Hammurabi

The monument found at Susa is a black stele more than two metres high, and the laws occupy only its middle. Above them is a relief of the king standing before Shamash, the sun god who is also the god of justice, seated on his throne and holding out the rod and the ring. Below and after the laws comes a long epilogue: blessings on any future ruler who preserves the text, and an extraordinarily detailed sequence of curses, deity by deity, on anyone who erases his name or alters what he wrote.

That frame is not decoration. The prologue says the gods called him to make justice appear in the land, to destroy the wicked, and to stop the strong from oppressing the weak, and the collection is offered as evidence that he did. Assyriologists have long noticed that Babylonian court records almost never cite these provisions when deciding cases, which suggests the stele is a royal monument and an account rendered to the gods rather than a statute book a judge consulted. The practical instrument of relief was something else: the periodic royal edict, the mesharum, which cancelled certain debts and released people who had been pledged against them, and which a king issued as an act rather than as a text.

The provisions on retaliation in kind, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, are the reason this collection is quoted in almost every discussion of biblical law, and the resemblance is real. So are the differences. The Babylonian penalties are graded by the class of the person injured, so that the same act costs a different amount depending on whether the victim was an awilum, a mushkenum or a slave, while the formulation in Exodus does not make that distinction in the same way. Both traditions treat the goring ox, the deposit left for safekeeping and the negligent builder, sometimes in a similar order.

What the resemblance proves is argued rather than settled. Positions range from direct literary dependence, through a shared stock of legal formulations circulating across the ancient Near East for a thousand years, to independent solutions to the same problems. The atlas records the debate rather than picking a side. One further fact is worth keeping in view: the stele is in the Louvre because an Elamite king carried it off from Babylonia as plunder, which is how a Babylonian monument came to be excavated in Iran in 1901. A column of its text was chiselled away, apparently to make room for an inscription that was never cut.