juris. Hi 28,25f Als er [sc. Hi 38,10f Ich habe ihm [sc. Und ich habe gesagt: Bis hierher und nicht weiter! Ps ,9 Du hast eine Grenze gesetzt, die sie [sc. Zilsel findet in diesen Belegen die Vorstellung einer gesetzlichen Bestimmung der Natur seitens von Gott. Der grundlegende Unterschied in der Gesetzesauffassung dieser Stellen liegt dabei allerdings auf der Hand: In den zehn Versen des Alten Testaments [sc.

Deutlich wird dadurch wiederum: Aber ich werde ihr Geschick wenden und mich ihrer erbarmen! Ps , Lobt ihn [sc. Jer 31,35f; 33,25; Ps ,6. Die wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Bedeutung dieser Texte wurde jedoch nicht zureichend erkannt. Man hat hier zwar nicht die Demokratie als Ursache der Vorstellung von einer Eigengesetzlichkeit der Natur vor sich, aber doch die dezentrale, teilautonome rechtliche Verwaltung eines weltumfassenden Grossreiches, dessen Einzelteile rechtlich nach eigenen Massgaben leben.

Doch hat das Alte Testament diese Vorstellung nicht erfunden. Sie ist in mesopotamischen Texten bereits vorgedacht worden. Ein fragmentarisches, aber doch hinreichend deutliches Beispiel findet sich im Text K , den W. Horowitz in seiner Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography bearbeitet hat: From sunrise to sunse[t They multiplied the width by the height. Ee V Er [sc. Am siebten Tag soll die Krone halbvoll sein, am Tag stehe in Konjunktion und konkurriere mit Schamasch. Transkriptionen des Akkadischen nach Ph. Helsinki University Press, Den Speichel, den Tiamat [ Sie setzten ein Sternbild in ihre Mitte und sprachen zu Marduk, ihrem Sohn: Durch dein Word lass das Sternbild verschwinden, mit einem zweiten Befehl lass das Sternbild wiedererscheinen.

Er gab den Befehl, und das Sternbild verschwand, mit einem zweiten Befehl kam das Sternbild wieder ins Sein. Wer den Himmel oder die Natur beobachtet, kann bestimmen, was geschehen wird.

Albani, Kannst du die Sternbilder hervortreten lassen zur rechten Zeit? Mohr Siebeck, , Omen, Omina, Reallexikon der Assyriologie 10 , S. Fink, , 65 77, hier Erst im Gefolge dieser rechtsgeschichtlichen Prozesse konnte sich dann die Vorstellung einer durchgehend naturgesetzlichen Verfasstheit der Welt etablieren. Dieser historischen Differenz in der Rechtsauffassung gilt das abschliessende Kapitel. Aus zwei Beobachtungen heraus erscheint das als wahrscheinlich: Rochberg, The Heavenly Writing. Cambridge University Press, , Die meisten Konflikte wurden ohnehin im Gewohnheitsrecht entschieden, das keiner schriftlichen Fixierung bedurfte.

Franz Steiner, , Hendrickson, , , hier f. Brill, , 18; J.

Assmann, Herrschaft und Heil. Beck, , ; R.

Ugarit-Verlag, , Assmann, Herrschaft, Zum Codex Hammurabi vgl. Narr, , 27 59; Assmann, Herrschaft, E. Otto, Recht und Ethos in der ost- und westmediterranen Antike: Entwurf eines Gesamtbildes, in: Polytheismus und Monotheismus in der Welt der Antike. Dass unsere Fragestellung in der weiteren Wissenschaftsgeschichte relevant geblieben ist, zeigt sich v. Hier scheint also die Physik eine wichtige Rolle als gebender Part gespielt zu haben. Rechtsgeschichte und Naturinterpretation haben nicht nur in der Antike untereinander interagiert.

Francesca Rochberg In the historical discourse about nature, especially about nature s relationship to gods, or God, the use of the conception of law as a way to describe perceived order and regularity in the world of physical phenomena shows nearly continuously from Greek and Greco-Roman antiquity down to the 17 th century. Even today the several related conceptions, the laws of nature, laws of physics, and laws of science perpetuate a metaphor of law to refer to structures purportedly embedded in a world apart from human thought or intervention, and in the view that the aim of science is the discovery of these laws.

It is precisely the power of the metaphor of the laws of nature to connect what is seemingly outside the sphere of human culture with what is human and cultural.

