1. Four thousand years ago, in the land that is now called Iraq, a king named Hammurabi erected a monument in his capitol city of Babylon. This monument survived the fortunes of the ages and is known to us as the "Hammurabi Stele." The Stele represents one of the fundamental Pre-Amarna values of order. This value is justice.

1.1. The peoples of the old times who inhabited the Tigris-Euphrates river basin in Mesopotamia (called the "land between the rivers" by the ancients) provided many of our deepest cultural models. By the end of the third millennium B.C.E., Babylon had gained enough strength to become the chief city of the southern half of this territory. Babylon achieved such prominence through the efforts of a line of aggressive and conquest-minded rulers known as the "First Dynasty" of Babylon. The greatest ruler of this dynasty was Hammurabi. Hammurabi's fame grew from his conquests, but his greatness came from his concern with justice.

1.2. Hammurabi's most enduring accomplishment was the erection of a cone-shaped pillar, a stele, more than seven feet tall, with a circumference of about five feet at the top, gradually increasing to over six feet at the base. At the top of the monument is an engraving, which portrays Hammurabi standing before a deity seated on a throne. The rest of the object was covered by an inscription, which reads from top to bottom, working around the stele.  The inscription, like the engraving, explains Hammurabi's role in the operation of his society.

1.3. Mesopotamian kings long before and after Hammurabi published similar statements, although on tablets rather than steles. As Hammurabi borrowed some of his ideas from those who had gone before, so later societies, including the Hebrews, would borrow from him, each taking what it found useful and adding what it needed. Apparently, Hammurabi's Stele was a public monument, set in one of the city-squares of Babylon, and possibly maintained for centuries after his time. Eventually, a group of invaders carted it off to the ancient Persian city of Susa, where it was discovered by a French expedition in 1901/02. For us, the Hammurabi Stele serves as a source for early, and still challenging, ideas of "justice."

2. To describe the meaning of the Stele, we should consider its mysterious function in ancient Babylon. Why did Hammurabi set it in a public place? We have no specific information about this, but we might imagine that the written contents of the kind of statements made on the Stele were read aloud to the public on a regular basis, say annually. Because the Stele describes the founding of Babylon as part of the ordering of the cosmos by the great deity Marduk, it would seem that a religious ceremony provides a likely situation for the reading of the Stele. The New Year's celebration provides the most likely religious ceremony, since it commemorated the ordering of the cosmos and the founding of the kingship. In the context of a religious ceremony, the Stele could function as idol as well as document. That is, the Stele could play its role as a physical object in the ceremony, which would enhance its significance and sacredness for the viewing public. To place it in a public setting the rest of the year would serve as a constant reminder of its message.

2.1. Lets put ourselves in the place of an ordinary person viewing the Stele. We are probably illiterate, although we have some familiarity with the contents of the inscription. After all, we attended the last New Year's Festival and heard it read! Yet as we gaze at the Stele, its engraving calls to us more loudly than its inscription. We come near the Stele, and we note that it is larger than we are but not too much larger. We feel that we can approach it. It's taller than we are, so we have to look up to view the scene. In this action, we feel the potency of royal power and our own humility, but we am also reassured with a sense of hope and security. Hammurabi is speaking to us about matters of serious concern: our own wellbeing and the wellbeing of our society!

2.1.1. He speaks through symbols that we know well. We look at the engraving and see the sun-god Shamash, who represents justice, sitting on a throne. A smaller figure stands attentively before him. This is Hammurabi, humbly receiving instruction. The topic is justice.

2.1.2. The Stele, then, begins with the truth-claim that its message of justice is based on divine instruction. Hammurapi repeats this claim in the first part of the inscription, lines 43-47:

    When Marduk commanded me
    to establish justice for the people of the land
    and to provide orderly government,
    I set forth truth and justice throughout the land,
    and caused the people to prosper.

By adducing a different deity--Marduk, the city-god of Babylon, the chief god of the Babylonian pantheon, and the maker of world order--these lines reiterate and strengthen the claim of divine inspiration portrayed in the engraving of Shamash. They also emphasize an essential premise of the engraving: god's will for society is that it exemplify justice. With the claim of divine inspiration and the premise of justice in mind, we can reasonably ask how the rest of the inscription gives voice to the divine will.

