1

Benjamin Jones

Brown University

15/05/2010

Exodus: The Hammurabi Code

The Relationship Between Mosaic Law and the Mesopotamian Legal Canon

In the history of literary conversation between the annals of Mesopotamian

literature and the Hebrew Bible, the stories referenced in the Book of Genesis are

probably the most immediately recognizable. Mesopotamian flood legends, like the tale

of Atrahasis and the story of Ut-Napishti from the Gilgamesh epic, are reminiscent of the

famous Biblical story of Noah’s ark. However, the conversation between the Bible and

the Mesopotamian canon reaches beyond mythology; the two sources have remarkably

similar approaches to jurisprudence. The Covenant Code, the set of laws given by

Yahweh to Moses, who conveyed them to the Israelites, bears a marked similarity to the

law codes of Mesopotamia, including, in particular, the Code of Hammurabi. Many of

the same moral and legal issues are addressed, and both the presentation of themes and

the narrative style of the two documents bear a strong resemblance to one another. This

similarity begs the question: what was the inspiration for the Covenant Code? Do the

similarities between the Law of Hammurabi and the Covenant Code reflect similarities

between the legal systems of Babylon and Judah, with the two systems and records

developing simultaneously? Or was the law in Exodus appropriated directly from the

laws of Hammurabi, as a philosophical or scholarly exercise? Though it is impossible to

know with any degree of certainty, both explanations may be partly true. The two sets of
 2

writing would seem to have been based on a code and practice of law common in the

region, yet the similarities between the Covenant Code and the Code of Hammurabi are

enough to suggest that the authors of Exodus were aware of, and inspired by, the

Babylonian legal document. However, the two documents are sufficiently different that it

seems more likely that the relationship was one of inspiration, rather than direct

appropriation.

It seems clear that if the Covenant Code was inspired by any one piece of

Mesopotamian legal writing, it was the Code of Hammurabi. The two texts share their

base format: a block of casuistic law abutted on either side by chunks of “apodictic law”

(appearing in both texts in the form of emphatic statements). The central block of

casuistic law in the Covenant Code and the latter half of the Code of Hammurabi present

similar themes in a similar order.1 Indeed, as David Wright points out: “No other known

cuneiform law collection has as many and pervasive similarities with [the Covenant

Code] as does [the Code of Hammuabi]. And no other biblical collection has as many

similarities to [the Laws of Hammurabi] as does [the Covenant Code]”.2

To what extent and in what way the Covenant Code borrowed from the Laws of

Hammurabi is by no means certain. If the intent of the Covenant Code was to lay down

the established and active law of the time, and if that central body of law was held in

common with Mesopotamia during its Old Babylonian period, then both codes would

have been drawing on the same existing corpus of legal thought, explaining the

similarities between the two documents. However, if the Code of Hammurabi was not a

reflection of actively practiced law, but served some other purpose, then the inclusion of

1
David P. Wright, Inventing God’s Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 8.
2
Wright, Inventing God’s Law, 15.
 3

so much of its structure in the Covenant Code casts that document in a very different

light. To better understand the relationship between these two texts, it is first necessary

to examine the purpose of the Code of Hammurabi in its own time, and next to consider

the rationale behind its transmission through the ages.

The Code of Hammurabi does not stand alone in the annals of Mesopotamian

legal writing. It is preceded by the laws of Lipit-Ishtar, Eshnunna, and Ur-nammu, and

followed by the neo-Babylonian Laws, Assyrian Laws, and Hittite Laws. All these law

codes bear stylistic similarities to one another: they are in large part comprised of

casuistic ‘if A then B’ statements, which are grouped into themes, e.g., laws concerning

murder, sexual transgressions, or theft. Often, two texts will share remarkably similar, or

even identical language.3 Contrast this passage from the Code of Ur-namma: “If a man

presents himself as a witness but refuses to take the oath, he shall make compensation of

whatever was the object of the case”4, with this one from the Code of Hammurabi: “If a

man in a case bear false witness, or do not establish the testimony that he has given, if

that case be a case involving life, that man shall be put to death. If a man bears witness

for grain or money, he shall himself bear the penalty imposed in that case”5. Though the

phrasing has developed, the fundamental meaning remains the same. In Mesopotamian

law, a refusal to take the oath was considered either an admission of guilt, or a

recognition of the knowledge that one would have to perjure oneself. Both laws propose

that a witness who subverts the legal process by refusing to testify or testifying falsely

