The Laws of Moses and the Code of Hammurabi

The Laws of Moses and the Code of Hammurabi

Author: Stanley A. Cook

Publisher: Cosimo, Inc.

Published: 2010-01-01

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 1616404426

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The Laws of Moses and the Code of Hammurabi are thousands-years old documents, evidence of the social structure and rules of ancient civilizations. The Code of Hammurabi is roughly one thousand years older than the Ten Commandments, or Laws of Moses, which were written in 1500 B.C., and is considered the oldest set of laws in existence. Promulgated by the king Hammurabi in roughly 2250 B.C., the Code is a set of rules guiding everyday life, listing everything from punishments for stealing and murder to the prices commanded for animals, products, and services. The famous "eye for an eye" maxim comes from the Hammurabi code: "If a man puts out the eye of an equal, his eye shall be put out." S.A. Cook's translation of The Laws of Moses and the Code of Hammurabi includes the code, the history of the regions in which it was employed-Babylonia and Israel, the elements of Law, the social structures of families, workers, and slaves, information on land, agriculture, trade, and commerce, protection of the people, and a detailed Index. STANLEY ARTHUR COOK (1837-1949) was born in King's Lynn, Norfolk. He was the Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge University from 1932-1938, where he also received his Bachelor's and Master's degrees. He was on the editorial staff of the Encyclopedia Biblica from 1896-1903, as well as an editorial advisor on Biblical subjects for the Encyclopedia Britannica. He edited Palestine Exploration Fund publications from 1902-1932 and authored many of his own books on ancient Hebrew and Middle East culture.


Making a Case

Making a Case

Author: Sara J. Milstein

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-08-11

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 0190911824

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Outside of the Bible, all of the known Near Eastern law collections were produced in the third to second millennia BCE, in cuneiform on clay tablets, and in major cities in Mesopotamia and in the Hittite Empire. None of the major sites in Syria that have yielded cuneiform tablets has borne even a fragment of a law collection, even though several have produced ample legal documentation. Excavations at Nuzi have also turned up numerous legal documents, but again, no law collection. Even Egypt has not yielded a collection of laws. As such, the biblical texts that scholars regularly identify as law collections represent the only "western," non-cuneiform expressions of the genre in the ancient Near East, produced by societies not known for their political clout, and separated in time from "other" collections by centuries. Making a Case: The Practical Roots of Biblical Law challenges the long-held notion that Israelite and Judahite scribes either made use of "old" law collections or set out to produce law collections in the Near Eastern sense of the genre. Instead, what we call "biblical law" is closer in form and function to another, oft-neglected Mesopotamian genre: legal-pedagogical texts. During their education, Mesopotamian scribes studied a variety of legal-oriented school texts, including sample contracts, fictional cases, short sequences of laws, and legal phrasebooks. When biblical law is viewed in the context of these legal-pedagogical texts from Mesopotamia, its practical roots in a set of comparable legal exercises begin to emerge.