Before the Church · c. 1754 BC
The Code of Hammurabi
Hammurabi of Babylon
What it is
Two hundred and eighty-two rulings cut into a black diorite pillar beneath a relief of the king receiving the rod and ring from the sun god. If a man destroy the eye of another man, they shall destroy his eye; if a builder's house collapses and kills the owner's son, the builder's son is put to death.
Why it lasted
The closest and most awkward parallel to the Covenant Code of Exodus — the goring ox, the eye for an eye, the ordeal by river — and the discovery in 1901 that reopened the whole question of where Israel's law came from.
Scripture it works from
Read it here
The full text is held here and can be read in the reader.
248 sections · complete, from The Oldest Code of Laws in the World, tr. Johns (Project Gutenberg #17150).
Elsewhere
The complete text is held here and can be read in the reader.
These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.
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