3
Raymond Westbrook, “Biblical and Cuneiform Law Codes,” Revue Biblique 92 (1985): 248.
4
Martha T. Roth, Harry A. Hoffner, and Piotr Michalowski, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia
Minor (Atlanta: Scholar’s Press, 1997), 20.
5
Robert F. Harper, ed., The Code of Hammurabi King of Babylon about 2250 B.C. (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1904),
http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1276&chapter=79599&layou
t=html&Itemid=27 (Accessed May 10, 2010)
 4

should be punished in the same manner as the accused. The textual tradition is therefore

remarkably unchanging, considering the Code or Ur-nammu was written some 250 years

before the laws of Hammurabi. Comparable correspondences can be found among the

rest of the ancient West Asian law codes. The similarities among the various legal

documents would seem to suggest that they, including the Covenent Code, might have

drawn on a fairly stable central corpus of practical law.

However, as Louis Hartman points out, “In various points…these laws differ

somewhat from the actual practices as known from the legal and business documents of

this time”.6 Indeed, the Code of Hammurabi is never cited as an authority in any legal

document. If the various law codes were inspired partly by one another, and partly by the

corpus of established law, but did not serve as an authoritative reference guide for

Mesopotamian judges, other interpretations must be considered. In the Code of

Hammurabi, the legal document itself is inserted into a frame comprised of a prologue

and epilogue which primarily aggrandize the king and speak of his wisdom and justice.

J.J. Finkelstein suggests that this format shows how the Code appropriated legal structure

in the service of its primary intent: to create an apologia-- a piece of propagandistic

literature—of the king.7 Westbrook expands on this argument, suggesting that since the

body of each text is similar, a law code’s frame can reveal the purpose for which it was

created.

The codes of Hammurabi, Ur-nammu, and Lipit-Ishtar all have prologues and

epilogues that speak of the great works of the king in establishing justice and order in the

6
Louis F. Hartman, Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Bible (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc.,
1963), 930
7
Westbrook, “Biblical and Cuneiform Law Codes,” 249.
 5

land, and may thus be interpreted as propagandistic texts.8 Westbrook claims that

Eshnunna lacks this format, but the fragmentary opening to the main body of law, “[when

Dadusha ascended to] the kingship of Eshnunna [and entered] into the house of his father,

[when] he conquered with his mighty weapons within one year the cities Supur-

Shamash…”,9 suggests that this document once held the same format. However, the

Assyrian and Hittite laws bear no prologue/epilogue because of a different intent in their

application. While both the Code of Hammurabi and the Hittite Laws (to take the best-

documented example from each category) were copied and re-copied over hundreds of

years, Hammurabi’s text remained, but for minor differences attributable to scribal error,

true to the original, whereas the Hittite Laws “occasionally indicate a process of

[revision]…These notation are worded thus: ‘Formerly they did such-and-such, but now

he shall do such-and-such,’ with the second ruling differing significantly from the

former”.10 This suggests that the Hittite and perhaps Assyrian law codes indeed had a

separate function; rather than serving as royal propagandistic literature and transmitted as

scribal exercise, they were instead living chronicles of the law at the time.

What does this mean for the Covenant Code? Its structure and correlation with

the Code of Hammurabi suggest that it fits into the same basic format as the

propagandistic texts; rather than standing alone as a body of law, it is put into a frame

that defines its purpose. While in the Sumerian/Babylonian canon, the existing corpus of

law was inserted into a frame extolling the king to create a royal apologia, however, in

the Covenant Code, a similar set of laws was placed in a different set of frames: the

immediate context of Yahweh’s apodictic commandments, and the larger structure of the

8
Westbrook, “Biblical and Cuneiform Law Codes,” 250.
9
Roth, Hoffner, and Michalowski, Law Collections, 59.
10
Roth, Hoffner, and Michalowski, Law Collections, 214.
 6

Pentateuch itself. Where Hammurabi, Lipit-Ishtar, Ur-nammu, and Dadusha of Eshnunna

used the format of prologue-law-epilogue to turn a formulaic writing of case law into a

document praising the king’s justice, the authors of the Covenant Code used the same

format to create an historical and religious text. 11 The inclusion of this law formula in

the book of Exodus could have been intended to legitimize it as a historical/religious

document by tying it to the long tradition of Mesopotamian law codes, as exemplified by

the Code of Hammurabi.

