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Mesopotamian laws and biblical laws

Date

1899BCE

nineteenth or eighteenth century BCEapproximate date

The code of the Babylonian king Hammurabi, long before Israel, has laws like those of the Pentateuch, a sign of an older Near Eastern legal tradition.

Art and culturePolitical history32.5373°N 44.4250°E
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Becoming the People of the Book: each bar is an event of the period; this one is in coral.

Sourced narrative

Each block is a verifiable statement. The number opens the cited page; amber or coral blocks flag tradition or contested interpretation.

4 statements

01The stela and the laws

01

The book's timeline dates the code of the Babylonian king Hammurabi to the 1800s or 1700s BCE, well before any trace of Israel; he wanted to bring justice to his realm. A copy carved on a stela about eight feet tall turned up in 1901 and 1902. It pictures Hammurabi being handed emblems of justice by the god Shamash, and its prologue affirms divine backing for the laws, although the king is the one who inscribes and enforces them.

02

Some of Hammurabi's laws are strikingly like laws of the Five Books of Moses, such as those about a destroyed eye or tooth of a slave. The Babylonian laws distinguish social classes, which biblical law does not, and impose different penalties, but form and content are so similar that, for scholars, biblical law is rooted in the older legal tradition of the Near East.

03

Pieces of a Mesopotamian legal text resembling Hammurabi's were recently unearthed in Canaan itself, at the Bronze Age city of Hazor, a sign that such codes were known in the region and could have influenced the development of biblical law.

Context

So the literature of the Hebrew Bible did not come from a cultural vacuum: its writers used compositional techniques and narrative, legal and other traditions shared with scribes of other Near Eastern cultures. The distinctiveness of biblical literature shows up only against a backdrop of widespread similarity.

§ 01Geography

Where it happened

Gazetteer coordinates (Pleiades for ancient places; Natural Earth and Wikidata for modern ones) over modern physical geography (Natural Earth). Coastlines and the Dead Sea have changed since antiquity.
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§ 02Museum

Objects and images

Each item states whether it is an ancient object, a modern photograph or a later artistic interpretation.

§ 04Network

Connections

§ 05Bibliography

Further reading

  • Michael Coogan, The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

    Introduction to the contents of the Hebrew Bible · recommended in Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 60

§ 06Apparatus

Sources on this page

  1. 01Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 43; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 519inspect
  2. 02Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 43; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 43inspect
  3. 03Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 43inspect
  4. 04Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 43inspect
  • Documented evidenceAttested by contemporary evidence: texts, inscriptions, coins, papyri or archaeology.
  • Scholarly reconstructionHistorians' inference from indirect evidence.
  • Tradition or narrativeA literary, traditional or religious account; significant in itself, but not independently verified.
  • Contested interpretationScholars explicitly disagree; see the positions in the debate.
  • Illustrative reconstructionA hypothesis or visual scheme to guide reading; not a historical claim.