The discovery of the Hammurabi Code is one of the greatest achievements of archaeology, and is of paramount interest, not only to the student of the Bible, but also to all those interested in ancient history.

The Code of Hammurabi (Codex Hammurabi) is a well-preserved ancient law code, created ca. 1790 BC (middle chronology) in ancient Babylon. It was enacted by the sixth Babylonian king, Hammurabi. One nearly complete example of the Code survives today, inscribed on a seven foot, four inch tall basalt stele in the Akkadian language in the cuneiform script. One of the first written codes of law in recorded history. These laws were written on a stone tablet standing over eight feet tall (2.4 meters) that was found in 1901.

Most scholars believe that the numerous similarities between the Covenant Code (Exodus 20:23-23:19) and Mesopotamian law collections, especially the Laws of Hammurabi, which date to around 1750 BCE, are due to oral tradition that extended from the second to the first millennium. This book offers a fundamentally new understanding of the Covenant Code, arguing that it depends directly and primarily upon the Laws of Hammurabi and that the use of this source text occurred during the Neo-Assyrian period, sometime between 740-640 BCE, when Mesopotamia exerted strong and continuous political and cultural influence over the kingdoms of Israel and Judah and a time when the Laws of Hammurabi were actively copied in Mesopotamia as a literary-canonical text. The study offers significant new evidence demonstrating that a model of literary dependence is the only viable explanation for the work. It further examines the compositional logic used in transforming the source text to produce the Covenant Code, thus providing a commentary to the biblical composition from the new theoretical perspective. This analysis shows that the Covenant Code is primarily a creative academic work rather than a repository of laws practiced by Israelites or Judeans over the course of their history. The Covenant Code, too, is an ideological work, which transformed a paradigmatic and prestigious legal text of Israel's and Judah's imperial overlords into a statement symbolically countering foreign hegemony. The study goes further to study the relationship of the Covenant Code to the narrative of the book of Exodus and explores how this may relate to the development of the Pentateuch as a whole.

Smith examines the history of Hebrew law from its beginning in the Decalogue to its close in the Priestly Code, considers its relation to contemporary social history and compares it to the Hittite, Assyrian and Babylonian codes. Originally published: Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1931]. ix, 285 pp. The extensive appendices contain complete translations of the Code of Hammurabi and the Assyrian and Hittite codes, providing a background to the study of Hebrew law. Recommended by Roscoe Pound in the Outlines of Lectures on Jurisprudence (5th. Ed.) 233. "Professor Smith traces the history of the Hebrew law as it is found in the Pentateuch. He repudiates the Mosaic origin of the contents of the Old Testament with the exception of the primitive Decalogue, the authorship of which he does ascribe to Moses. He discusses the Covenant Code, the Deuteronomic Code, Ezekiel's Code, the Holiness Code, and the Priestly Code; and he presents a new translation of the Code of Hammurabi, the Assyrian Code and the Hittite Code, thus bringing together in one body the records of the legislation of all the great peoples of Western Asia. A vivid background is thus afforded for the study of Hebrew law." --Louis E. Levinthal, 7 Temp. L.Q. 126 1932-1933 J[ohn].M[erlin]. Powis Smith [1866-1932] was a professor of Old Testament language and literature at the University of Chicago. In The Bible: An American Translation (1935), the Old Testament was translated by a group of scholars under his editorship. He was the author of The Moral Life of the Hebrews (1923) and other works.