We can now turn to the question of the precise nature of the relationship between

the Covenant Code and the laws of Hammurabi. Did the Covenant Code simply follow

the form seen in the Mesopotamian law codes by taking the orally transmitted

compendium of law and inserting it into a relevant frame, or did it lift its content directly

from the Code of Hammurabi? First, methods of transmission must be examined to see

whether the Code of Hammurabi would actually have been available to the compilers of

Exodus. Hammurabi himself ruled ca. 1792 – 1750BCE, presumably placing the

authorship of his Code in that range, by modern estimates roughly 1770BCE. Some argue

that authorship of the Covenant Code dates to around 1000BCE, using as evidence the lack

of mention of a king anywhere in the laws, and the absence of laws referring to

“commercial life or the culture of city-dwellers”,12 which to many suggests that the

Covenant Code was produced by a pre-monarchic culture, which best fits Israel/Judea

around 1000BCE. The Covenant Code also includes some passages that appear to be

inspired by the laws of Eshnunna, which predates the Code of Hammurabi by some 200

years, which would not rule out an earlier date of composition for this portion of

11
Westbrook, “Biblical and Cuneiform Law Codes,” 251.
12
Hartman, Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Bible, 440.
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Exodus.13 However, even without laws catered specifically to city life, the laws of the

Covenant Code reveal a settled culture, rather than a nomadic one; in laws concerning

property, animal possessions are “cattle, sheep, and asses rather than horses or camels”,14

livestock which suggest a stable agricultural community. It is also problematic to assume

that the lack of mention of a king in the text of the Covenant Code implies that its authors

belonged to a pre-monarchic society. In sections of the biblical text that parallel the Code

of Hammurabi, the roles of the king and of the sun god Shamash have been removed and

replaced with that of Yahweh.

If that man pay attention to my words which I have written upon my

monument…then will Shamash prolong that man’s reign, as he has mine…If that
man do not pay attention to my words which I have written upon my monument…
may the great god… take from him the glory of his sovereignty, may he break his
scepter, and curse his fate! (Hammurabi)15

Beware of Him and obey His voice; do not provoke Him, for He will not pardon
your transgressions; for My name is in Him. But if you indeed obey His voice and
do all that I speak, then I will be an enemy to your enemies and an adversary to
your adversaries. (Exodus)16

The authors of the Covenant Code were trying to legitimize their religious history, and to

that end extolled Yahweh, rather than an earthly authority, as their lawgiver. It is

therefore acceptable that no king appears in the text of the Covenant Code, allowing us to

consider later dates for the authorship of the Covenant Code.

Further evidence supporting this later authorship comes in the form of strong

correlations between sections of Deuteronomy and the Vassal Treaties of Esarhaddon.17

13
Wright, Inventing God’s Law, 26.
14
Hartman, Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Bible, 440.
15
Harper, The Code of Hammurabi
16
Ex 23:21-22 NKJV
17
Wright, Inventing God’s Law, 103.
 8

May Sin, the luminary of heaven and earth, clothe you in leprosy, and thus not
permit you to enter the presence of God and king…May Shamash…not give you a
fair and equitable judgment, may he take away your eyesight; walk about in
darkness! (Esarhaddon §39-40)18

The LORD will strike you with the boils of Egypt, with tumors, with the scab, and
with the itch, from which you cannot be healed. The LORD will strike you with
madness and blindness and confusion of heart, and you shall grope at noonday,
as a blind man gropes in darkness. (Dt 28:27-29)19

If this correlation is accepted, and the not-unreasonable assumption is made that the

related legal sections of Deuteronomy and Exodus were contemporaneous, it would give

the biblical texts a date of at least 672BCE, the composition date of the Vassal Treaties.20

This dating would make a world of difference, as it would place the composition of the

Covenant Code within the Neo-Assyrian period.