Real and independent as we may think nature and its orderliness are, the very notion of physical phenomena being subject to laws is a profoundly cultural claim, one which imparts a human value to the world external to human society. In so doing, that noble part of civilization, law, is further dignified by being written into the very substance of the world, and, in turn, the world is made intelligible and even predictable by its law-like behavior.

Endemic to the development of Western science are three conceptions in which the metaphoric extension of the idea of law is projected outside of human society and into the realms of nature and the gods, or God. They are divine law, the order imposed upon nature from a transcendent source, the laws of nature, seen as a property of the physical world, and the natural law, an ethical theory grounded in a commitment to a universal human reason.

Scholarship on the origins of the conception of laws of nature or physical law, as well as of the natural law, has traditionally focused on the classical and Greco-Roman periods, with a view to tracing that history down to the fully nomological and secularized laws of nature in early modern Europe. Zilsel, The Genesis of the Concept of Physical Law, Philosophical Review 51 , , places the origins of the idea of nature as fully and independently nomological and as emerging from the view of natural phenomena being law-like as a result of obeying God s commands, in the period of Descartes, Hooke, Boyle and Newton Ruby, however, in The Origins of Scientific Law, Journal of the History of Ideas 47 , pushes the idea further back into the Middle Ages, saying, although prima facie, the explanation of scientific law as arising from the idea of divine legislation is highly plausible, it is for the most part mistaken.

The idea of legislation by God or Nature does account for much of ancient use of law for natural phenomena. However, the modern use emerged through different processes at different. Needham cited it as a key point of difference with science in China.

In Western civilization, Needham wrote, ideas of natural law in the juristic sense and the laws of Nature in the sense of the natural sciences go back to a common root. For without doubt one of the oldest notions of western civilization was that just as earthly imperial lawgivers enacted codes of positive law, to be obeyed by men, so also the celestial and supreme rational creator deity had laid down a series of laws which must be obeyed by minerals, crystals, plants, animals and the stars in their courses.

Though distinct in the domain of their effect, natural law applying to human social life and the laws of nature to physical phenomena, they interconnect historically in Stoicism and its philosophical times in three distinct fields, in only one of which the idea of divine legislation had any part. In all three it appeared before For the argument against this position, see D.

Lehoux, What Did the Romans Know? An Inquiry in to Science and Worldmaking Chicago: University of Chicago Press, , 65 74, where he sets Ruby s modern criteria for a law of nature against those of J. Needham, Science and Civilization in China. History of Scientific Thought New York: Needham, Human Laws and Laws of Nature, Striker says that the idea that the natural law theory was invented by the Stoics would be an exaggeration, but they maintained that the reason which governs the universe can be described as a universal lawgiver it prescribes what ought to be done, and prohibits what must not be done.

Keyes; Loeb Classical Library; London: The context of such ideas about physical order as a function of theocratic order, implied in the terms ius divinum divine law and deus legislator divine lawgiver, has thus far been looked for in earlier Greek materials and in the various relationships assumed between the terms nomos law and physis nature. Asking the question where the Laws of Nature were before there was Nature is meant to dislodge the discussion of the laws of nature from the mostly Greco-Roman period and later Greek and Latin sources that speak explicitly in those terms, and to bring with the framework and history of this concept cuneiform evidence from the second and first millennia B.

Whereas the cuneiform corpus altogether lacks a lexical counterpart to the word or the conception nature, and thus, strictly speaking, belongs prior to and outside the bounds of the Western discourse about nature, that is to say, it is literally before nature, a relation between the divine and the world is nonetheless described in the Akkadian language in legal and juridical terms. What I do set out to show is that a language of law and of judgment in the Babylonian sources bears relation to what is later quite clearly a laws of nature metaphor.

Whether Stoic natural law theory actually emanated from Babylonian cosmology 7 is a question that would be significant for understanding the very roots of an important point of Western jurisprudential and theological thought. Scholfield said, with Stoic natural law the stage is set for ius naturale as it appears in Cicero s de officiis and the Digest and in 6 7 Having a lexical counterpart to nature is obviously not a requirement for the application of the legal metaphor in cosmological thought, as Bodde s study cited above, n.

See further his follow-up, Chinese Laws of Nature: A Reconsideration, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 39 , One could also say that having a lexical counterpart to nature is obviously not a requirement for the interest in, observation of, and theorizing about the phenomena. The presence or absence of the divine in nature is also beside the point, as demonstrated by the history of mediaeval European science. It would probably be better to avoid the use of the modern term cosmology, as there was no study of the universe in its totality in cuneiform texts, nor a study of the universe absent of consideration of the role of the gods in its functioning.

