Divine justice and law in the neo-assyrian period

This article is devoted to the study of the application of the ordeal in the Neo-Assyrian period and to its ideological and religious background. A survey of the various categories of the written documents of that period demonstrates that there are rather few texts dealing with the problem of justice in comparison with other near Eastern historical periods, and that the space given to justice in these texts is always rather scarce. In the royal inscriptions justice is one of the positive qualities normally attributed to the reigning king, who is rhetorically depicted, albeit rather rarely, as a just judge. Only ca. 60 Neo-Assyrian texts deal with juridical matters, and 36 of them are entitled "completed juridical proceedings"; some of them contain a clause imposing a payment to various gods who are thought to sanction the procedure. A very small group attest to a procedure which is to be considered a true ordeal, i.e. an oath taken upon a juridical transaction to be validated by a divine judgment. The procedure (hursān) is studied thoroughly in its very rare practical application, and it is stressed that the gods who act as judges in the hursān are the same who give their decisive answers in the haruspical queries. Accordingly, it is suggested that in the Neo-Assyrian hursān procedure the divine judgment was to be obtained through extispicy and not through a higly risky test as prescribed in the Hammurabi Code.