During the Neo-Assyrian period, Israel and Judah were vassal states of the

Assyrian empire, resulting in a certain degree of contact with Assyrian culture, literature,

and law. It is known that during the Neo-Assyrian period, the Code of Hammurabi was

still being transcribed in scribal schools as a literary text. Though no copies of the

Hammurabi text have been discovered in the area of Israel, cuneiform inscriptions and

fragmentary Assyrian stelae found in Israel and Judah demonstrate that the language must

have been understood by at least some of the population. Akkadian legal documents –

18
J. Maxwell Miller and John H. Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel and Judah (Louisville: Westminster
John Knox Press, 1986), 395.
19
Dt 28:27-29 NKJV
20
D.J. Wiseman, The Vassal-Treaties of Esarhaddon (London: British School of Archaeology in Iraq,
1958), 3.
 9

mostly for the purchase of slaves and land – have been found at Gezer, just west of

Jerusalem, and some legal texts in Akkadian from throughout the empire are attributed to

scribes with Northwest Semitic names, showing that Mesopotamian legal customs were

somewhat understood and transcribed in Neo-Assyrian Israel.21 Combining this with the

knowledge that the Code of Hammurabi was still very much in active circulation at the

time, especially as a scribal exercise, it makes sense to assume that the authors of the

Covenant Code would have been familiar with that text.

However, the question remains: was the Code of Hammurabi a template for the

Covenant Code, or are their similarities incidental, arising from shared roots in the same

legal tradition? David Wright argues for the complete dependence of the Covenant Code

on Hammurabi’s laws. In his study, he lays out a significant body of similarities between

the two texts: “The laws or legal topics in the casuistic laws of[the Covenant Code] and

[the Laws of Hammurabi] share almost the same sequence. These points of similarity,

fourteen by my numbering, account for the majority of [the Covenant Code’s] casuistic

laws. Several of the casuistic laws of [the Covenant Code] that do not follow this basic

order still have correspondences with [the Laws of Hammurabi]. The remaining few

casuistic laws have similarities to laws in other cuneiform collections”.22 Wright reads a

striking similarity lies in the two codes’ inclusion of a provision for manslaughter in their

homicide laws:

If a man strike another man in a quarrel and wound him, he shall swear: “I
struck him without intent,” and he shall be responsible for the physician. If (he)
die as the result of the stroke, he shall swear (as above), and if he be a man, he

21
Wright, Inventing God’s Law, 99-100.
22
Wright, Inventing God’s Law, 31.
 10

shall pay one-half mana of silver. (Hammurabi §206-207)23

He who strikes a man so that he dies shall surely be put to death. However, if he
did not lie in wait, but God delivered him into his hand, then I will appoint for you
a place where he may flee. (Exodus)24

Not only do both of these laws deal specifically with unplanned homicide, but when

speaking of murder, both texts use the verb ‘to strike’ and the root verb mwt, ‘to die’.

This linguistic parallel is repeated throughout both documents.25 The Covenant Code also

makes reference to the swearing of oaths before God being used as a legal device to

ascertain truth,26 showing that this practice was carried over into the Mosaic Law.

Similarities of this sort exist throughout the two documents; there is not an abundance of

one-to-one correspondence of text, but a great number of repeated themes and ideas. For

example, in both the Covenant Code and the Code of Hammurabi, laws dealing with

kidnapping and wet-nursing break up lists of laws dealing with rebellious children, a very

specific thematic overlap. However, the penalties in these sections were altered for the

Covenant Code, and the order of some laws was changed within the section.27 Overall,

the order of casuistic laws in the Covenant Code follows the order of Hammurabi’s laws

closely enough to suggest a strong relationship between the two. However evidence for

Wright’s theory that the authors of Exodus based the Covenant Code directly on a

transcript of the Code of Hammurabi seems shaky at best, given the lack of direct textual

borrowing.