As will certainly be noticed in this paper, sources for the variety of ideas on the universe and its relation to divine agency, including references to parts of the universe inhabited or governed by various deities, consist largely of text types such as prayers, hymns, incantations and ritual texts. Neither do texts focusing on the physical functioning of the celestial bodies, such as the Astrolabes, MUL. APIN, or the late Babylonian observational and predictive mathematical texts, articulate what we would recognize as cosmological ideas. My goal is simply to review the cuneiform sources relevant to the connection between divine law and cosmic order, leaving specialists to draw their own conclusions about its later Western legacy.

To that end I would like to consider first the Mesopotamian trope of the divine judiciary, second its extension to the physical world, and lastly, and in all brevity, to take up the question of the casuistic, or case-law, formulation of Akkadian omen statements as they appear in codified written series.

Botschaften deiner Engel und Himmelswesen

Cuneiform sources reflecting on the ancient Mesopotamian conception of law run the gamut of chronological periods, geographical locations, and genres. None are philosophical in nature, and so do not afford second order articulations on the nature of cuneiform law. Strictly speaking, second order thinking about the contents of texts is precisely what is represented in commentaries, although they are not forthcoming on the nature or principles of law.

The single legal text for which a commentary is preserved is the Codex Hammurabi and this provides alternative words as explanations such as hazannu mayor for rabannu high functionary; the same equivalence is found in a commentary to the omen text Izbu, see CAD s. For the Hammurabi Laws commentary, see W.

Talon; Akkadica Supplementum 6; Leuven: Peeters, , 96 98; and E. Frahm, Babylonian and Assyrian Text Commentaries: Ugarit-Verlag, , From as early as there are texts that bear on the administration of justice, law was attributed to a divine source and was legitimated by a claim to divine foundations. As Assyriologist and legal historian R. Westbrook emphasized, the gods stood behind and above the entire judicial system. Moreover, oaths and the ordeal 14 effectively moved the court of appeal directly to the gods, whose judicial authority was final. The large See C. A History of its Beginnings.

Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, , See the address to the River Euphrates , line 7: You judge the case of mankind, in L. Hinrichs, , ; see also STC, The Writings of Raymond Westbrook ed. Magdalene; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, , The attribution of the power of judicial command and decree to gods is also a part of Sumerian religious discourse, the full exposition of which would take us far afield. To illustrate, see e. After you have extended yourself in the bright, the daylight, after you have established on earth, on the day of the disappearance of the moon, as you have completed the month, you summon?

Enki and Ninki, the great lords, the great princes, the lords who determine fates, await your utterances, father; they the newborn? Hinrichs, , Although the meaning and purpose of Hammurabi s stele in all its complexity is beyond the present scope, 20 the firm rooting of the conception of justice in divine truth or rectitude is of central interest here. On this basis, N. Yoffee defined the notion of law underpinning the code as law in the sense of natural law, i. Speiser had also stated that in the cuneiform tradition, law is an aspect of cosmic order and hence ultimately the gift of the forces of the universe, 22 seeing the term truth kittum as an immutable aspect of the Other gods can extend the rod and ring toward royal figures.

Walther de Gruyter, , Carsten Niebuhr Institute, forthcoming. Stolleis put it that the metaphor is indicative of something that is not, in itself, law, but which underpins law, lending it validity and, as it were, making it right or just. Jurisprudence, Theology, Moral and Natural Philosophy ed. Ashgate, , For a summary and discussion of the debate concerning the legislative status of the cuneiform law codes, see R. Eisenbrauns, , See also ibid. Toland; Political Anthropology 6; New Brunswick: Transaction Books, , , my emphasis. Contemporaneous with Hammurabi s law collection are Old Babylonian petitionary prayers ikribu to Shamash and Adad, gods of judgment and the divinatory inspection of the exta, respectively.

These prayers are a particularly evocative source for the whole complex of ideas about the relation of the divine to the world in its Mesopotamian form. Spoken in preparation for the performance of an extispicy, the inspection of the sheep s liver for the purpose of taking omens, the prayers ask the gods directly for judgment and a true that is, just, or, reliable verdict.

At daybreak, the diviner, having made himself ritually clean by means of cedar, addressed Shamash and Adad, saying: Another Old Babylonian ikribu makes clear that the divination on behalf of the client is a legal case, and the sun god is asked to put truth or a true verdict in the offered lamb: Foster, Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature, Vol. CDL Press, , , where he in his introduction to this text points out that the procedure is a case; inducements are offered for a favorable decision; the outcome is a verdict.

