History of the Ancient Near East · Part 6 · The first cities and kingdoms · B2
Hammurabi and the Torah’s Laws
Part 6 of History of the Ancient Near East: around 1750 BCE, King Hammurabi of Babylon set up a black stone carved with nearly three hundred laws. Many centuries later, laws in the book of Exodus said remarkably similar things, about eyes, teeth, debts, slaves and an ox that gores. The language of law: if … shall, the legal passive (shall be paid), be allowed to, be required to and unless, with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight, two law codes, side by side: one carved in Babylon, one written in Philo’s scrolls. We read them both whole, including the parts nobody likes to quote.
I have always said that our laws are the wisest and the mildest. Very well: let us see whether that is true.
Then I shall have learned something, Marcos. That is what scrolls are for.
Hammurabi was king of Babylon for about forty years in the 18th century BCE. He turned a small city into the capital of most of Mesopotamia. Near the end of his reign he set up stone monuments, or stelae, carved with about 280 laws, between a prologue and an epilogue in which he says the gods made him king “so that the strong may not oppress the weak”.
The laws are written as cases: if someone does this, then this shall happen. They cover trade, debts, farming, marriage, inheritance, doctors, builders, injuries and slaves. Punishments depend on rank: a free man, a commoner and a slave are not treated the same. Scribes copied the laws in schools for more than a thousand years. Scholars still debate whether judges actually used them in court; very few court records mention them.
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