Codes For Humans To Live By Since Time Began

Nadene Goldfoot                                     
                                                                             

Moses, Prince of Egypt

Moses was born in 1391 BCE according to the Torah, and died at age 120 in 1271 BCE. This happened after Hammurabi of Babylon had lived.  Jews had been taken to Babylon after the Exodus in 586 BCE, a place they passed by ages before on their way from Ur of Chaldees to Canaan.  That could have been the time of Hammurabi and his code  that the Israelites would have known very well and had carried with them.  Moses was raised by the Egyptians as a prince, so if he knew of the code, and so did many other Egyptians.  He, through G-d's directions, made vast improvements on the code that was so similar.   The Mosaic Law is a combined set of laws of the land and a religion pertaining to one G-d only, a new concept in a polytheistic Egypt and the rest of the world.    
                                                 

Hammurabi ruled Babylon from 1792 to 1750 BCE (according to the middle chronology),or 3,992 years ago;  or from 1728 to 1686 BCE according to Jewish records.   At the head of the stone slab is Hammurabi receiving the law from Shamash, and in the preface, he states, "Anu and Bel called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak; so that I should rule over the black-headed people like Shamash, and enlighten the land, to further the well-being of mankind." The laws were arranged in 44 columns and 28 paragraphs; some follow along the rules of "an eye for an eye."  The Hammurabi Code remained as a set of laws of the land but did not involve their religious beliefs of a polytheistic world.  
                                                       

This is the stele.
Hammurabi is portrayed receiving the laws directly from Shamash the sun god. (a parallel to Moses can be made here). Shamash is the dominate figure—he is seated on his throne, wears a crown composed of four pairs of horns, holds a ring and staff, and has flames issuing from his shoulders. Although Hammurabi is subservient to the god he still makes a powerful authority statement by addressing the god directly. Even though he has his hand raised in reverence he shows that he has a personal relationship with the gods while mere mortals do not.

This is the upper part of the stele that is approximately 7' 4" tall. The laws, written in cuneiform, are inscribed on the lower part of the monument.  His famous legal code had very severe penalties where they had to enforce the Jus Talionis ("An eye for an eye" or the law of retaliation is the principle that a person who has injured another person is to be penalized to a similar degree by the injured party. In softer interpretations, it means the victim receives the [estimated] value of the injury in compensation.).  It resembles the Code that Moses brought to the Jews with its 613 Laws.  Interestingly, the cultures differed a great deal, enough to have caused Abram and his family to leave for Canaan.  Whereas Hammurabi depended on custom and obedience to his will, Moses appealed to the ethical nature of his laws to the human conscience.
                                             

Babylon

  "Hammurabi's Code is only consequential law; i.e., if you do X then Y will happen to you. The Torah on the other hand gives moral pronouncements; i.e., "You shall not…" - as well as consequences.

Hammurabi's Code contains no positive obligations toward others. The Torah on the other hand is replete with directives of love, kindness, lending, charity, etc.

Hammurabi's Code protects the nobility and land-owners as privileged classes. The class of people "protected and favored" in the Torah are the widows, the orphans, the poor and the strangers."

"Whatever similarity Hammurabi's Code bears to the Torah may be attributed to the following: Before the Torah was given at Sinai, Mankind already had seven categories of laws in the "Noachide Laws" which G-d had commanded to Noach. The Seven Laws of Noah, also referred to as the Noahide Laws or the Noachide Laws, are a set of imperatives which, according to the Talmud, were given by God as a binding set of laws for the "children of Noah" – that is, all of humanity. Beginning with Genesis 2:16, the Babylonian Talmud listed the first six commandments as prohibitions against idolatry, blasphemy, murder, adultery, and robbery and the positive command to establish courts of justice (with all that this implies). After the Flood a seventh commandment, given to Noah, forbade the eating of flesh cut from a living animal (Gen. 9:4). Though the number of laws was later increased to 30 with the addition of prohibitions against castration, sorcery, and other practices, the “seven laws,” with minor variations, retained their original status as authoritative commandments and as the source of other laws.

The Jewish Calendar has us celebrating the year of 5781 on September 19, 2020, this coming Friday night which is Evev Rosh Hashanna.  So the story of Noah took place sometime after our planet's birthday of 5781, which is not very long ago considering scientists say we've been around for at least 10,000 years.  This puts us back almost 8,000 years ago.  

These laws were passed down from generation to generation, and these laws were the subject of study in the ancient Academy of Shem and Ever. I once heard from Rabbi Simcha Wasserman, zatzal, that Hammurabi most likely absorbed some ideas from this academy."  However, from my 2 findings, Hammurabi lived 400 years before Moses.  

The Jewish culture is imbedded with the gift of reading and writing, the love of learning, the performance at age 13 of difficult reading before a large group with a celebration of this skill as a reward (bar mitzvah).  The mark of their cultural interests and beliefs is usually a bookcase in the living room full of books!  So be it that our first library was in a cave 5,000 years ago!  We wrote and read in Ur back then and haven't stopped since.                                                                                                  

"In the Ancient Near East, clay tablets (Akkadian ṭuppu(m) 𒁾) were used as a writing medium, especially for writing in cuneiform, throughout the Bronze Age and well into the Iron Age. Cuneiform characters were imprinted on a wet clay tablet with a stylus often made of reed (reed pen)." Found in mint condition.  

Inside Shem and Ever's Cave in Safed
Adult men pray with a prayer shawl (tallit) in the morning and in the afternoon,
and on the Day of Atonement all day long.  The cave is still used both for prayer and study, usually on a Shabbat afternoon in summer. Although the gates are normally locked, you can peer through them and imagine that you can see Shem and Ever still bent over their scrolls, studying. If you are lucky you might find the gates open and be able to join a study group, a prayer minyan, or just look around the caves. In front of the cave is a courtyard with stone benches where you can sit and contemplate.

                                         Shem And Ever's Cave in Safed (Tzfat) 

Legend has it that Noah's son Shem and his great-grandson Ever, set up a Beit Midrash or House of Study in this cave. Depending on which story you believe, Avraham, Isaac or Jacob, or two or all three of them, went at separate times, to this cave to study Torah with these descendants of Noah.  

The Stele was taken as plunder by the Elamite king Shutruk-Nahhunte in the 12th century BCE and was taken to Susa in Elam (located in the present-day Khuzestan Province of Iran), where it was no longer available to the Babylonian people. However, when Cyrus the Great brought both Babylon and Susa under the rule of his Persian Empire and placed copies of the document in the Library of Sippar, the text became available for all the peoples of the vast Persian Empire to view.

In 1901, Egyptologist Gustave Jéquier, a member of an expedition headed by Jacques de Morgan, found the stele containing the Code of Hammurabi during archaeological excavations at the ancient site of Susa in Khuzestan.

The stele unearthed in 1901 had many laws scraped off by Shutruk-Naknunte. Early estimates pegged the number of missing laws at 34, however the exact number is still not determined and only 30 have been discovered so far. The common belief is that the code contained 282 laws in total.

Reference:
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi
https://www.historians.org/teaching-and-learning/teaching-resources-for-historians/teaching-and-learning-in-the-digital-age/images-of-power-art-as-an-historiographic-tool/stele-with-law-code-of-hammurabi
https://ohr.edu/ask_db/ask_main.php/210/Q2/compare Hammurabi to Moses laws
https://www.safed.co.il/cave-of-shem-and-ever.html