For the edition, see A. On the right of this lamb place a true verdict, and on the left of this lamb place a true verdict. The function of Babylonian divination was therefore to give the diviner a hearing with the gods and to receive truth, as J. Undena, , 30 and See also line 7 for the case of so-andso.

Rochberg, The Heavenly Writing: Cambridge University Press, , with n. Writing, Reasoning and the Gods trans. University of Chicago Press, , , where he says, each oracle [omen] was like a verdict against the interested parties on the basis of the elements of the omen, just as each sentence by a tribunal established the future of the guilty person based upon the dossier submitted to its judgment.

The divinatory future, the predicted future, was what had to be expected at the moment that the gods publicized their decision by means of and in the omen Jeremias, Kleinere Mitteilungen, ZA 43 , For discussion of the two senses of heaven s interior, one located below the horizon and the other in the faraway hence invisible heavens, see W. Horowitz, Astral Tablets in the Hermitage, St. Petersburg, ZA 90 , ; and G. While various gods are named as judges who convene before an extispicy, the sun god presides as supreme judicial authority in the cosmos, both in heaven and in the netherworld.

That the sun god held sway above and below the horizon, over the heavens and into the netherworld, is further reflected in epithets showing him to be lord and ruler in the Great City, in Arali, and over the Anunnaki and the spirits. In the first part, the images of the witches are raised up to the divine judge Shamash before being placed in the brazier for burning. The incantation is as follows: Judge my case, render my verdict!

Burn the warlock and the witch! Steinkeller, Of Stars and Men: Gianto; Biblica et Orientalia 48; Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, , T. Brill, , n.

See also Steinkeller, Of Stars, 26 n. The incantation is from M. Studies in Honor of Ake W. University Museum, , , lines 31, For the original identification and elucidation of this usage of alaktu, see T. Akademie-Verlag, , rev. To reveal the future I stand before you, to give a right judgment I pray with uplifted hands to you. An inscription of Esarhaddon states: The stars of the heavens went according to their positions, taking the right i. There, the Babylonian god Marduk fixes the heavenly bodies in specified areas of the sky, called the paths of Ea, Anu, and Enlil.

Their regularity is coordinated with the marking of time in a manner correlated with a scholarly text known as the Astrolabe, which lays out in detail the arrangement of three stars for each month of a month ideal year, one star for each path. Eisenbrauns, , , Esarhaddon See Leichty, Royal Inscriptions, , Esarhaddon 57 col. No juristic terminology is found in this passage, nor is Marduk referred to as judge. In Tablet VII, Marduk s role as the god who regulates the celestial universe is reiterated with the line: In the Sumerian, the moon s course is next established as an indicator of the month iti as well as of a sign giskim.

The Akkadian version describes the celestial markers of time in both sun and moon, referring to the creation of the day and the renewal of the month. What is of interest in the present context is that these acts of cosmological ordering are, as elsewhere, effect DDD, The earliest exemplar of the Astrolabe comes from a Middle Assyrian copy datable to the time of Tiglath-Pileser I , though W. Horowitz has suggested that its composition is even Old Babylonian. Mohn, , Glassner, Droit et divination: One last example for the legal metaphor for divine cosmic order must be adduced. BAR , who draw the lots, who fashion the designs, who apportion the lots, establish temples and keep the rites pure, who know the ritual purification.

To determine the fates NAM. The fates destinies of life you alone determine. The designs of life you alone fashion. The decisions of life you alone make. You alone are the great gods who direct the decisions of heaven and earth, and of the depths of the seas. East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine 25 ed. Vogel; Special Issue in Honor of Prof.

Psychology

Asien-Orient-Institut, , 77 n. See duplicates in Ebeling ed. First, legitimation of civil law is secured by the transmission to the king of the principles of right and justice from Shamash, chief justice over the whole of the cosmos. Again, this places divine law at the center of the interaction between human beings and the gods, where the human stands humble before that law awaiting judgment.

Creation and arrangement of a celestial order was conceived of as the product of divine decree. One expression of this idea was that Marduk assumed the role of organizer of the cosmos and, in that capacity, fixed the regular positions of the stars, thereby creating the sun and moon as visible indications of time and as celestial omens. Another expression of the same idea was that the cosmic gods Anu, Enlil, and Ea produced the celestial positions and their meaning as signs.

