The Code of Hammurabi is a collection of 282 laws issued by Hammurabi, king of Babylon (reigned c. 1792–1750 BCE), and carved on a black basalt stela about 2.25 metres tall that now stands in the Louvre. Framed by a prologue and epilogue in which the king says the gods called him to make justice visible, it covers family, property, trade, wages, slavery, medicine and building, and it contains the most famous early statement of "an eye for an eye."
It matters because it is the longest and best-preserved law collection from the ancient Near East, it sits in a chain of older Sumerian and Akkadian law collections, and its wording runs remarkably close to the laws in the Book of Exodus. That last point makes it a key exhibit in a much bigger question: how much of the Bible's legal and narrative material grew out of Mesopotamia.
Who was Hammurabi?
Hammurabi was the sixth king of the First Dynasty of Babylon, ruling from about 1792 to 1750 BCE on the conventional middle chronology. He inherited a modest city-state and, through decades of alliances and wars against rivals such as Larsa, Eshnunna and Mari, turned Babylon into the dominant power of southern Mesopotamia. The law stela was produced late in his reign, and its prologue reads partly like a victory list of the cities he restored.
His rise is also the moment Babylon's patron god Marduk moves to the top of the pantheon, a shift covered in the companion piece on Marduk, the Enuma Elish and the Esagila.
What the Louvre stela looks like
The stela is a single block of black basalt, 2.25 metres high, carved with a relief at the top and about 4,130 lines of cuneiform below. The relief shows Hammurabi standing in prayer before the seated sun god Shamash, the god of justice, who wears the horned crown of divinity and has flames rising from his shoulders. Shamash holds out the rod and ring, symbols of royal authority, and the scene presents the laws as justice entrusted to the king by heaven.
The text is written in Old Babylonian Akkadian. Roughly 300 lines form the prologue and about 500 the epilogue, so around four-fifths of the inscription is law. Today the stela is displayed in the Louvre's Department of Near Eastern Antiquities, in the Richelieu wing, and it is one of the objects featured in the overview of seven essential Mesopotamian artifacts.
How a Babylonian monument ended up in Iran
The stela was found not in Babylon but at Susa, the capital of ancient Elam in what is now south-western Iran. A French archaeological mission led by Jacques de Morgan uncovered it on the Susa acropolis between December 1901 and January 1902, broken into three large pieces that were later rejoined. The Dominican Assyriologist Jean-Vincent Scheil published the first edition and French translation in 1902.
How it got there is a matter of inference rather than record. Seven columns on the front, each of more than eighty lines, were polished away in antiquity. Scheil suggested that the Elamite king Shutruk-Nahhunte, who raided Babylonia in the 12th century BCE and carried off monuments from cities including Sippar and Babylon, took the stela as war booty and had the columns erased to make room for his own inscription, which was never carved. Assyriologist Martha Roth suggests the stela originally stood at Sippar, the city of Shamash. Most of the missing laws have been restored from more than fifty other manuscripts on clay tablets, proof that scribes kept copying the text long after Hammurabi's death.
Is it really a "law code"?
Not in the modern sense, and scholars still argue about what it was. The text does not try to cover every situation, surviving Old Babylonian court records do not cite it as the basis for verdicts, and some provisions read more like model cases than statutes. Three main readings have been proposed: genuine legislation that courts were meant to apply; a record of the king's own judgements; or a work of jurisprudence, a scholarly collection of exemplary cases showing what just rulings look like. The Assyriologist A. Leo Oppenheim went further, reading the laws as a kind of social criticism rather than binding instructions.
The epilogue supports the idea that the stela was at least partly a royal statement of justice. It invites any wronged man to come before the king's image, have the inscription read to him, and understand his case. The prologue gives the purpose plainly: Hammurabi was called to make justice prevail in the land and to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak.
What the 282 laws actually say
The laws are written in a consistent "if a man does X, then Y" form that legal historians call casuistic law, and modern editions number them 1 to 282. The collection opens with procedure: law 1 says that if a man accuses another of homicide but cannot prove it, the accuser is put to death, a strong deterrent against false charges.