2.2. What immediately follows the statement about truth, justice, and prosperity is a list of regulations that occupies the bulk of the inscription. More than any other aspect of the Stele, the regulations have caught the eye of modern interpreters, leading to a fundamental falsehood about the nature of the Stele, a falsehood long exposed yet often repeated as a "truthhood." This falsehood is that the Stele presents a "law-code."

2.2.1. The intention of a "law-code" is to codify a legal system. The regulations on the Hammurabi Stele lack the comprehensive, systematic structure that would suggest such an intention. Conflicting descriptions of cases and sanctions exist with no concern to resolve the conflicts; note, for example, the varying strictures on pawnbrokers in regulations 122-124. More importantly, the regulations are not comprehensive. In fact, the collection is so incomplete that the Stele could seldom serve as a specific model on which particular judicial decisions might be based. We have access to many court-records from times when one would expect to detect the influence of Hammurabi's Stele. Most of them deal with matters not treated on the Stele.

2.2.2. In addition, the idea of "law" as it applies to the inscription on the Stele needs to be carefully articulated. A "regulation" is not necessarily the same thing as a "law." Our view of "law" derives from the Roman notion of "lex" (law). One could say that the Romans gave a substance to the term "law" that would determine its meaning in the Mediterranean cultural tradition to this day. If we look at this substance from an anthropological point-of-view /see Pospíšil/, regulations only qualify as laws if they meet four criteria: 1) laws come into being as decisions made by a political authority; 2) laws define the relationship between two or more parties in a dispute; 3) laws are applied regularly, with the intention of universal application; and 4) laws require explicitly stated sanctions (penalties). If any of these four criteria is lacking, a regulation does not qualify as a law.

2.2.3. By these criteria, none of the regulations contained on Hammurabi's Stele are laws. Some have no sanctions (criterion no. 4); for example, no. 88 simply suggests rates of interest. Most of the regulations were not applied in Hammurabi's time or in the immediately following periods. In fact, when we have judicial decisions that coincide with topics of the Stele, the decisions generally go against the proposals made on the Stele (criterion no. 3). That the judiciary system could and did run independently of the "king's" expressed intentions calls into question the king's actual political authority in the realm of law (criterion no. 1, even disregarding the explicit claim that the regulations come from a divine source). Finally, some regulations presuppose no adversarial (conflicting) relationship (criterion no. 2); 88 could again serve as an example.

2.2.4. To interpret the regulations as a legal code is simply to substitute an ethnocentric analogy for an effort to understand the Stele. We read the regulations as laws because we have something at stake in doing so.

3. The precise public function of the Stele in ancient Babylonian society may be impossible for us to determine. However, we can make three observations about the content of the Stele. These observations provide our basic clues to the values demonstrated by the Stele.

• First, the content is mythological in nature. That is, it tells a story. The story is about Hammurabi's place in the universe. We see this first of all in the engraving. Hammurabi is the person-of-privilege who is taught directly by god. In this light the inscription assumes a narrative, rather than a legal, significance. It tells the story of Hammurabi's role. The narrative is not a framework to the regulations in the middle. The narrative is the primary emphasis of the whole, and the regulations support the basic thrust of the narrative: Hammurabi's role is to mediate between the deities and the humans in order to provide justice for the humans.
• A second observation is that the Stele delivers a religious statement attributed to the most powerful figure in its society about how the society should be run. If we take our interpretive guide from the observation that the statement is mythological, then we must realize that the contents of the statement function as metaphors. For us, this realization comes easily as we read the narrative, but not so easily as we read the regulations. And why not? Only because we don't think of this type of material as metaphorical. The Stele gives no indication that Hammurabi shared our view.
• A third observation is that the Stele made a political statement, meant to endure beyond Hammurabi's lifetime, about the king's ideal role in the administration of justice.

3.2. The king's ideal role, then, was to mediate that which existed at a cosmic level (order) to the level of human society. The message of Hammurabi's Stele is self-serving, both in pictures and words: Hammurabi was a worthy king, a true supporter of justice and order. The regulations give concrete expression to this message. They give voice not to laws but to ideals, examples of the operation of justice in an orderly society. Their intention is not to limit but to inspire the judicial system of Hammurapi's time and of later times.

