In the winter of 1901–1902, Jacques de Morgan's French expedition was excavating the acropolis of Susa in southwestern Iran when his team uncovered three fragments of a polished black basalt monolith — seven feet four inches tall when reassembled, the upper register carved with Hammurabi standing before Shamash, the Babylonian sun-god of justice. Below the relief, in dense Akkadian cuneiform running down the front and back, ran 282 numbered case-laws bracketed by a prologue and an epilogue. The stele had been carried to Susa as war-booty by the Elamite king Shutruk-Nahhunte around 1158 BC, twelve hundred miles from where Hammurabi had originally erected it in Babylon. Jean-Vincent Scheil produced the editio princeps in 1902. It has stood in the Louvre since. Hammurabi reigned in Babylon roughly 1792 to 1750 BC — within a century of Abraham's traditional lifetime. The case-laws cover property, marriage, theft, false witness, slavery, surgical malpractice, builder liability, and the famous lex talionis clauses on bodily injury. "If a man has destroyed the eye of a free man, they shall destroy his eye. If he has broken the bone of a free man, they shall break his bone." Anyone reading Exodus 21–23 — the Covenant Code — recognizes the world. Eye-for-eye, ox-goring rules, statutes governing the slave struck by the master, restitution for the borrowed beast that dies — the legal vocabulary is shared across the ancient Near East. The differences are equally instructive. Hammurabi's code is overtly class-stratified — different penalties for awīlum, muškēnum, and slave — and contains no equivalent to Sinai's commandments on worship, idolatry, or Sabbath. The Hebrew Covenant Code embeds civil law inside covenant theology that Hammurabi's prologue, dedicating the stele to the god Marduk, frames very differently. The parallels demonstrate that Mosaic law was given into a recognizable legal landscape, not in a vacuum; the contrasts mark out where Sinai goes its own way. The stele is on permanent display in the Louvre's Department of Near Eastern Antiquities. Sources: Jean-Vincent Scheil, Textes élamites-sémitiques: Code des lois de Hammurabi (Mémoires de la Délégation en Perse 4, 1902); Martha T. Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor (SBL Writings from the Ancient World 6, 1995); James B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (Princeton, 1969); Exodus 21:1–23:33.
Dated to roughly 1792–1750 BC, the Code of Hammurabi establishes the legal conventions of the ancient Near East into which the Mosaic Covenant Code was later delivered. Its parallels with Exodus 21–23 — lex talionis, ox-goring statutes, slave provisions — demonstrate shared legal idiom; its divergences sharpen what is distinctive in Sinai's legislation.