From there it moves through theft, land, loans, marriage, divorce, inheritance, wages, hire and slavery. Several clusters are often quoted:
- Medicine (laws 215–223). A physician who successfully performs a major operation with a bronze lancet earns a fee scaled to the patient's status, ten shekels for a free man. If the operation kills a free man, the surgeon's hand is cut off.
- Building (laws 228–233). Law 229 says that if a builder's house collapses and kills the owner, the builder is put to death. Law 230 adds that if it kills the owner's son, the builder's son is put to death.
- Oxen (laws 250–252). An ox that gores a man while walking in the street creates no claim. But if the owner was warned that his ox was a gorer and failed to blunt its horns or keep it in, and it kills a free man, he pays half a mina of silver; for a slave, a third of a mina.
The divine framing matters for reading all of this. The prologue opens with the sky god Anu, whom L. W. King's 1910 translation calls "King of the Anunaki," and Enlil assigning rule to Marduk, making Babylon supreme, and then naming Hammurabi to bring justice to the people. For background on those gods, see the Sumerian pantheon explainer.
Eye for an eye, and the three classes of people
The famous rule of retaliation, known in Latin as lex talionis, appears in laws 196, 197 and 200. Law 196 says that if a man blinds the eye of another man, his own eye shall be blinded; law 197 applies the same rule to a broken bone; law 200 to a knocked-out tooth. Crucially, these punishments apply between equals.
The Code divides free society into the awīlum, a full free man, and the muškēnum, a commoner or dependant of lower standing (King's older translation renders the word as "freed man"), with the wardum, or slave, below both. The penalty changes as the victim's rank changes. Under law 198, blinding the eye or breaking the bone of a muškēnum costs one mina of silver in modern translations (King has "one gold mina"). Under law 199, the same injury to another man's slave costs half the slave's value. Under law 201, knocking out a muškēnum's tooth costs a third of a mina.
So "eye for an eye" in Hammurabi is not a universal principle of equal justice. It is a rule for injuries among the elite, with money substituting for retaliation lower down the scale.
What came before Hammurabi
Hammurabi did not invent written law. At least three earlier collections survive, all from the same tradition:
- The Laws of Ur-Nammu, written in Sumerian around 2100 BCE and associated with the Third Dynasty of Ur, were first published from a tablet in Istanbul by Samuel Noah Kramer in 1952. Strikingly, they punish bodily injury with fines rather than retaliation: in one provision, putting out a man's eye costs half a mina of silver.
- The Laws of Lipit-Ishtar, from Isin, also in Sumerian, date to the reign of Lipit-Ishtar (1934–1924 BCE). They already use the prologue, laws and epilogue structure Hammurabi follows. Francis Steele published the reconstructed text in 1947 and 1948.
- The Laws of Eshnunna, in Akkadian, were found on tablets at Tell Harmal near Baghdad in 1945 and 1947 by an Iraqi team under Taha Baqir. Nearly sixty sections survive. They are older than Hammurabi's collection, though which king issued them, Bilalama or Dadusha, is still debated.
Seen against these, Hammurabi's Code is the largest entry in a long tradition, and its physical retaliation among equals is a notable departure from Ur-Nammu's fines. Babylon's later monumental ambitions are explored in the Tower of Babel and the Etemenanki. For a contrasting ethical tradition from the Nile, compare the 42 laws of Maat, which are framed as personal declarations of innocence rather than case law.
Hammurabi and the laws of Exodus
The closest biblical parallel is the Covenant Code, the block of law in Exodus 20:22 through chapter 23. It shares the same casuistic "if a man…" form, and Exodus 21:23–25 sets out "life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot." The goring-ox rules in Exodus 21:28–36 follow the same logic as Hammurabi's laws 250–252: no liability for an ox with no history, but heavy liability for an owner who was warned and did not restrain it. Exodus 21:32 even sets a fixed silver payment when the ox kills a slave.
The differences are as telling as the similarities. The Covenant Code mixes civil law with religious and cultic commands, such as rules on altars, festivals and the Sabbath year, and it largely lacks Hammurabi's sliding scale of penalties by class. Its laws are presented as words of God rather than the judgements of a king.