3.3. As evidenced by Hammurabi's Stele, ancient societies did not view justice in a mechanical fashion; for a simple example of this, compare the fees stated in regulations 215 and 217 to those stated in 221 and 223. The Stele, combined with the judicial decisions which contradict it in detail, helps us understand the difference between what we might think of as the "rule of law" and the "doing of justice." In a sense, it is odd that we must seek justice through law, because legislation can never incorporate enough "nuances" and "behavioral clues" in its definitions to achieve justice. Hammurabi tries to teach us that justice is primarily a matter for the human spirit guided by divine will, not the pressure of "laws." Yet he also taught us that an orderly society cannot exist without some LAW (or, to use a wonderful word the Romans gave us: IUS - law as the genuine expression of justice). If we learn from Hammurabi, we would not have to tie our notion of ius to his theory of divine will (although subsequent notions of law have often made this connection in some way). And we certainly would not want to put too much confidence in the propositions by which we express our sense of ius. The Hammurabi Stele, when compared to the actual practice of law in its time, warns us: it is dangerous to confuse the propositions with the principles. Orderly society must be built on ideals.

3.3.1. One of Hammurabi's ideals establishes a model for justice that later societies (Greece and Rome, for example) were unable to preserve: all the people that live in society should be included in its system of justice. In one sense, this monumental inclusiveness set an ultimate standard for the vision of justice in society. However, the inclusiveness derived from an understanding of society that would be rejected by Hellenic culture in the Post-Amarna Era. In Hammurabi's view, the people were considered to be subjects of the king. When the Hellenes developed the concept of people as citizens, a tension between the limits of citizenship and the inclusiveness of justice began to characterize legal thought in the Mediterranean tradition.

3.3.2. While Hammurabi's ideal of justice was comprehensive, it was also explicitly proportional, with rights distributed as a function of class. Everyone had explicit rights and a protected place in society, but the rights were not equal and the place was not always enviable. The Stele addresses a society composed of three broad classes: (1) free persons, usually landowners or members of various professions or trades (guilds); (2) civil-servants, members of the massive government bureaucracy, including military and temple personnel; and (3) slaves. Hammurabi's explicit acknowledgement of this condition highlights an issue that continues to plague notions of justice: how is it possible to provide political-legal equality for everyone (or even every citizen) in society?

3.3.3. The specific topics of the inscription also establish ideals. For instance, the first set of regulations deals with the need for honesty in court settings. Such "regulations" express principles that could be comprehended and applied to particular situations, principles that are as important today as in the time of Hammurabi.

3.4. The Hammurabi Stele does not give us a complete view of the way in which Hammurabi's society operated, but the ideal society portrayed by the Stele was actualized in various ways throughout the Ancient Mediterranean World. The Hebrews of the first millennium B.C.E. adopted some of the provisions of the Stele by incorporating them into their most sacred scriptures, the Torah /see, for example, Exodus 21-23/. Eventually these regulations became part of the Christian Bible, and part of the essential understanding of "law" in those cultural matrixes influenced by the Bible. Later, principles enunciated in the Stele (for instance, the notion of "contract" as one means of ordering society) would inform Greco-Roman views, which were passed along to various cultural matrixes that followed.

4. The inscription on the Stele falls naturally into three parts.

4.1. The first part is a poem which states the situation described on the Stele. This poem tells the story of the rise of the god Marduk to the head of the pantheon, an event which forms the cosmic basis for the rise of Babylon, the city-state particularly favored by Marduk, as the greatest political entity in the world. Marduk chose the "god-fearing" Hammurabi to be the king and to establish justice in the land. At this point, the focus of the poem turns directly to Hammurabi. We learn that Hammurabi is the greatest hero the world has ever known. He is the conqueror of the world, the representative of true religion in the world, the leader responsible for all genuine improvement in human society.

