Individual public confession and pious ex voto, or stereotypical and stylized trial document and stigmatizing tablet for the pillory? The expiation texts in Ancient South Arabian

The so-called 'expiation' or 'confession' texts in Ancient South Arabian [ASA] have understandably attracted the attention of scholars in the field of the comparative history of religion. As public, and apparently spontaneous, confessions by individuals of religious offences, mostly in the sphere of ritual purity, the parallels with Judaism and Islam seemed obvious. Nonetheless, scholars were struck by the element of spontaneous public and written confession, even though they accepted all too willingly this interesting 'anomaly' in religious history. Recently discovered texts of the same genre from Raybūn (Hadramawt) are longer than usual, more detailed and definitely refer to misdeeds and offences in the field of social, and possibly economic, life. They refer to offenders and the (human) victims of the offence, possibly to witnesses, and to mediators or judges. There is mention of a trial (which implies plaintiffs and defendants), a judgement and a fine. In fact there are all the elements of a legal process. This suggests that a different, hermeneutical, approach to these texts should be adopted, which treats them as stereotypical judicial documents. Judicial courts may have been attached to the temples, in which the priests acted as judges. The role of the ' published' cases could well have been that of exemplary precedents or a kind of pillory. The expressions used in the stereotypical formulas of these texts would then belong to the vast realm of political and religious euphemisms. To confess' would cover: ' to be denounced, interrogated', 'to be humiliated' would mean ' to be judged and condemned', etc. This paper attempts to show that a totally different understanding of ASA expiation texts can be achieved by applying these premises to some examples.