The Code of Hammurabi

The event

Near the end of his reign, Hammurabi had his laws inscribed on a stele of polished black diorite nearly eight feet tall, topped with a relief showing the king receiving authority to rule and judge from Shamash, the Babylonian sun god of justice. The stele, rediscovered in 1901 and now displayed in the Louvre, preserves 282 case laws covering property disputes, false accusations, marriage, slavery, and violent crime, along with the famous "eye for eye" principle of proportional punishment.

For Bible readers, the Code of Hammurabi offers an invaluable point of comparison with the Law of Moses, given roughly three centuries later at Sinai. The two share the same general ancient Near Eastern legal genre and even some strikingly similar case-law language — compare Hammurabi's talionic penalties with Exodus 21:23-25 — which simply confirms that Moses wrote real law, in the real legal idiom of his world, for a real nation.

The differences matter even more than the similarities. Hammurabi's code punishes the same crime differently depending on the social class of victim and offender, and grounds its authority in the king's own claim to divine favor. The Law of Moses, by contrast, applies the same standard of justice to rich and poor, citizen and foreigner alike (Leviticus 24:22), and grounds its authority not in a king's claim to divine favor but directly in the character and covenant of the LORD who redeemed Israel from slavery — a strikingly different, and strikingly more just, vision of law for its era.

Dating

The Code was compiled near the end of Hammurabi's reign — commonly cited as c. 1754 BC, with some references giving c. 1755-1750 BC. As with Hammurabi's regnal dates, the absolute year depends entirely on which Mesopotamian chronology (long, middle, or short) is followed; the date here uses the middle chronology and would shift by several decades under the alternatives.

Scripture references

• Exodus 21:23-25
• Leviticus 24:22