Code of Hammurabi
Five centuries before Sinai, in the city of Babylon, a king set down the law in stone. Hammurabi, sixth king of the First Dynasty of Babylon, inscribed 282 ordinances on a black basalt stele…
Biblical Narrative
Five centuries before Sinai, in the city of Babylon, a king set down the law in stone. Hammurabi, sixth king of the First Dynasty of Babylon, inscribed 282 ordinances on a black basalt stele topped with a relief: the king standing before Shamash, the sun god of justice, who hands him the rod and ring of authority. The image is a theology in stone: law descends from a god to a king to a people.
The biblical reader cannot but recognize the family resemblance. 'If a man knock out the eye of another man, his eye shall be knocked out.' (Hammurabi §196). 'Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.' (Exodus 21:24). 'If a son strike his father, his hands shall be cut off.' (Hammurabi §195). 'He that smiteth his father, or his mother, shall be surely put to death.' (Exodus 21:15). The same lex talionis, the same case-law form, the same casuistic 'if-then' rhythm.
But where Hammurabi distinguishes the gentleman from the commoner from the slave — three tiers of damages and protections — Sinai introduces a flatter idea: 'one law shall be to him that is homeborn, and unto the stranger that sojourneth among you' (Exodus 12:49). And where Hammurabi's prologue calls upon Marduk and Anu, Sinai's preamble names only the One who brought the people out of Egypt.
The Torah was not written in a vacuum. It inherited the legal vocabulary of its world and rotated it. The Sinai covenant is not unique in being a covenant; it is unique in claiming that every member of the community, slave or free, hears it directly from the God who liberated them — not from a king who stands between.
I, Hammurabi, am the king of justice, to whom Shamash committed the law.Code of Hammurabi, Epilogue (xlvii.59-72)
Archaeology · History · Genetics
Hammurabi reigned in Babylon from approximately 1792 to 1750 BCE (middle chronology), and the Code is most plausibly dated to the closing decade of his reign, c. 1754 BCE. The Akkadian text, written in a deliberately archaizing style of cuneiform, comprises a prologue extolling the king's piety, 282 case-laws covering theft, agriculture, marriage, inheritance, slavery, and assault, and an epilogue cursing future kings who would alter or remove the inscription.
Martha Roth's authoritative English edition (Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 1995, 2nd ed. 1997) places the Code within a broader tradition of Mesopotamian law-collections — none of which functioned as 'codes' in the modern statutory sense. They appear to have served as monumental displays of royal justice and as reference compendia for scribes, rather than as direct sources cited by judges in actual cases (real Old Babylonian court records cite custom and individual contracts, not the Code).
The literary parallels with the Covenant Code of Exodus 21-23 are precise enough that direct dependence has been seriously argued. David P. Wright's 'Inventing God's Law' (2009) makes the controversial case that the biblical Covenant Code is a deliberate, structured rewriting of the Code of Hammurabi, possibly produced in the Neo-Assyrian or Neo-Babylonian period when Babylonian culture was once again dominant in the Near East. Most scholars accept literary kinship while disputing direct one-to-one rewriting.
The famous Talionic principle — 'eye for eye' — appears in Hammurabi as literal physical retaliation, but the rabbinic tradition (Bava Kamma 83b-84a) reinterpreted the Sinai version as monetary compensation: the value of the eye, not the eye itself. Whether this rabbinic reading reflects an original Israelite divergence from Babylonian practice or a later moral softening is contested; W. F. Albright argued for the former, Jacob Milgrom and Calum Carmichael for nuanced versions of the latter.
The Code of Hammurabi is a literary monument, a propagandistic display of royal justice, and a scribal reference work — but not a statute book in our sense.Martha T. Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor (1997)