Hammurabi’s Code

About 1754 BC, near the end of his long reign, Hammurabi king of Babylon (r. c. 1792–1750) had a basalt stele inscribed with 282 case laws in Akkadian cuneiform and set up in the temple of Marduk. The text opens with a prologue in which the king claims that the gods sent him "to make justice appear in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doer." It then runs through everyday legal questions — property, debt, marriage, divorce, slavery, professional liability of doctors and builders, theft, assault — and ends with curses on any future ruler who alters its provisions. Many rulings use the lex talionis ("an eye for an eye") familiar from Exodus 21. The stele was carried off as plunder to Susa by the Elamites in the 12th century BC, where French archaeologists rediscovered it in 1901; it now stands in the Louvre. Hammurabi’s laws predate the Sinai legislation by roughly three centuries and reflect a stratified, polytheistic legal world. The biblical Law shares many of the same case forms and concerns — because Israel’s God speaks into a real Near-Eastern legal culture — but its theological foundation, its protection of the poor, the alien, and the slave, and its grounding in covenant relationship with the living God are without parallel in the ancient world.