The Code of Hammurabi and the Law of Moses
The Urantia Book · 96:5.4
Yahweh, God of the Hebrews
Moses endeavored to elevate Yahweh to the dignity of a supreme Deity when he presented him as the "God of truth and without iniquity, just and right in all his ways." He sought to depict Yahweh as a "God of mercy, gracious and longsuffering, abundant in goodness and truth." But the Hebrew people of those days could hardly grasp this advanced concept; they understood Yahweh as one who would "by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children."Read the full UB paper →
Ancient Source · Babylonian
The Code of Hammurabi (~1754 BCE)
If a man has destroyed the eye of another free man, his eye shall be destroyed. If he has broken the bone of a free man, his bone shall be broken. If a man has knocked out the tooth of a man of his own rank, his tooth shall be knocked out. If a builder has built a house and his work is not strong, and the house falls and causes the death of the owner, that builder shall be put to death.
Laws 196, 197, 200, 229, trans. L.W. King / Theophile Meek (ANET pp. 175 to 177)
The basalt stele of Hammurabi was unearthed at Susa in 1901 and is now in the Louvre. It predates the Mosaic legislation by roughly five centuries.
The Parallel
Exodus 21:24 ("eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot") is verbatim Hammurabi. The casuistic structure ("if a man does X, then Y shall be done to him") is identical. Hammurabi 250 to 252 on goring oxen matches Exodus 21:28 to 32 in detail. Both codes treat slaves, debt, marriage, theft, and bodily injury within the same legal grammar. Moses inherited a Mesopotamian legal tradition and worked to inject monotheistic ethics into it.
Why It Matters
The Mosaic law is not a divine dictation handed down without precedent. It is a reform within an existing Mesopotamian legal tradition, adapted by Moses to serve the Yahweh covenant. The UB credits Moses with the genuine spiritual elevation of an inherited code, not with its invention.
Scholarship
- Driver, G.R. and J.C. Miles. The Babylonian Laws (Oxford, 1952 to 1955).
- Roth, Martha T. Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor (Scholars Press, 1995).
- Wright, David P. Inventing God's Law: How the Covenant Code of the Bible Used and Revised the Laws of Hammurabi (Oxford, 2009).
- Pritchard, ANET pp. 163 to 180.