to account and his master shall cut off his ear.
The judgments of righteousness which Hammu- rabi the mighty king confirmed and caused the land to take a sure guidance and a gracious rule.
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ee
[There are three sections of the Code which have been recovered to us from the fragments of the copies made by Assyrian scribes. They were once to be found in the tive columns which are now erased from the stele. They may be given here, for the sake of completeness.—
§ X. If a man has borrowed of a merchant and has assigned him a plantation of dates and said, ‘Take the dates that are in my plantation for thy money,’ the merchant shall ‘not consent. The owner of the plantation shall take the dates that are in the plantation and he shall answer to the merchant for the loan and its interest according to the tenour of his bond. The dates that are over, which are produced in the plantation, the owner of the plantation shall take for himself.
§ Y. If a house tenant has paid the year’s rent for the house in full to the landlord, but the land- lord has ordered the tenant to go out before the time is up, the landlord because he has ordered the tenant to leave before his time is up, shall give back . . . of the rent.
§ Z. If a man has to pay, in money or corn, but has not the money or corn to pay with, but has goods, he shall give to the merchant whatever he has, before witnesses. The merchant shall not object, he shall receive it}.
III. Comparison oF THE CoDE WITH EARLY HEBREW LEGISLATION.
The comparison of such a Code with the Mosaic Laws is not one to be dismissed in a few para- graphs. Its obvious likenesses are not more re- markable than the contrasts which exist. The whole question of common origin may depend on how these are regarded. In some cases a conscious deviation is as strong proof of influence as an agreement.
i. THE QUESTION STATED, AND THE DATA AVAILABLE FOR ANSWERING IT.—1. Wemay begin by stating, as concisely as may be, what we under- stand by the influence of the Code of Hammurabi on Mosaic legislation. There need be no discussion as to whether Moses knew cuneiform. Such a proposition could be maintained only by insisting, firstly, on the literal truth of the statement that Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyp- tians (Ac 7”) ; secondly, that such learnine must have included cuneiform. The latter proposition is not very safe. The evidence of the Tel el-Amarna tablets can only establish the existence of some scribes at the courts of Amenophis II, and ty. who could read and write Babylonian. The cur- rent opinion of critics does not ascribe much of the Hebrew Law to Moses. So his personality may be set aside,
Nor do we need to discuss exactly how far Baby- lonian influence had modified the life of the in- habitants of Palestine before the incursion of the Hebrews. Some men doubt whether that ineur- sion did not find a widely spread Hebrew popu- lation already in possession. Whoever was in Palestine then, of whatever nationality, there is evidence that the chief rulers of the settled dis- tricts wrote in Babylonian to the kings of Egypt, and, presumably, also to the kings of Mitanni, Assyria, and Babylonia. Whether they used any other form of writing besides cuneiform we do not know. They did use words which were not pure Babylonian, but are at least Semitic, if not He- brew. These words they glossed by a more or less accurate Babylonian. That the whole population of Palestine was Semitie or Hebrew, or read Babylonian literature at that time, are not. pro- positions that we need trouble about. All that we need is that the people who drew up the Hebrew legislation, whenever that was done, should have
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embodied the laws observed in Palestine at their own date, and that those laws should have there remained unchanged from the time when they were the same as were to be found in Babylonia at the time when Hammurabi codified them. Indirect influence is then proved.
2. The laws may have once been common to all the Semitic races, or to the populations they dis- placed or overran. The greater part of the com- mon ideas of the two legislations may be due to this source. It may not even be Semitic at all, only human, such as man, anywhere and every- where, under similar conditions would and did agree upon. Such a common stock, including many most striking things, is no proof of Babylonian influence, either upon the Hebrews or upon the inhabitants of Palestine before the Exodus. Thus the principle of retaliation, the making a punish- ment as far as possible an exact reproduction of the injury, was a primitive-view. It might well be Sumerian in Babylonia, and pre-Israelitish in Palestine. It omits the consideration that such a punishment only gratifies revenge, does not benefit either the ottenderortheinjured. Itischaracteristic of very inadequate justice. Now, in the Code we find that already a system of compensation to the injured was growing up. But the aristocracy, the amélt, would not accept money for their bodily injuries, they insisted upon the primitive < eye for eye, tooth for tooth, limb for limb’ (g§ 196, 200, 197), and so did the Hebrews (Ex 214, ete.). If this had been a peculiar or abnormal form of carrying out the principle, we might argue for a racial connexion between the Babylonian aristocrats of Hammurabi’s time and the Hebrews. This has been done on the ground of linguistic affinities. But there is no reason to doubt that if retaliation, pure and simple, were the rule anywhere, it would be expressed in this way. All we can say is, that, whether from pride, conservatism, or racial pecu- liarity, the aristocrat of Babylon clung to the primitive method of punishing bodily injuries. The acceptance by the commoner, or muskénu, of com- pensation may well point to a different race and a subject position. It would be interesting if we could show that the conquered races in Palestine used to accept compensation in a similar way.