108 SHALOM E. HOLTZ God the judge, therefore, should act just as human judges might have in order to preserve evidence that will be used in trial. Given the basic relevance of evidence preservation procedures to a discussion of sin, proper understanding of Hos 13,12 and Job 14,17 re- quires pursuing information about how human courts preserved evidence. Some insight comes from the Hebrew Bible itself, as will be seen below. As is often the case, however, the biblical texts provide only minimal de- scriptions, so one must seek analogies beyond the biblical material. By reading the verses together with the Neo-Babylonian trial records, this study follows a recent scholarly trend that identifies these extra-biblical texts as a crucial supplement to what the Hebrew Bible provides. Thus, the Neo-Babylonian records have already proven vital to the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible’s procedural legislation, of Job’s trial, and of prophetic courtroom scenes 3. The cuneiform texts allow students of the Hebrew Bible to see and hear, as it were, how human courts operated in a civilization contemporary to that of ancient Israel. In terms of the spe- cific verses at hand, they allow one to see the forensic practice that un- derlies the imagery of sins tied in a bundle 4. Earlier scholarship on Hos 13,12 and Job 14,17 has used extra-biblical materials both to explicate the meaning of the common image of bound sins as well as to anchor that image in an analogous human practice. W.G.E. Watson has explained the meaning of the image by pointing to the language of Akkadian magical texts. In these texts, verbs that have the basic mean- ing “to untie”, such as pašāru, patāru and rummû, take as their objects the . sins that are to be absolved by the magic 5. By extrapolating from the Akka- 3 On procedural legislation, see B. WELLS, The Law of Testimony in the Pen- tateuchal Codes (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für Altorientalische und Biblische Rechtsgeschichte 4; Wiesbaden 2004). On Job, see F.R. MAGDALENE, On the Scales of Righteousness. Neo-Babylonian Trial Law and the Book of Job (BJS 348; Providence, RI 2007). On prophecy, see S.E. HOLTZ, “A Comparative Note on the Demand for Witnesses in Isaiah 43:9”, JBL 129 (2010) 457-461. 4 Connecting the Neo-Babylonian records to the biblical verses is not meant to imply direct borrowing from the former to the latter. Rather, the connec- tion reflects the origins of both legal systems in a common Near Eastern tra- dition. For a convenient summary on this topic, see B. WELLS, “Introduction: The Idea of a Shared Tradition”, Law from the Tigris to the Tiber. The Writings of Raymond Westbrook (eds. B. WELLS – F.R. MAGDALENE) (Winona Lake, IN 2009) I, xi-xx. Also see WELLS, Law of Testimony, 158-167 and MAGDALENE, Scales of Righteousness, 31, with additional literature cited in n. 16. 5 CAD pašāru 13b3’ (P, 244), patāru 3a (P, 290-291), ramû A 3a (R, 129). . Note, however, that, as an anonymous referee from Biblica has observed, Ak- kadian does not have directly parallel terminology, namely of “binding” or “tying” sins.