The laws of Moses and Hammurabi

Law in Ancient Times:

Comparison of the Laws of Moses and Hammurabi

From earliest times, societies have struggled with questions of law and order. At first decisions as to the permissibility or illegality of this or that act relied almost wholly on notions of custom or tradition. It was only with the dawn of civilization that rulers first attempted to codify what was right and what was wrong. Early law codes, such as those of the Babylonian Hammurabi, and the Biblical Moses, represent the values of their time and place. They lay down the penalties for the commission of specific crimes. Their legislation speaks to the structure and nature of their respective cultures and indeed they share much in their approach to judicial procedure and punishment. Both note that they were inspired by the will of the gods, or of the One God. Both make right action a matter of sacred moral choices. Both concern themselves with a similar variety of offense that range from assaults against persons, to those against property, and on to the violation of general social norms. Their pronouncements are all-embracing, and serve as virtual guidebooks to the ideal construction of their respective civilizations. As well, each derives from the traditions of Mesopotamian civilization. The earliest known law codes of all were those of Ancient Sumer, the civilization from which that of Babylonia was derived, and also the original home of Abraham, the Biblical patriarch. Thus, the laws of Hammurabi and Moses possess a common origin and similar set of precepts and concerns. Down to the present day, the principles behind these ancient law codes continue to inform much of Western legal and moral thinking.

The laws of Ancient Mesopotamia represent the oldest known collections of codified law -a tradition that predates by many centuries the earliest written laws of other ancient civilizations, such as those of India and China.

This civilization; therefore, was unique in committing to writing an entire system of legal thinking. Enacted during the Eighteenth Century before Christ, Hammurabi's famous code was preceded by numerous other written compilations of the law, the earliest yet found being that of the Sumerian king Uruinimgina, or Urukagina, a ruler of city of Lagash in the 24th Century B.C.

The "Reforms of Uruinimgina" already reveal a resort to tradition and to divine sanction as necessary underpinnings of the legal enactments of human beings.

Hammurabi likewise attributed his code to the gods,

Anum and Enlil had named him, the pious ruler, to proclaim justice in the land, 'to eliminate the evil and the wicked, so that the strong should not oppress the weak... To give justice to the orphan and the widow'. He also stated that 'the wronged man shall stand before the inscribed stela and read its precious ordinances'.

As with the later Mosaic Law, the code's purpose is conceived as a divine attempt to bring justice to the affairs of humankind. The king serves as the guarantor of the rights of the weak and the champion of the oppressed. Worldly order would reflect the righteousness of the divine plan.

Hammurabi's code contains an interesting mixture of civil and criminal matters. There are laws relating to public administration, family relations, economic resources, and religious ritual.

This holistic approach contrasts notably with much of the legal thought of our own time. Hammurabi's world was one in which all aspects of society were united into one. No real distinction existed between the public and the private spheres. Matters we believe to be firmly under private control - or matters of conscience - were readily accepted as being under the governance of the state. No doubt, such an attitude reveals a fairly homogeneous society, or at least one that aspired to be so. Religion and the supernatural were seen as forces controlling virtually every facet of daily life, and there was no question that ordinary men and women were subject to the dictates of the gods. What the gods had created and set into motion was what should and must be. The merely mundane concerns of commerce and property ownership were as much a part of the divine order as anything else. The importance of perpetuating the family line is treated matter-of-factly, as though it were it kind of business arrangement, the principles underlying it also sanctioned by the gods. As in the Bible, a woman might allow her slave to bear her husband's child if she is unable to have a child herself. The Code of Hammurabi not only permits such a situation, it also foresees the inherent dangers to the relationship between the wife and her husband. It takes note of the possibility of a rivalry between the childless wife and the slave who is now the mother of the husband's child.

Here, too, the law is the instrument of harmony, the private life of the family a mirror of the larger society. If husband and wife and their children can interact in an orderly manner, remain productive and law-abiding, so too can the merchants, priests, soldiers, craftsmen, and officials, that comprise the "family" of the city or state.

Better known to modern day Westerners, the laws of Moses comprise the Biblical answer to the Code of Hammurabi. Like the Babylonian ruler's decrees, they are also attributed to Divine authority. The Bible emphasizes the sacral quality of the commandments that Moses brings down from Mt. Sinai. Moses himself is an especially blessed individual. He was specifically chosen by God to be the bearer of His message. As in the earlier Sumerian civilization, the Babylonian kingship of Hammurabi was conceived as representing the extension of the god's rule over the whole of civilization - "The dominion of the ruler reached beyond the land of Sumer proper and became coextensive with the cosmic lordship of the god."

In the same way, God's laws as given to Moses supersede those of Pharaoh and apply to the Israelites wherever they might live. Human peoples do not create their own versions of morality and right conduct, rather they must submit to the Divine Will, acting in accordance with principles that are universal, or nearly universal in their application. Divine sanction prevents the code from being contested. The most powerful man or women remains less powerful than God, or the gods; less knowledgeable, less wise, and less virtuous. Society is a web of complex interactions on a great variety of levels. These relationships transcend the personal, encompassing not only the greater community, but even the cosmic order.

