The Ancient Near Eastern Background of Biblical Law

Several collections of laws are known from ancient Mesopotamia and Asia Minor; the most famous are the Laws of Hammurabi, king of Babylon (eighteenth century BCE). A small fragment from about the time of Hammurabi, found at Hazor (then a Canaanite city), with laws written in Akkadian similar to those of Hammurabi, shows that the Mesopotamian legal tradition was known in Canaan before the arrival of the Israelites and perhaps had been imitated there by local rulers.

There are many similarities between these other ancient law collections and the Torah’s law collections. Their laws are formulated in the same style: “If [or] when a person does X, [then] Y shall happen.” Torah laws and other ancient law collections also share similar cases or topics. Sometimes the similarities are so striking as to suggest that a specific biblical law was influenced by its ancient Near Eastern counterpart, as with, for example, laws about goring oxen (Exodus 21:28–32).

In addition to laws, some Mesopotamian kings proclaimed remissions of debt and release of debt servants and of foreclosed land. These proclamations are similar to the biblical laws in Exodus 21:1– 4, Leviticus 25:10–55, and Deuteronomy 15:12, except that the Mesopotamian proclamations generally took place at the beginning of a king’s reign and, in some cases, again several years later, rather than at fixed intervals of seven or fifty years as in the Bible.

In both biblical and ancient Near Eastern law collections, a narrative often precedes the laws and describes the events leading to their promulgation. For example, the text on Hammurabi’s stela begins with a prologue that does this. And the laws are followed by an epilogue that lists, in detail, the blessings and curses that would befall future rulers who either preserve the laws or change them, or damage the monument on which they are inscribed. Analogous blessings and curses follow the laws in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28, and blessings follow the laws in Exodus 23.

Prologues and epilogues with these functions are also found in ancient Near Eastern treaties between states, especially treaties between suzerains and their vassal states. Both of these ancient literary genres—the law collection and the treaty—are apt parallels to the biblical laws in that they present rules issued by kings to their subjects, just as the biblical laws are issued by the divine sovereign to Israel. The treaties, even more than the law collections, form an important model for the Torah’s covenant (a treaty) between God and Israel, according to which Israel owes exclusive loyalty to God, just as vassals owe exclusive allegiance to their suzerain, and God promises protection to Israel, just as the suzerain promises to protect his vassals. Treaties also contain provisions for depositing copies of them in sanctuaries and reading them aloud periodically so that their terms will be remembered and followed, provisions that are similar to the biblical requirements to deposit the Tablets of the Covenant and Deuteronomy in the sanctuary and to read Deuteronomy to the people every seven years (Exodus 25:16; Deuteronomy 31:10–12, 25–26).

Notwithstanding the similarities to, and undoubted influence of, Mesopotamian laws, there are important differences as well. One major difference is that the Bible regards God as the author of the laws. In Mesopotamia, the king claimed authorship of the laws. Although the king was endowed by the gods with knowledge of truth and justice, the laws themselves were the king’s words and the authority behind them was his. In addition, many biblical laws emphasize values not expressed in other ancient Near Eastern law collections, such as the concern for slaves and strangers and for protecting human life; they treat murder as a crime for which the killer cannot avoid capital punishment by compensating the victim’s family, and they never prescribe capital punishment for crimes against property. A notable overall thrust of biblical law is that it seeks to maintain a balanced distribution of political power and economic status in society by apportioning authority among various officials (judges, king, priests, and prophets) and requiring that loans be interest-free.