Omitted Text - 10. Social Justice Sanctified, From Inanna and Nanshe to Nemesis
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Query: 10. Social Justice Sanctified, From Inanna and Nanshe to Nemesis
Omitted Text
Quoted text:
Punishments
The first sanction was that of the blood-feud to punish a murderer of one’s family—that is, to remove the community’s murder-pollution. Religion and exile were thus linked (and hence the city of refuge found in biblical times).
Also sanctioned was the obligation to redeem the lands of a family member.
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Include for instance money: Weights and measures (as anticipated briefly in Measures, Rules, and Prices). And hence social oversight and punishment. And this had to be “higher” than the two parties directly involved. The solution was to involve not merely the community and its selected members, but also a specialized sacred estate.
This is of course hardly surprising in view of the fact that temples were civilization’s first corporate institutions, at least in the Bronze Age Near East. But these public corporate entities were only part of the interface between the deities and economic life.
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Here, I focus largely on Mesopotamian religion. The region’s two great contributions to civilization have been called writing and law. (Alphanumeric Notation and the Calendrical-Musical Kosmos has described writing.) The role of law was to reflect cosmic order, or more accurately, to create it on earth to encompass the increasingly complicated economic relations of commercial Mesopotamia, its trade and colonization, its debts and slavery, its trade, its weights and measures, and its public and private sectors.The two paragraphs between the bracketed lines in the Quoted Text above appear to be stubs with incomplete sentences, so we omitted them in the chapter body for now. Can you help us expand them and help transition them into the chapter where this hover-over note indicated?
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