4.2. The second part of the inscription consists of 282 regulations. These regulations may be outlined as follows:
 1. Regulations setting basic standards for justice (1-25)
     1.1. Concerning the administration of justice (1-5)
     1.2. Concerning capital crimes (6-25)

 2. Regulations dealing with specific aspects of society (26-282)
     2.1. Concerning military personnel (26-41)
     2.2. Concerning price-fixing and land-use (42-65)
     2.3. Concerning capital and interest (66-93)
     2.4. Concerning commerce (94-107)
     2.5. Concerning liquor (108-111)
     2.6. Concerning safe-deposits and debts (112-126)
     2.7. Concerning marriage and family (127-164)
     2.8. Concerning inheritance (165-177)
     2.9. Concerning priestesses (178-184)
     2.10. Concerning adoption and wetnursing (185-194)
     2.11. Concerning damages (195-214)
     2.12. Concerning doctors (215-225)
     2.13. Concerning miscellaneous occupations, including carpenters, sailors, farm-workers, herders, and crafts-persons (226-282)

4.3. The final part of the inscription is a summary poem which restates Hammurabi's accomplishments and describes the merits of the corpus of regulations. By the help of the gods, Hammurabi claims to have defeated all enemies and established peace and prosperity: "So that the strong might not oppress the weak ... I inscribed my precious words on my stele ...." The summary closes with a blessing on all future rulers who perpetuate the regulations and a curse for rulers who alter the regulations or replace Hammurabi's name with their own.

In the following selections, I have frequently changed the grammar and sequence of words from that of the original text, and I have omitted sections of material, so that what is given will read comprehensibly in English. I have grouped regulations by topical categories for discussion, rather than simply following their numerical sequence.

¹When the deities of old
who allot the destinies of the world,

Gave the rule of human beings to Marduk,
set him over all other deities,
⁵made Babylon the foremost city-state in all the earth
and the capital of an everlasting kingdom,
with foundations laid strong as those of heaven and earth,

At that time I, Hammurapi,
the pious, god-fearing prince,
¹⁰was called forth by name for the welfare of the people:

                To cause justice to appear in the world,
       to destroy the evil and the wicked
       so that the strong should not oppress the weak,
       and to rise like Shamash to give light to the land.

 

 
 
 

¹⁵I, Hammurapi the shepherd,

have gathered abundance and plenty,
have stormed the four quarters of the world,
have magnified the fame of Babylon,
and have elated the mind of Marduk my lord.

 

 
 
 

²⁰To me has been given the authority,

and I have been faithful to Shamash.

I am like a god among kings,
endowed with knowledge and wisdom.

I have provided plentiful offerings for the deities
²⁵and built their temples.

I am pure of mind,
and the deities listen to my prayers.

I am the wise ruler
who bears the responsibility of government,
³⁰who has attained the source of wisdom,
who has enlarged the kingdom,
and who has established pure sacrifices for ever.

I am first of all kings;
I have conquered all peoples.

³⁵I am the shepherd of the people
who causes the truth to appear,
guiding my flock rightly.

I am the pious prince,
deep in prayer to the great deities.

 

 
 
 

⁴⁰I am the mighty king, the sun of Babylon,

who causes light to appear in the land,
who brings all the world to obedience.

I am the favorite of the deities.
When Marduk commanded me
⁴⁵to establish justice for the people of the land
and to provide orderly government,

                I set forth truth and justice throughout the land,
      and caused the people to prosper.

         Social Structures

196. If a free person puts out the eye of another free person, the first person's eye shall be put out.
197. If a free person breaks the bone of another free person, the first person's bone shall be broken.
198. If a free person puts out the eye or breaks the bone of a civil-servant, the free person shall pay one-half kilogram of silver.
199. If a free person puts out the eye or breaks the bone of another free person's slave, the free person shall pay half the value of the slave.

195. If a son strikes his father, the son's hand shall be cut off.
205. If a free person's slave strikes the cheek of another free person, the ear of the slave shall be cut off.
282. If a slave says to the master, "you are not my master," the master shall cut off the slave's ear.

138. If a free man wishes to divorce his wife who has had no children, he must pay her a settlement equal to the value of the gifts he gave her father when they were married, plus the dowry she brought from her father's house; by paying this settlement he divorces her.
139. If the free man had given her father no gifts, this part of his settlement shall amount to one-half kilogram of silver.
140. If the man is a civil-servant, he shall pay one-sixth kilogram of silver.

