Here I continue my thread on interesting aspects of the Hebrew Bible not known to most people I meet at a cocktail party.  (OK, I never talk about the Hebrew Bible at a cocktail party.  But if I did, I’m pretty sure this would never come up.)

Everyone knows about the “Ten Commandments.”  Even Christians who think the Law of Moses no longer is binding on them (because, they say, Christ “abolished the law”) (which isn’t true, but it’s what they say) claim that the Ten Commandments are valid (it’s usually not clear why these apply but the other laws don’t), even if they don’t know what they are (how many people can actually list them?).

And they in fact willingly break one of them all the time: anyone who has done any work on a Saturday is guilty!   When my undergraduate students tell me they keep the Ten and I ask them if they have ever had a job on Saturday they usually end up admitting that they try to follow the “nine commandments” – but that somehow doesn’t sound as catchy.

Among the many other things interesting about the law of Moses in the Hebrew Bible is that many of the laws found there can be found in much older law codes – centuries earlier – in other parts of the Ancient Near East.  When the Code of Hammurabi was discovered 125 years ago, it caused quite the stir.  It was written long before the Pentateuch, but some of the laws sure sound familiar.  Why is that??

Here are two of the side-boxes found in my textbook, The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction, 2^nd ed. (Oxford University Press).

BOX 5.3 THE NUMBERING OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

The term “the Decalogue” literally means “the ten words.” But what are the ten words? You would think that everyone would agree on what they were. But, as it turns out, they don’t. There are in fact three major ways of numbering the ten words, and depending on your own religious tradition (if you have one), you are probably accustomed to one or the other and may be surprised to find out that not everyone agrees with you. There is a traditional Jewish numbering, a different numbering accepted by most Protestant churches and the Eastern Orthodox churches, and yet another numbering accepted by the Roman Catholic and Lutheran churches. They work like this:

	Jewish	Protestant and Orthodox	Catholic and Lutheran
I am the LORD your God who brought you out of Egypt	1	(prologue)	1
You shall have no other gods before me	2	1	1
You shall not make idols	2	2	1
You shall not make wrongful use of the Lord’s name	3	3	2
Keep the Sabbath day holy	4	4	3
Honor your father and mother	5	5	4
Do not murder	6	6	5
Do not commit adultery	7	7	6
Do not steal	8	8	7
Do not bear false witness	9	9	8
Do not covet your neighbor’s (various) things	10	10	9 and 10

 

 

 

BOX 5.4 THE CODE OF HAMMURABI

• The various corpora of legal materials in the Hebrew Bible—the Covenant Code, the Priestly Code, the Holiness Code—were not unique in the ancient world; far from it. Many peoples had their own legal systems, and in some ways those of other peoples were remarkably similar to those of the ancient Israelites. None is more famous than the Code of Hammurabi, which long predated the corpora found in the Hebrew Bible. Hammurabi was a king of Babylonia in the early part of the eighteenth century c.e. His law code was inscribed on an eight-foot- high stele made of basalt, discovered in 1901. It contains 282 laws, some of which will sound familiar to those who have read their Hebrew Bibles (with striking differences as well). Here are some samples (Taken from Martha T. Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1997).

 

• 130: If a man pins down another man’s virgin wife who is still residing in her father’s house, and they seize him lying with her, that man shall be killed; that woman shall be released.
• 131: If her husband accuses his own wife (of adultery), although she has not been seized lying with another male, she shall swear (to her innocence by) an oath by the god and return to her house.
• 195: If a child should strike his father, they shall cut off his hand.
• 196: If an awilu (= freeperson) should blind the eye of another awilu, they shall blind his eye.
• 197: If he should break the bone of another awilu, they shall break his bone.
• 198: If he should blind the eye of a commoner or break the bone of a commoner, he shall weigh and deliver 60 shekels of silver.
• 199: If he should blind the eye of an awilu’s slave or break the bone of an awilu’s slave, he shall weigh and deliver one-half of his value (in silver).
• 209: If an awilu strikes a woman of the awilu class and thereby causes her to miscarry her fetus, he shall weigh and deliver 10 shekels of silver for her fetus.
• 210: If that woman should die, they shall kill his daughter.