The nature of heavenly appearances as conveying written judgments of the gods, the so-called heavenly writing, is in the background of the prayer literature when the plea is made to reveal, or make known the course of the stars , meaning to deliver a See Enlil in the E-kur, ETCSL: The fate he decides is everlasting. Brill, , From a different point of view, B.

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, , , sees these principles as transcending the divinities themselves, considering them a moral cosmic standard and an innate force of the universe. These various cuneiform references to cosmic order point to a conception of a divine law with universal legitimacy, whether it is the divine judge Shamash and his cosmic jurisdiction, Marduk as the cosmic regulator of heavenly phenomena, Anu, Enlil, and Ea s decision to lay down a cosmic plan, or the association of Shamash, Ea and Marduk with cosmic law.

In view of this evidence, it is difficult to argue against some connection between the Babylonian legal metaphoric language used to express divine cosmic order and the later history of the topoi of the natural law and laws of nature, particularly inasmuch as they too were deeply rooted in the idea of divine law. Cicero stated that one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and all times, and there will be one master and ruler, that is, God, over us all, for he is the author of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge.

For the universe obeys God; seas and land obey the universe, The view that the stars form a decipherable language, written by the gods upon the sky as though on a tablet, is a trope that continues within the history of astrology well into the early modern period. Grafton points out that Giovanni Gioviano Pontano, who published his treatise On Celestial Things in , argued explicitly that the language of the stars conformed in all essential ways to the language of humans. Stars and planets, Pontano argued, formed the letters of a cosmic alphabet. Every planet played the role of a letter with defined qualities.

Every astrologically significant configuration of two or more planets for example, when two of them met, or came into conjunction resembled a word or a phrase, the sense of which the astrologer could determine. See Grafton s Cardano s Cosmos Cambridge: Harvard University Press, , 6. To the sky as a surface upon which gods could write, and the ominous phenomena as a written language, see my Path of the Moon n. A History of Heaven on Earth [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ], Cicero, On the Republic 3. Keyes; Loeb Classical Library ; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ,.

The omnipotence of God, in Armogathe s words, manifests itself by its decrees, which constitute a juridic apparatus of government gubernatio. Milton, the idea of nature being governed by laws had become widely acceptable. Francis Bacon quotes James I as saying that kings ruled by their laws as God did by the laws of nature. Juridical or legal terminology in cuneiform texts has no reference to nature, that is to say, no reference to a domain of physical phenomena qua phe Cicero, Laws Vol. Harvard University Press, , Philo, On Moses 2. Colson; Loeb Classical Library ; Cambridge: Brill, , , argued for Philo being the earliest philosopher to articulate the theory of natural law.

Horsley, however, in his The Law of Nature in Philo and Cicero, Harvard Theological Review 71 , 35 59, proposed an earlier voice on natural law in Cicero, which derived from a Stoic source on universal law and right reason 36 , namely in Antiochus of Ascalon. Armogathe, Deus legislator, italics in the original. The divine-human relation, whether effected by means of divinatory techniques to obtain knowledge directly or indirectly from the gods, or by means of ritual acts of entreaty to gain a response from a divinity, is what was described juridically, not the phenomena themselves i.

However, insofar as phenomena were taken as signs of divine communication, legal terms were extended to them as well, as in Esarhaddon s use of the word kittu truth to denote the regular path of the stars, 57 and in the formulation of omen statements as laws. On the other hand, as philosopher N. Goodman put it, confirmation of a hypothesis by an instance depends rather heavily upon features of the hypothesis other than its syntactical form.

It was of concern to Goodman, for example, that lawlike generalizations were to be distinguished from statements of mere contingent or accidental generality. He said, only a statement that is lawlike regardless of its truth or falsity or its scientific importance is capable of receiving confirmation from an instance of it; accidental statements are not.

Today, what separates law-like physical phenomena from other kinds of regularities is a quality of necessity and universality in all cases. Beebee described the difference between physical laws and non-law-like, or accidental, regularities in the following way: We tend to suppose that laws as opposed to accidental regularities govern what goes on in the universe.

We tend to suppose that laws are rather like pieces of divine legislation; decrees that the universe must obey certain rules rather than mere general description of what in fact happens. See Rochberg, Heavenly Writing n. Goodman, Fact, Fiction and Forecast 4 th ed. Harvard University Press, , Ibid. Beebee, Causes and Laws: Elsevier, , Zilsel, in what is still one of the principal essays on the history of the concept of physical law, said, the concept of physical law, as it is used in modern natural science, does not contain any ideas of command and obedience.