141. If a free man's wife wishes to divorce him, the man may divorce her and give her no settlement. If the man does not wish to divorce her, he may marry another woman and keep his first wife in his house as a slave.
142. If a woman wishes to divorce her husband and refuses him sexual rights, an inquiry shall be held. If she has not committed adultery but her husband has, she may take her dowry and return to her father's house.
143. If she has committed adultery, then she shall be executed by being thrown into the water.

154. If a free man has sexual relations with his daughter, that man shall be exiled.
157. If a free man has sexual relations with his mother after the death of his father, both of them shall be executed by burning.
158. If a free man has sexual relations with his father's first wife, who is the mother of sons, after the death of his father, that man shall lose his paternal inheritance.

159. If the first wife and a female slave of a free man both bear him sons, and the father acknowledges the sons of the female slave as his own, then the sons of the female slave shall share equally with the sons of the first wife in the paternal inheritance after the death of the father.
171. If the father did not acknowledge the sons of the female slave as his own, then the sons have no right to share in the paternal inheritance; but both the female slave and her sons shall be given their freedom.

         Economic Structures

7. If a free person buys or receives in pawn anything from another free person who is a minor, or from a free person's slave, without a contract signed by witnesses, that person is a "fence" and shall be executed.
122. If a free person wishes to pawn anything, that person is responsible for drawing up a contract signed by witnesses before completing the transaction.
123. If a free person has pawned anything without a contract signed by witnesses, and the pawnbroker later claims not to have received anything, that case is not subject to claim.
124. If a free person has pawned anything in front of witnesses (even if there is no contract), and the pawnbroker later claims not to have received anything, the pawnbroker must repay twice the amount denied.

42. If a free person signs a contract to rent a field for cultivation but fails to raise a crop in the field, that person must pay the landlord an amount equivalent to the harvests of the adjoining fields.
43. In addition, the renter who has neglected the field must plough it, so that another free person may rent and cultivate it.
45. If a free person rents a field to a cultivator and is paid in advance, but later a natural disaster destroys the crop, the cultivator must stand the loss.
46. If the rent was not paid in advance, the renter and the cultivator shall divide any crops that can be salvaged according to the proportion stipulated in their contract.
48. If a free person is in debt and loses a crop because of a natural disaster, the contract shall be changed so that person will not owe the creditor any interest for the year.

88. A merchant may collect interest of thirty-three and one-third per cent on a loan of grain, and twenty per cent interest may be charged on a loan of silver.
89. If a free person who has borrowed cannot repay the loan with silver but can repay it with grain, the merchant who made the loan is obligated to accept the grain at the rate of exchange set by the king; if the merchant tries to raise the interest-rate, that merchant shall forfeit both the capital and the interest.
92. If a merchant loans grain or silver at one rate but later tries to collect at a higher rate, that merchant shall forfeit both the capital and the interest.

215. If a surgeon performs a major operation which saves the life of a free person, that surgeon shall be paid eighty grams of silver.
217. If the person is a slave, the owner shall pay sixteen grams of silver to the surgeon.
221. If the surgeon set a broken bone of a free person, that surgeon shall be paid forty grams of silver.
223. If the person is a slave, the owner shall pay sixteen grams of silver to the surgeon.

228. If a carpenter builds a house for a free person, that carpenter shall be paid sixteen grams of silver for every thirty-five square meters of the house.
234. If a shipwright has caulked a ship with a carrying capacity of three hundred liters for a free person, that shipwright shall be paid sixteen grams of silver.

        The Operation of the Judicial System

3. If a free person commits perjury during a murder-trial and the perjury is discovered, that person shall be executed.
4. If a free person commits perjury during a damage suit, that person will be liable for the damages.

1. If a free person accuses another free person of murder but cannot prove the charge in court, the one who made the accusation shall be executed.
127. If a free person accuses a priestess or a married woman of illicit sexual relations but cannot prove the charge, that free person shall be publicly flogged and half of that free person's head shall be shaved.

5. If a judge delivers a written verdict and later changes it, that judge shall pay twelve times the amount of the damages awarded in the verdict. Then the judge shall be publicly expelled from office.

        The Rule of Law

14. If a free person kidnaps the son of another free person, the kidnapper shall be executed.
15. If a free person helps a slave of either a palace- or civil-servant escape, that person shall be executed.
16. If a free person gives shelter to a fugitive slave of either a palace- or civil-servant, that person shall be executed.

