Hammurabi, Defender of Justice?

Chapters 7 to 8 of Marc Van De Mieroop’s biography on Hammurabi describe Hammurabi’s rulership after unifying the ancient Near East, including probably his best-known achievement, the creation of a law code, which is monumentalized on his personal stele. The chapter “Laws of Hammurabi” from the book Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor goes into further detail regarding Hammurabi’s law code by translating the entire law code from Babylonian to English.

In the prologue to his law code, Hammurabi lists one of his duties as “to prevent the strong from opposing the weak” (Code of Hammurabi, i. 27-49). Nevertheless, several of the laws that appear in the body of Hammurabi’s code seem to contradict this statement. In his biography on Hammurabi, Marc Van De Mieroop describes laws where the perpetrator received a punishment equal to the crime he committed only if the perpetrator and the victim were of equal status. As an example, “if a member of the elite blinds the eye of another member of the elite, they shall blind his eye” (Van De Mieroop 105). If the social status of the perpetrator and the victim were not equal, however, the punishments could be much less severe than the crime, or vice versa. For instance, if a member of the elite injured a commoner, he only had to pay a fee rather than sustain the same injury, as he would have been required to if he was equal in status to the commoner.

These examples seem to contradict Hammurabi’s claim that he protected the weak from the strong. However, Van De Mieroop also mentions that Hammurabi’s laws were not actually meant to serve as a functioning law code. Rather, they were meant to portray Hammurabi as “the paradigm of a just king” (Van De Mieroop 111), by showing how he had undertaken the effort ot establish resolutions for potential legal disputes. Van De Mieroop further states that evidence of legal proceedings from the past shows that Hammurabi’s law code was rarely used to settle legal disputes. In this context, Hammurabi’s law code and the aforementioned laws make more sense. The fact that those laws were unfair is irrelevant, since they were probably rarely, if ever, used. The inclusion of them in Hammurabi’s law code was what mattered, because it showed that Hammurabi made it his duty to settle problems between his people as a good ruler should.