23
Harper, The Code of Hammurabi
24
Ex 21:12-13 NKJV
25
Wright, Inventing God’s Law, 35.
26
Ex 22:11 NKJV
27
Wright, Inventing God’s Law, 36.
 11

Additionally, elements of other Mesopotamian legal codes have made their way

into the Bible and the Covenant Code. Specifically, the laws regarding arson28 and

bestiality29 seem to have been taken from the Hittite Laws, and those regarding animal

control30 are derived from the Code of Eshnunna. Not only does this undercut the theory

of direct textual dependence on the Code of Hammurabi, but the borrowing from the

Hittite Laws is especially interesting, as these laws were living compendia of legal code,

rather than codified literature.

Additionally, some stories in Genesis conform to Mesopotamian legal tradition;31

the tale of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar32 is echoed in the laws of Hammurabi: “If a man

take a wife and she give a maid servant to her husband, and that maid servant bear

children and afterwards would take rank with her mistress; because she has borne

children, her mistress may not sell her for money, but she may reduce her to bondage and

count her among the maid servants”.33 These parallels demonstrate that the association

between the Covenant Code and the laws of Hammurabi was not a one-off relationship.

The Code of Hammurabi surfaces throughout the Bible, and elements of Mesopotamian

law codes other than Hammurabi’s seem to have influenced the authors of Exodus.

Ultimately, the idea of a direct citation of the Code of Hammurabi in the form of

the Covenant Code seems unsupportable. However, it is equally unlikely that the

Covenant Code was composed simply from the legal ideas common to the oral tradition

and culture of the time without referencing the Code of Hammurabi directly. The

28
Ex 22:6 NKJV
29
Ex 22:19 NKJV
30
Ex 21:28-32 NKJV
31
Hartman, Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Bible, 931
32
Gn 16:2-6 NKJV
33
Harper, The Code of Hammurabi
 12

similarities between the two texts seem to numerous to be coincidence. Though no

solution to this problem can be proven accurate, the most organic one would be a blend

of these two theories. Just as the Code of Hammurabi, like its cousins Ur-namma and

Lipit-Ishtar, fitted Mesopotamian legal formulae within a frame praising the king to

create a powerful propagandistic document, so too did the creators of the Covenant Code

draw on the materials available to them.

Using the format of Mesopotamian legal code, the writers of what would become

Mosaic Law synthesized the sources at their disposal; the Hittite Laws, the Code of

Eshnunna, and, of course, the Code of Hammurabi, putting all these legal ideas in a

Hebrew context, and inserting them in a frame that gave the laws a purpose: not to

aggrandize the king, but to honor Yahweh. The Code of Hammurabi would have

certainly been one of the most popular and readily available legal documents for

Israelites in the Neo-Assyrian period, and it is no surprise that of all the influences of the

biblical text, the Code of Hammurabi probably was the inspiration for the Covenant

Code’s overall format. Hammurabi’s laws were not the sole source for the Covenant

Code, and did not inform every aspect of its creation, but would have been an integral

factor. When the Hebrew scholars writing the book of Exodus looked for a way to

legitimize their religious history, they tied it to the long tradition of Mesopotamian law,

and, in so doing, to the Code of Hammurabi. This relationship provides a new

understanding of the thought process and inspiration behind an important part of the

Bible, and expands the legacy of one of the most famous documents in the Mesopotamian

canon.
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Works Cited

Harper, Robert F., ed. The Code of Hammurabi King of Babylon about 2250 B.C.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1904.
http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=127
6&chapter=79599&layout=html&Itemid=27 (Accessed May 8, 2010)

Hartman, Louis F. Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Bible. New York: McGraw-Hill

Book Company, Inc., 1963.

Miller, J. Maxwell and John H. Hayes. A History of Ancient Israel and Judah. Louisville:
Westminster John Knox Press, 1986.

Roth, Martha T., Harry A. Hoffner, and Piotr Michalowski. Law Collections from
Mesopotamia and Asia Minor. Atlanta: Scholar’s Press, 1997.

Westbrook, Raymond. “Biblical and Cuneiform Law Codes.” Revue Biblique 92 (1985):
247-265

Wiseman, D.J. The Vassal-Treaties of Esarhaddon. London: British School of

Archaeology in Iraq, 1958.

Wright, David P. Inventing God’s Law. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.