As all of society is ultimately under God's control. So too do the laws of Moses mix the civil and the criminal, the private and the public, and the religious with the administrative. The very first commandment is an injunction that one worship no other gods but the one true God. This religious commandment is followed by others that speak to the relationships between husband and wife, parent and child, and between the various individuals within a community. The proscriptions cover interpersonal relations as well as the relationship of individuals to the material property. The hundreds of commandments that make up the rest of the Mosaic Code cover practically every imaginable aspect of Ancient Israelite culture. Many of them apply to concerns still prominent today, namely issues of juridical procedure, the settlement of disputes, and the definition of and punishment of criminal actions. St. Thomas Aquinas described the Mosaic laws as,

Concerning justice, since they involve actions '"hat are directed to the ordering of one man in relation to another, which ordering is subject to the direction of the sovereign as supreme judge." He says explicitly there that a contemporary sovereign could rightly enact laws modeled on those precepts: "if a sovereign were to order these judicial precepts to be observed in his kingdom, he would not sin."

In other words, the Laws of Moses function as a divine blueprint for good government, and as a model for the conduct of the righteous ruler. All future legislation should work toward the ideals embodied in these decrees. The identification sin with criminality, or with the failure to observe proper procedure in civil and private matters, underscores the importance of taking the needs of others into consideration. It sets out the real meaning of a civil society, and the ideal state of human interactions.

Nevertheless, the Laws of Moses, like their Babylonian counterpart, can be cruel and often apparently unforgiving. The principle of an "eye for an eye" famously expounded in the Code of Hammurabi is also clearly present in that of Moses. Both codes base many of their penalties on the philosophy that wrongdoers deserve to suffer punishment for their actions. Murderers, for example, must be put death, frequently in ways that are believed to correspond to the gravity of the offense, the manner of execution being more terrible for crimes deemed - by God or the gods - more egregious and more damaging to the social and cosmic order. In this sense, "justice," an otherwise high-sounding concept is equated with little more than simple retribution.

If the purpose of law is to maintain the order of society yielding the best possible circumstance for each individual man, woman, and child, then the argument arises as to whether such direct revenge is actually conducive to preventing further disorders. Revenge can easily run in endless cycles, and fear of punishment may not in and of itself be any deterrent at all, in particular if the act which is to be punished was committed in the heat of passion or without premeditation. Philosophers of law and ethics have long discussed the precise nature of the divine code that was given to Moses. On a fundamental level, there exists the question as to whether these laws are immutable expressions of an unchanging natural order such as has always existed, or whether these Mosaic laws represent merely the decrees of God that are applicable to a particular, time, place, or situation.

If God had simply made law in the manner of most temporal rulers, then these laws might not be applicable under changed circumstances - an evolving society might require new laws, or new interpretations of existing precepts.

As has been stated, the Mosaic Code makes much of very specific punishments for very specific violations of the rules. Many of these penalties are considered cruel by modern standards, though they are remarkably similar to many that are found within the laws of Hammurabi. Furthermore, many of the Biblical injunctions do not appear to apply to modern society in as much as they are ignored or overlooked by most modern Western societies. The numerous commandments that concern ritual practice, both public and private, are largely ignored today, though the Bible contains no direct admonition that they are in force only under certain conditions or for a limited period of time. The fact that laws, even divinely-given laws can dispense with, further complicates the question of what constitutes "justice," and of what comprises the actual purpose of any system of laws. The "eye for an eye" principle of Mosaic law implies two different things on two different levels. Read literally, the violator must pay in directly equal proportions to his or her actions. Read figuratively, the prescription appears to be that individuals - and the society in which they live - must be held somehow responsible for their own decisions and acts. Perhaps the segregation of certain major pronouncements into a collection of Ten Commandments is meant to call attention to the idea of underlying motive in a way that is not as clearly represented in Hammurabi's nearly three hundred decrees liberally mixed between criminal, civil, familial, and religious matters. In the Mosaic Ten Commandments, a common thread can be seen between the kinds of motivations that give rise to violations of the major ten commandments and many of the other additional commandments. One commits adultery or covetice, or for that matter, ordinary theft, because of an inordinate desire for that which one does not possess. One displays disobedience if one does not "honor they father and the mother," or similarly violate the ritual precepts relating to sacrifice in the Temple, or following menstruation or childbirth. By looking into these concepts, one sees the deeper feelings that bind a society together and which create or destroy order. Whether that order is simply human, or broadly cosmic and universal, the ideas that back them up are the same. John Finnis argues that, "Even if laws should not aim to make citizens in general virtuous, still, they should aim to insure that those who govern be virtuous"