Before the Church · c. 2100 BC
The Laws of Ur-Nammu
The court of Ur-Nammu
What it is
The oldest surviving law code, opening with a king who claims to have removed the crooked measure and stopped the powerful from seizing the widow's ox, then setting fines in silver for injuries — a broken bone, a severed nose — rather than demanding the matching mutilation.
Why it lasted
Compensation in silver three centuries before Hammurabi's talion formula, so the ancient Near East ran no single line from harsher to gentler. A comparison for the case laws of Exodus 21 and Deuteronomy 19, which Scripture accounts for on its own terms.
Scripture it works from
Where to read it
Public domain and free to read in full, though not held here. The archives below have it.
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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