The Laws of Hammurabi: At the Confluence of Royal and Scribal Traditions

Barmash (Homicide in the Biblical World), director of Jewish, Islamic, and Near Eastern Studies at Washington University, takes an illuminating and original look at the Laws of Hammurabi, “the first documentation we have of law in human society, thousands of years earlier than Roman law.” Barmash offers a comprehensive history of these laws (composed in the 1700s BCE), examining their origins, the impact they had on biblical and Hittite law, and the role of justice in Mesopotamian culture. The Laws were first believed to be royal legislation, but other theories arose in the 20th century, including that they were actually propaganda intended to demonstrate that King Hammurabi had fulfilled his mandate to act justly. Barmash makes a convincing new argument—that the Laws were the work of an unnamed Babylonian scribe whose work copying other laws and studying cases gave him a sense of what was equitable, and enabled him to derive statutes from what he’d analyzed. Barmash argues that this pioneering scribe went further than his predecessors, including explanations for prescribed punishments and expanding reasoning in ways that anticipated Roman thought. Barmash’s persuasive scholarship puts the ancient code of law in an entirely new light. (Nov.)