Code of Hammurabi

This final section of the Code is less homogenous in terms of content than either of the previous two sections. With the major categories of property, business, and family law already addressed, the final laws are a miscellany of various other topics, ranging from personal injury law to professional trade law to livestock management. In addition to a more disparate array of topics, this section also sees a slight shift in form, moving to notably shorter formations of case laws than was the case in the sections devoted to family law. With its shorter laws and a less-coherent organizational scheme, this miscellaneous section is more closely akin to the form and content of earlier law codes, like the Sumerian Code of Ur-Nammu.

The Code’s major themes all find expression in this section of laws in one way or another. The theme of The Presumption of Innocence and the Importance of Intention—the dual foundations that allow an accused person to mount a fair legal defense—appears in these laws. While the first half of the theme found its clearest expression at the beginning of the Code’s case laws, the second half of the theme appears here. With regard to causing an injury in a quarrel, these case laws allow the perpetrator to claim a lack of intention to cause real harm, and their penalty is diminished as a result. This theme also shows up in the section on professional trades, which includes a law that allows barbers to claim ignorance of an enslaved person’s status when applying a mark on them, should that mark later be found to be in error, and this claim of ignorance is counted as a lack of criminal intent.

One of the most important themes of Hammurabi’s Code finds expression in its fullest form in this section: The Legal Principle of Lex Talionis (“Eye for an Eye”), or reciprocal justice. This form of jurisprudence is exemplified by the old adage, borrowed from biblical language, of “an eye for an eye”—an example that goes all the way back to the principle’s first notable historical appearance in the Code of Hammurabi. This principle applies not only to eye injuries, but also to broken bones, and is even extended to applications in the professional trades, as shown in the example of the builder sentenced to death for a fatal collapse in a house he built.

The principle of lex talionis, as described in these laws, is not always as clear-cut as the rule of “an eye for an eye” would make it seem due to Social Position as a Measure of Legal Rights. One’s position within Babylonian society dictated the scale of the penalties involved in cases of injury, like putting out an eye or breaking a bone. If the injury occurs between equals, the principle of lex talionis would apply; however, if it is a free-born Babylonian man who injures a freedman or an enslaved person—that is, someone in a lower class—then reciprocal justice does not apply, and the free-born man would simply pay a fine. 

The protection the Code offers to a person is often contingent, at least in part, on that person’s position in society. This is amply demonstrated in the closing laws, which show that enslaved persons did not generally come under the legal protection of the Code for their own sakes, but for the sakes of their enslavers. The brutality of the Code’s final law—chopping off an enslaved person’s ear for a comment said in anger to the enslaver—reveals the extent to which social position determined the application of one’s rights. In the case of enslaved persons, those rights were nearly none, except in special circumstances.

There is a certain irony with the way the Code’s case laws conclude, especially when contrasted with Hammurabi’s self-assessment at the end of the Prologue. The king held himself up as a defender of the oppressed, and yet his Code closes on a note of oppression: The mutilation of a human being who has no recourse to legal defense.