INTRODUCTION
The dual sense of guilt, which comprises both absolute moral responsibility and provable act-oriented rendering of culpability may gesture toward both religious and legal world-views The Hebrew Bible has the definition and articulation of human guilt as one of its chief concerns As John Barton writes, ‘‘the Old Testament’s assumption [is] that human beings are
responsible agents, not the playthings of God” (2003, p.
8) Old Testament law may delineate ethical stipulations but only the narratives fully reveal a portrait of the guilty heart However much ambiguity and complexity the Hebrew Bible’s narratives contain regarding moral obligations ‘‘we come away from reading such narratives... with a clear picture of what it is to be a moral agent’’ (Barton 2003, p. 11) These biblical stories not only define guilt, but they suggest that it is accounted for and judged by a higher power: ‘‘the meaning of history is to be found., in the regular succession of sin and punishment” (Eichrodt, 1983, p. 26) Thus interna) moral guilt is viewed as an [end in itself] an almost self-catalyzing act that brings about its own inherent judgment 1In the legal sphere interna] moral culpability is relevant insofar as it represents one aspect of a legally prosecutable crime Legal scholars have discussed extensively how relevant (if at all) moral responsibility is to cri- minality,2 but whether morality is invoked or no] there is a virtual consensus that some kind of internal guilt is a necessary component of legal guilt As Samuel Pillsbury puts it, ‘‘to be guilty of a crime a person must have made a bad choice not just a choice that had harmful results’’ (Pillsbury 1998, p. 80) While the ‘‘harmful results’’ may be established through scientific evidence triers of fact are often instructed that ‘‘the knowledge that a person possesses at any given time may not ordinarily be proved directly because there is no way of directly scrutinizing the workings of the human mind’’ (Pillsbury 1998, p. 92) Nonetheless this knowledge is considered a key ingredient for rendering a guilty verdict in countless criminal cases
I would like to explore how these two concepts of unequivocal internal guilt and qualified legal guilt are associated and indeed merged by the early rabbis religious leaders who shape a notion of guilt that is at once internal and indeterminate I will examine the biblical story of Cain’s killing of his brother Abel - the first homicide in human history according to the Bible - in order to fully illustrate a paradigm of human guilt I will then turn to rabbinic interpretations of this narrative noting how they dismantle this paradigm only to subtly suggest a more nuanced alternative one in which guilt ultimately is either shared or unknown
More on the topic INTRODUCTION:
- Domingo Rafael. Roman Law: An Introduction. Routledge,2018. — 252 p., 2018
- Introduction: Themes and Literature
- Nicholas Barry, Metzger Ernest. An Introduction to Roman Law. Oxford University Press,1976. — 317 p., 1976
- INTRODUCTION
- Introduction
- Introduction
- Introduction
- INTRODUCTION
- Introduction
- Introduction
- Introduction
- INTRODUCTION
- INTRODUCTION
- Introduction
- Introduction
- Introduction