Code of Hammurabi

Carried Off as Loot, and Found at Susa

The stele was set up in Babylon in the eighteenth century BC. Around 1150 BC an Elamite king raided Babylonia and carried it home as plunder, which is why a French expedition under Jacques de Morgan dug it up at Susa, in southwestern Iran, in the winter of 1901-02. It is now in the Louvre. At the top, a relief shows Hammurabi standing before the seated sun god Shamash, god of justice, receiving the rod and ring of authority; below, in tight columns of archaic cuneiform, run the laws.

They are not a code in the modern sense of a comprehensive statute book. They are a collection of rulings in the form "if a man does X, then Y," framed by a prologue in which Hammurabi says the gods called him to make justice appear in the land and to keep the strong from oppressing the weak, and an epilogue heaping curses on any later king who alters them. Whether they were actually applied in court, or functioned mainly as a monument advertising the king's righteousness, is genuinely debated — surviving Babylonian court records rarely cite them.

Alongside the Book of the Covenant

The parallels with Exodus 21-23 are close enough to be worth reading side by side. Both are cast in the same conditional form. Both handle the goring ox, and in remarkably similar terms: an ox that has gored before, whose owner was warned and did nothing, brings the owner into liability, where a first offence does not. Both address injury to a pregnant woman, a slave's status and release, theft and restitution, deposits left with a neighbour, and the negligent builder. And both use the talion formula — an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

That is a shared legal tradition, not a borrowing. Hammurabi's laws are some five centuries older than any date proposed for Moses, and there is no evidence of direct literary dependence; what the resemblance shows is that Israel's law was written in the legal language of its world, in forms any ancient Near Eastern reader would have recognised. It is the same point as Gilgamesh and Enuma Elish, in a different register.

Where They Differ

The differences are where the comparison earns its keep. Hammurabi's penalties are explicitly graded by social class: the same injury costs a different amount depending on whether the victim is a free man, a commoner, or a slave, and an offence against a superior is punished far more severely than the reverse. Israel's law applies one standard and famously insists on it — "you shall have one kind of law, for the foreigner as well as for the native-born." Hammurabi makes a long list of property offences capital, including theft and receiving stolen goods; the Torah does not execute for property crimes, and the balance it strikes between life and property runs consistently the other way.

The framing differs too. Hammurabi presents the laws as his own achievement, and the epilogue is largely about his reputation. The Torah presents its laws as the terms of a covenant between God and a whole people, addressed to that people in the second person — "you shall," not "if a man" — and grounded repeatedly in a shared memory: you were slaves in Egypt, therefore do not do this to the vulnerable among you. The talion formula reads differently inside that frame, as a limit on vengeance rather than a licence for it, which is how Jesus takes it up in the Sermon on the Mount.

Scripture references

• Exodus 21:28-32 — The goring ox — the closest single parallel
• Exodus 21:23-25 — "Eye for eye, tooth for tooth"
• Exodus 22:21-27 — The stranger, the widow, the orphan, and the poor man's cloak
• Leviticus 24:22 — "One kind of law for the foreigner as well as the native-born"
• Matthew 5:38-42 — Jesus on "an eye for an eye"

Sources

• Holding institutionLouvre collections: Code de Hammurabi, roi de Babylone (Sb 8) — Musée du Louvre, Département des Antiquités orientales · Material basalt; H. 225 cm, W. 79 cm, D. 47 cm; found at Susa 1901-1902, mission de MorganSupports: Material, dimensions, findspot, excavator and inventory number
• Primary textThe Code of Hammurabi, translated by Robert Francis Harper (1904) — Robert Francis Harper, University of Chicago Press · Public domain; prologue, 282 laws and epilogue in fullSupports: The text of the prologue, the talion formula and the graded penalties described in section three
• ReferenceBible Odyssey (SBL): The Ten Commandments — Society of Biblical Literature
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Code of Hammurabi

Further reading

• Wikipedia: Code of Hammurabi
• Louvre: the Code of Hammurabi stele
• Bible Odyssey (SBL): The Ten Commandments