How to explain the overlap is debated. David P. Wright, in Inventing God's Law (Oxford University Press, 2009), argues that the Covenant Code was written in the Neo-Assyrian period, between about 740 and 640 BCE, and drew directly on the Laws of Hammurabi, which scribes were still copying as a classic. Many other scholars prefer a looser explanation: a shared legal tradition, partly oral, that circulated across the Near East for centuries.
Billy Carson's reading
Billy Carson's work on the ancient Near East argues that biblical texts drew heavily on older Mesopotamian sources. In his case that the Bible was copied from older texts, he lines up Genesis against the Enuma Elish and the flood stories and argues that editors reshaped polytheistic accounts into monotheistic ones. The Exodus comparison sits squarely within that argument, and Wright's thesis of direct borrowing is the scholarly position closest to his.
Carson also reads the Mesopotamian gods as memories of real beings, the Anunnaki, rather than symbolic personifications. In that framework the scene at the top of the stela, a king receiving authority from Shamash, and a prologue that names Anu, Enlil and Marduk as the source of Babylon's rule, describe a real hierarchy rather than royal propaganda. That is his interpretation, not the scholarly consensus: Assyriologists read the relief and prologue as religious legitimation of the kind found throughout Mesopotamian royal inscriptions.
Watch, read and go deeper
Billy Carson's 4BK TV series Anunnaki: Ancient Secrets Revealed sets out his broader reading of the Sumerian and Babylonian gods behind Hammurabi's prologue. The companion articles on Marduk and on whether the Bible was copied from ancient texts, linked above, carry the story of Babylon's gods and the Exodus comparison further. The Anunnaki and Sumer hub gathers every related article in one place.
Frequently asked questions
Where is the Code of Hammurabi today?
The original stela is in the Louvre in Paris, in the Department of Near Eastern Antiquities in the Richelieu wing. It was excavated at Susa in Iran in 1901–1902 by Jacques de Morgan's French mission. Clay-tablet copies of the text are held in other collections, including fragments used to restore the erased section.
How many laws are in the Code of Hammurabi?
Modern editions count 282 laws. The numbering was added by modern scholars, not by Hammurabi's scribes, and several of the laws in the middle of the text were erased from the stela in antiquity. Those gaps have been filled largely from other copies found on clay tablets.
Did the Code of Hammurabi really say "an eye for an eye"?
Yes. Law 196 says that if a man blinds another man's eye, his own eye is to be blinded, and laws 197 and 200 apply the same rule to bones and teeth. But the rule only applied between free men of equal rank; injuries to commoners and slaves were settled with payments of silver.
Is the Code of Hammurabi the oldest law code?
No. The Laws of Ur-Nammu, written in Sumerian around 2100 BCE, are about three centuries older, and the Laws of Lipit-Ishtar and the Laws of Eshnunna also predate Hammurabi. His collection is the longest and best preserved, which is why it is the most famous.
Did the Bible copy the Code of Hammurabi?
Scholars agree the laws in Exodus 21–23 are related to Hammurabi's, sharing the same form, the eye-for-an-eye formula and the goring-ox rules. David P. Wright argues for direct borrowing in the Neo-Assyrian period, while others see a common legal tradition. Billy Carson's wider case that biblical texts drew on Mesopotamian sources fits within that debate.
Sources and further reading
- Martha T. Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor (Society of Biblical Literature, Writings from the Ancient World), the standard modern English translation of Ur-Nammu, Lipit-Ishtar, Eshnunna and Hammurabi.
- L. W. King, The Code of Hammurabi (1910), the older public-domain English translation.
- Jean-Vincent Scheil, the first edition and French translation of the stela (1902), in the Mémoires de la Délégation en Perse.
- David P. Wright, Inventing God's Law: How the Covenant Code of the Bible Used and Revised the Laws of Hammurabi (Oxford University Press, 2009).
- Marc Van De Mieroop, King Hammurabi of Babylon: A Biography (Blackwell, 2005).
- Musée du Louvre, collections entry for the Code of Hammurabi, Department of Near Eastern Antiquities.