25. If a fire breaks out in a free person's house, and another free person who went to extinguish the fire saw, wanted, and looted any of the property in the house, the looter shall be executed by being thrown into that fire.
109. If rebels meet in a bar and the woman who owns the bar does not capture them and take them to the palace, that woman shall be executed.
125. If a priestess who does not live in the temple owns and operates a bar or even enters a bar for drink, that priestess shall be executed by burning.

229. If a carpenter has erected a poorly constructed house, so that the walls cave in and kill the homeowner, that carpenter shall be executed.
230. If the poorly constructed house causes the death of the homeowner's son, the carpenter's son shall be executed.
231. If the poorly constructed house causes the death of the homeowner's slave, the carpenter shall provide an equivalent slave for the homeowner.
232. If the poorly constructed house causes the destruction of the homeowner's property, the carpenter shall replace whatever has been destroyed; if the entire house caves in, the carpenter shall rebuild it free of charge.

        The Doing of Justice

6. If a free person steals sacred property from a temple or palace, that person shall be executed, along with anyone who purchased the stolen property.
8. If a free person steals ordinary property, such as an ox or a sheep, from a temple or palace, that person shall repay thirty times the amount of the stolen property. If a free person steals the same type of property from a civil-servant, that person shall repay ten times. If a thief cannot pay, that thief shall be executed.

22. If a free person robs another free person and is caught, that thief shall be executed.
23. If the thief is not caught, the city of the free person who has been robbed shall pay for the loss.
24. If the free person has been murdered [that is, robbed of life], the city shall pay one-half kilogram of silver to the relatives of the deceased.

129. If the wife of a free man is caught lying with another man, they shall both be tied up and drowned in the water; but if the husband decides to let his wife live, than the king shall let the man live.

250. If a free person's ox happens to gore another free person on the street so that the person dies, there is no cause of action.
251. If the free person's ox is a habitual gorer, and the free person has been officially notified yet does not cover the horns of the ox or tie it up, then if the ox gores another free person so that the person dies, the owner of the ox shall pay one-fourth kilogram of silver to the relatives of the deceased.

¹These are the regulations
which Hammurabi the able king has established
so that the world may enjoy stable and just government.

I, Hammurabi, have been called by the great deities.
⁵I am the shepherd
who brings well-being and abundant prosperity;
my rule is just.

So that the strong might not oppress the weak,
and that even the orphan and the widow might be treated with justice,
¹⁰I inscribed my precious words
on my stele called "King of Justice" in Babylon.

 

 
 
 

I am the king who is first of all kings;

my ability has no rival.

By the command of Shamash, who judges all the world,
¹⁵let justice now appear in the world.

By the word of Marduk my lord,
let no one mar the figures or words on my monument.

Let the oppressed person stand before my monument
and have the precious words of my inscription read aloud.

²⁰Then that person's mind shall rest easy
in the knowledge that justice will be done.

 

 
 
 

To the end of time

let the kings of the world
follow the just words inscribed on my monument.

²⁵Let no king alter the inscription
or erase the engraving.

May the kings who listen to my words
be blessed with empires as large as mine,
governing the world in justice.

³⁰As for the kings who do not listen to my words,
may their destinies be cursed,
their kingdoms overthrown,
their people scattered,
and their very existence forgotten.

³⁵Let these curses be unalterable,
and let them quickly overtake
the kings who do not listen to my words.

Discussion Questions

Many of the following questions require a close reading of the translation (and they show why I made my specific selections). The questions are organized according to the headings used above for the sections, Often, I first state questions in a specific form, then in a more general form.

      Description

How would you describe the Hammurabi Stele as a physical object? According to the Stele, an orderly society is a just society. Where did Hammurabi claim to get his view of justice? What is a "law-code"? What are the four characteristics of lex?

      Values

How would you define the "leadership principle"? How did Hammurabi's leadership promote order in his society? What perspective would the leadership principle promote?

