Code of Hammurabi

The Prologue and Epilogue are distinct from the main text of the Code for reasons of both form and content. In terms of their literary form, they are poetry, whereas the main text consists of prose lines of case law. The Prologue and Epilogue thus function as poetic bookends to the main text, and their placement on the stele reinforces this function, appearing in ring composition around the laws. The poetic nature of the Prologue is reinforced by the litany-style multi-clause sentence about Hammurabi’s accomplishments, a grammatical construction which finds no parallel anywhere in the main text of the Code.

In its content, the Prologue varies from the main text in several ways: Its focus on the figure of Hammurabi, its overall lack of reference to the case laws of the Code, and its profoundly religious content. The main text makes no reference to Hammurabi at all, and only mentions kings in the broadest and most general terms. The Prologue, by contrast, is all about Hammurabi. It provides a mythic-religious etiology for Hammurabi’s reign, essentially presenting him as the designated agent of the god Marduk and endowed with divine wisdom to enlighten the people like the god Shamash. The Prologue lauds Hammurabi’s virtues and accomplishments to such an extent that it may come off to some modern readers as braggadocio, but it is a fairly conventional piece of royal propaganda for its era. It only mentions the laws of the Code obliquely, as part of Hammurabi’s accomplishments in defending the oppressed and enlightening the people. 

The main sensibility that the Prologue conveys is a picture of Hammurabi’s piety; it portrays him as a dutiful worshiper of the gods of Babylon and of the wider Mesopotamian pantheon. Hammurabi’s many virtues and successes are held up as evidence of the divine blessings he receives. Again, this is in contrast with the main text of the Code, where the only religious material is a passing reference here and there to a religious worker or a temple, without any doctrinal or theological content.

Due to the stark differences in content between the Prologue and the main text, most of the major themes of the Code are not yet fully in view here. One might say that the theme of The Legal Principle of Lex Talionis (“Eye for an Eye”)—that is, of reciprocal punishment—is hinted at in the Prologue’s insistence that Hammurabi has come to destroy the wicked and to punish evildoers, but if so it is only an implicit connection. 

Similarly, one might see in the Prologue’s depiction of Hammurabi as defending the weak and the oppressed a link to the theme of Social Position as a Measure of Legal Rights, but in this case the connection is weak. The actual way the theme is worked out in the Code has less to do with an all-out defense of the oppressed, and more to do with a scaled calculation of how one’s position in society affects the scope of the legal judgments one receives.