Term Paper on "Laws of Moses and Hammurabi"

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The laws of Ancient Mesopotamia represent the oldest known collections of codified law -a tradition that predates by many centuries the earliest written laws of other ancient civilizations, such as those of India and China.

This civilization; therefore, was unique in committing to writing an entire system of legal thinking. Enacted during the Eighteenth Century before Christ, Hammurabi's famous code was preceded by numerous other written compilations of the law, the earliest yet found being that of the Sumerian king Uruinimgina, or Urukagina, a ruler of city of Lagash in the 24th Century B.C.

The "Reforms of Uruinimgina" already reveal a resort to tradition and to divine sanction as necessary underpinnings of the legal enactments of human beings.

Hammurabi likewise attributed his code to the gods,

Anum and Enlil had named him, the pious ruler, to proclaim justice in the land, 'to eliminate the evil and the wicked, so that the strong should not oppress the weak... To give justice to the orphan and the widow'. He also stated that 'the wronged man shall stand before the inscribed stela and read its precious ordinances'.

As with the later Mosaic Law, the code's purpose is conceived as a divine attempt to bring justice to the affairs of humankind. The king serves as the guarantor of the rights of the weak and the champion of the oppressed. Worldly order would reflect the righteousness of the divine plan.

Hammurabi's code contains an interesting mixture of civil and criminal matters. There are laws relating to public administration, family relations, economic resources, and religious ritual.

This holistic approach contrasts notably with much of the legal thought of our own time. Hammurabi's world was one in which all aspects of society were united into one. No real distinction existed between the public and the private spheres. Matters we believe to be firmly under private control - or matters of conscience - were readily accepted as being under the governance of the state. No doubt, such an attitude reveals a fairly homogeneous society, or at least one that aspired to be so. Religion and the supernatural were seen as forces controlling virtually every facet of daily life, and there was no question that ordinary men and women were subject to the dictates of the gods. What the gods had created and set into motion was what should and must be. The merely mundane concerns of commerce and property ownership were as much a part of the divine order as anything else. The importance of perpetuating the family line is treated matter-of-factly, as though it were it kind of business arrangement, the principles underlying it also sanctioned by the gods. As in the Bible, a woman might allow her slave to bear her husband's child if she is unable to have a child herself. The Code of Hammurabi not only permits such a situation, it also foresees the inherent dangers to the relationship between the wife and her husband. It takes note of the possibility of a rivalry between the childless wife and the slave who is now the mother of the husband's child.

Here, too, the law is the instrument of harmony, the private life of the family a mirror of the larger society. If husband and wife and their children can interact in an orderly manner, remain productive and law-abiding, so too can the merchants, priests, soldiers, craftsmen, and officials, that comprise the "family" of the city or state.

Better known to modern day Westerners, the laws of Moses comprise the Biblical answer to the Code of Hammurabi. Like the Babylonian ruler's decrees, they are also attributed to Divine authority. The Bible emphasizes the sacral quality of the commandments that Moses brings down from Mt. Sinai. Moses himself is an especially blessed individual. He was specifically chosen by God to be the bearer of His message. As in the earlier Sumerian civilization, the Babylonian kingship of Hammurabi was conceived as representing the extension of the god's rule over the whole of civilization - "The dominion of the ruler reached beyond the land of Sumer proper and became coextensive with the cosmic lordship of the god."

In the same way, God's laws as given to Moses supersede those of Pharaoh and apply to the Israelites wherever they might live. Human peoples do not create their own versions of morality and right conduct, rather they must submit to the Divine Will, acting in accordance with principles that are universal, or nearly universal in their application. Divine sanction prevents the code from being contested. The most powerful man or women remains less powerful than God, or the gods; less knowledgeable, less wise, and less virtuous. Society is a web of complex interactions on a great variety of levels. These relationships transcend the personal, encompassing not only the greater community, but even the cosmic order.

As all of society is ultimately under God's control. So too do the laws of Moses mix the civil and the criminal, the private and the public, and the religious with the administrative. The very first commandment is an injunction that one worship no other gods but the one true God. This religious commandment is followed by others that speak to the relationships between husband and wife, parent and child, and between the various individuals within a community. The proscriptions cover interpersonal relations as well as the relationship of individuals to the material property. The hundreds of commandments that make up the rest of the Mosaic Code cover practically every imaginable aspect of Ancient Israelite culture. Many of them apply to concerns still prominent today, namely issues of juridical procedure, the settlement of disputes, and the definition of and punishment of criminal actions. St. Thomas Aquinas described the Mosaic laws as,

Concerning justice, since they involve actions '"hat are directed to the ordering of one man in relation to another, which ordering is subject to the direction of the sovereign as supreme judge." He says explicitly there that a contemporary sovereign could rightly enact laws modeled on those precepts: "if a sovereign were to order these judicial precepts to be observed in his kingdom, he would not sin."

In other words, the Laws of Moses function as a divine blueprint for good government, and as a model for the conduct of the righteous ruler. All future legislation should work toward the ideals embodied in these decrees. The identification sin with criminality, or with the failure to observe proper procedure in civil and private matters, underscores the importance of taking the needs of others into consideration. It sets out the real meaning of a civil society, and the ideal state of human interactions.

Nevertheless, the Laws of Moses, like their Babylonian counterpart, can be cruel and often apparently unforgiving. The principle of an "eye for an eye" famously expounded in the Code of Hammurabi is also clearly present in that of Moses. Both codes base many of their penalties on the philosophy that wrongdoers deserve to suffer punishment for their actions. Murderers, for example, must be put death, frequently in ways that are believed to correspond to the gravity of the offense, the manner of execution being more terrible for crimes deemed - by God or the gods - more egregious and more damaging to the social and cosmic order. In this sense, "justice," an otherwise high-sounding… READ MORE