WE HAVE seen that at the same time certain statutes in biblical law were part of the tradition of cuneiform legal traditions, many other aspects of biblical law differed radically from cuneiform law. There is little in the way of shared assumptions between biblical law and cuneiform law. We have determined that cuneiform law collections share a common tradition and that the legal records from Mesopotamia diverge and converge with other legal records and with the law collections. Another way of testing the commonality of the legal traditions of the ancient Near East is to ask whether there were basic ground rules about the treatment of homicide beyond a general assumption that the unlawful killing of a human being is wrong.

One method of answering this question is to analyze the case of a citizen of one territory slain in another. There are a number of ancient Near Eastern documents that address this case. This group of texts allows us to examine the question of whether there was generally accepted international law that governed such occurrences or whether one country attempted to impose its law upon another. Serendipitously, these texts all come from about the same time period, from the mid—fourteenth century b.c.e. to the mid—thirteenth century b.c.e., granting us the opportunity to observe legal procedures that might have operated concurrently.