        Marduk and Hammurabi, Hammurabi and Everyone Else

What is the main point of the poem about "Marduk and Hammurabi"? Of the poem about "Hammurabi and Everyone Else"? What shift in emphasis occurs? How would you account for this shift? How does "Marduk and Hammurabi" reflect a mythological worldview? How does "Hammurabi and Everyone Else" reflect a mythological worldview? It could be argued that the poems promote a different perspective than the regulations. Show how this could be the case. How do the poems together help you understand the intention of the regulations?

        Social Structures

[Specific questions] How would you rank the three classes of society according to regulations 196-199? What do nos. 195, 205, and 282 suggest about the relative importance of relationships between family members and between classes? How would you assess the status of women in society on the basis of nos. 138-143? What significance would you attach to the different penalties in nos. 154 and 157-158? What do nos. 158, 159, and 171 tell you about the importance of motherhood?

[General questions] How would you rank the three classes of Hammurapi's society? Are the relationships between family members more or less important than those between classes? How would you assess the status of women in Hammurapi's society?

        Economic Structures

[Specific questions] What differences and similarities do you see between regulation 7 and nos. 122-124? On the basis of these four regulations, how would you describe the importance of contracts in Hammurabi's society? In the regulations regarding land use (nos. 42-43, 45-46, and 48), who seems to be favored, the landlord or the cultivator? What two basic reasons for crop-failures are suggested in these regulations? What similarities and differences do you see in the provisions of nos. 45, 46, and 48? According to regulations 88-89 and 92, what is the incentive for investing capital? Why do you think the interest-rate is higher for grain than for silver in no. 88? What role does government play in nos. 89 and 92? What advantages and disadvantages do you see in the wage-control regulations (nos. 215, 217, 221, 223, 228, and 234)? What is the common element that ties together the work of the surgeon, the carpenter, and the shipwright? Do you find any surprises in the structure of the fees given here? Do you think there is a minimum wage?

[General questions] What was the value of contracts in Hammurabi's society? In the regulations regarding land use, who seems to be favored, the landlord or the cultivator? Why? What incentive does the Stele provide for investing capital? What role does the government play? What advantages and disadvantages do you see in the wage-control regulations?

       The Operation of the Judicial System

[Specific questions]What general principle could you derive from regulations 3 and 4 to apply to other instances of perjury? On what basis should accusations be made, according to nos. 1 and 127? What is the primary responsibility of the judge in no. 5? How would you summarize the aims of Hammurabi's judicial system? How does your summary agree/disagree with that given in the opening poem? How would you compare the aims of Hammurapi's system with the aims of our system?

[General questions] What general principle would Hammurabi apply to instances of perjury? How would you summarize the aims of Hammurabi's judicial system? How does your summary agree/disagree with that given in the opening poem? How would you compare the aims of Hammurapi's system with the aims of our system?

       The Rule of Law

[Specific questions]Could you think of extenuating circumstances for the capital crimes described in regulations 14-16 and 25? What role does the intention of the criminal play in these regulations? How would you assess the severity of the crimes mentioned in nos. 109 and 125? Why do you think Hammurabi considered them capital crimes? Nos. 229-232 exemplify a principle known as lex talionis (see also nos. 196-197). From your reading of these regulations, how would you define this principle? Do you think this same principle is operative in nos. 3-4? How would you argue for and against the justice of this principle? What view of children is implicit in no. 230?
[General questions]Could you think of extenuating circumstances for the capital crimes? What role does the intention of the criminal play? From reading the regulations about the "carpenter," how would you define the principle of  lex talionis? How would you argue for and against the justice of this principle?

       The Doing of Justice
 

[Specific questions]What nuances appear in regulations 6 and 8? Can you think of further nuances to add to these regulations? Compare the penalties in nos. 8 and 22. How would you account for the differing levels of severity? What justice is implied in no. 22 for the person who was robbed? Why do you think the city bears the responsibility in nos. 23-24? What type of legal role is implied by the king's action at the end of no. 129? What overall sense of justice do you gain from this regulation? What behavioral clues are incorporated into regulations 250-251? Do you think "enough" justice has been incorporated into these regulations? Explain.
[General questions] What is a "nuance"? What nuances appear in the first two regulations? What nuances could you add? What overall sense of justice do you gain from regulations 8-129?  What is a "behavioral clue"? What behavioral clues are incorporated into regulations 250-251? How would you evaluate the "justice" of these regulations?