Transcribed from the 1903 T. & T. Clark edition ,email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
THE CODE OF LAWS PROMULGATED BY
HAMMURABI, KING OF BABYLON
b.c. 2285-2242
TRANSLATED
by
C. H. W. JOHNS, M.A.
LECTURER IN ASSYRIOLOGY, QUEENS’ COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
author of “assyrian deeds and documents”
“an assyrian doomsday book”
EDINBURGH
T. & T. CLARK, 38 GEORGE STREET
1903
PRINTED BY
MORRISON AND GIBB LIMITED
FOR
T. & T. CLARK, EDINBURGH
london: simpkin, marshall, hamilton, kent, andco. limited
new york: charles scribner’s sons
first impression . . . February1903.
second impression . . . March 1903.
third impression . . . May 1903.
fourth impression . . . June 1903.
“The discovery and decipherment of this Code is the greatestevent in Biblical Archæology for many a day. A translationof the Code, done by Mr. Johns of Queens’ College, Cambridge,the highest living authority on this department of study, has just beenpublished by Messrs. T. & T. Clark in a cheap and attractive booklet. Winckler says it is the most important Babylonian record which has thusfar been brought to light.”—The Expository Times.
The Code of Hammurabi is one of the most important monuments in thehistory of the human race. Containing as it does the laws whichwere enacted by a king of Babylonia in the third millennium B.C.,whose rule extended over the whole of Mesopotamia from the mouths ofthe rivers Tigris and Euphrates to the Mediterranean coast, we mustregard it with interest. But when we reflect that the ancientHebrew tradition ascribed the migration of Abraham from Ur of the Chaldeesto this very period, and clearly means to represent their tribe fatheras triumphing over this very same Hammurabi (Amraphel, Gen. xiv. 1),we can hardly doubt that these very laws were part of that tradition. At any rate, they must have served to p. vimouldand fix the ideas of right throughout that great empire, and so formthe state of society in Canaan when, five hundred years later, the Hebrewsbegan to dominate that region.
Such was the effect produced on the minds of succeeding generationsby this superb codification of the judicial decisions of past ages,which had come to be regarded as ‘the right,’ that two thousandyears and more later it was made a text-book for study in the schoolsof Babylonia, being divided for that purpose into some twelve chapters,and entitled, after the Semitic custom, Nînu ilu sirum,from its opening words. In Assyria also, in the seventh centuryb.c., it was studied in a different edition,apparently under the name of ‘The Judgments of Righteousness whichHammurabi, the great king, set up.’ These facts point toit as certain to affect Jewish views before and after the Exile, ina way that we may expect to find as fundamental as the Babylonian influencein cosmology or religion.
For many years fragments have been p. viiknown,have been studied, and from internal evidence ascribed to the periodof the first dynasty of Babylon, even called by the name Code Hammurabi. It is just cause for pride that Assyriology, so young a science as onlythis year to have celebrated the centenary of its birth, is able toemulate astro