Mishpatim's civil law collection, on servants, injury, theft and property, has been compared since the nineteenth-century decipherment of cuneiform law codes to other ancient Near Eastern legal collections, above all the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, which shares specific provisions such as the principle of 'an eye for an eye' (Exodus 21:24) in strikingly similar wording. Scholars studying the comparison also note real differences: Hammurabi's code sets penalties according to the social rank of victim and offender, while Mishpatim applies its core talionic principle without the same explicit stratification, and its opening laws address the release of an indentured servant rather than, as in several Near Eastern codes, beginning from property or state offences.
Source critics generally treat Mishpatim as an old, self-contained legal collection, sometimes called the Covenant Code, incorporated into the Exodus narrative rather than composed for it, on the strength of its distinct legal style compared to surrounding narrative material and to the later Priestly and Deuteronomic law collections elsewhere in the Torah. Traditional Jewish legal tradition instead treats all of these collections as a single unified law given at Sinai, and rabbinic literature draws extensively on Mishpatim as a primary source for civil law in the Talmud.