Yet it obviously originates in a juridical metaphor. He stated that the roots of our concept go back to antiquity. They consist in a few passages of the Bible and the Corpus Iuris. A few other ancient ideas are of less importance. As has been noted elsewhere, omen statements were formulated in just the same way as the laws in law collections, i.

Despite discussion and debate over the precise nature of the cuneiform civil law collections and the degree to which they represent legislative codifications or a kind of royal display of righteousness, they can be called codifications by virtue of being systematically arranged rulings. Similarly, omen series are also codifications, in the sense of their being systematic arrangements of rulings in accordance with various criteria or subject matter. As far as the historical relation between omen collections and laws of nature as recognized in later Western tradition, the crux lies in the respective criteria by which the collected statements If P, then Q are taken as law-like.

Conceived or perceived as omen statements, the law-like nature of phenomena is a function of their being correlated with other, mostly social, phenomena, rather than there being a conception of lawhood intrinsic to the phenomena themselves. Kraus, Ein zentrales Problem des altmesopotamischen Rechtes: Was ist der Codex Hammu-rabi? Genava 8 , The case law formulation of omen collections constitutes yet another aspect of the legal metaphor as it was projected onto divination. Just as in Hammurabi s law code or the others where case rulings represent what was decided in the case of P, so the omen statements refer to what was decided by the gods in the event of P, where P is some possible physical phenomenon.

And just as in the use of precedent by judges to make the same decision as in a prior case where the material facts are the same, so the diviner would find the ruling in his case in the same way each time the same ominous phenomenon occurred. There was no need for physical or efficient causality to connect the event with its consequent; indeed, the Babylonian omen statements do not represent causally connected events in that way.

One is hard-pressed to find Nature within such a cosmic picture. Omens are law statements because they were meaningful within a juridical frame of reference extended to the divinities of the cosmos. Though formulated in a law-like way, criteria such as causal necessity, necessary condition, physical possibility, and real connections between matters of fact will not be met by the elements of Babylonian omen statements.

It is on this basis that I might begin to argue that the legal, juridical, and judicial language applied to divinatory practice and signs was in fact metaphoric, though admittedly, this could be a function of my thinking in modern, not ancient, terms. As I said at the outset, my interest in the subject of legal terminology for universal order in ancient Mesopotamia was neither for tracing the transmission of ideas from the Near East to the West nor for determining the origins of the concepts of laws of nature or natural law in Mesopotamia, and certainly not for claiming a direct linear evolution of these ideas from the ancient Near East to Athens or to the Stoics and on to the Christian West.

I only hope I have shown that cuneiform texts have a place in that complex history. Perhaps apparent commonalities are a function of even See F. Although our subject is by no means restricted to the history of science, it has direct relevance for it in that science, in its desire to understand physical phenomena or as we would say, natural phenomena is still susceptible to the use of metaphor, the legal metaphor being particularly attractive and entrenched.

Psychology

By means of it, whether it functioned metaphorically or not, recurring cyclical phenomena were described as being regulated by some outside agency gods, or God , with the transfer of this same notion only much later to one of internal regulation through physical law, altering but not relinquishing the metaphor. The commitment to the view of nature as having laws has had a longstanding claim on our conception and representation of nature, and even though, strictly speaking, ancient Mesopotamian cosmological texts are before nature, their juridical language has a place in the history of that claim.

Lewontin, review of L. Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code, Science , , said, It seems impossible to do science without metaphors. But the use of metaphor carries with it the consequence that we construct our view of the world, and formulate our methods for its analysis, as if the metaphor were the thing itself.

It did not begin as a research project, like the work leading to my books Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography or Cuneiform in Canaan: Cuneiform Sources from the Land of Israel in Ancient Times, 1 but rather as a result of personal experience. Only later did this interest lead me to an academic study of rainbows in cuneiform sources. So too this paper will begin with personal observations, and only later present the cuneiform evidence for rainbows and their significance in ancient Near Eastern texts. This paper in its truest sense began one rainy night outside my house in the Judean Desert in Israel.

It had rained and thundered for what seemed to me like hours, but had finally stopped, so I went out to do some errand or another, and happened to glance at the now clearing sky.

• Musical Torture
• Making The Frat: The Old School
• The Counts Hanukkah Countdown
• Discover Nature in Winter (Discover Nature Series)
• Money Making Business Ideas and Reports for the Entrepreneur