This chapter is concerned with a form of reconciliation attested in Irish and other Indo-European traditions and arguably present in some Anglo-Saxon legislative evidence as well. Its most familiar occurrence, however, is in a text far removed from early medieval Europe:

That it has become customary to refer to Exodus 21:18–19 as an instance of ‘sick-maintenance’ shows how decisively our understanding of this institution has been shaped by studies less interested in the biblical ordinance than its supposed analogues within various branches of Indo-European. The term ‘sick-maintenance’ is a close translation of the Irish folog n-othrusa, and although they conceivably postdate the events of Exodus by millennia, Irish ordinances have long been held to preserve a more archaic form of the institution than is found even in the laws of Moses. According to D. A. Binchy, whose article of 1934 remains the authoritative discussion of the subject,

An ordinance composed in Hittite (1500 BCE) suggests that the customs described above have roots deep in the Indo-European past:

Similar provisions in sources as far-flung as the code of Manu led Calvert Watkins in 1976 to label sick-maintenance ‘an inherited feature of Indo-European customary law.’ Though this conclusion has since found wide acceptance, the views of Binchy and Watkins are not always repeated without reservations in present-day scholarship.