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Babylonian law is a subset of cuneiform law that has received particular study due to the large amount of archaeological material that has been found for it. So-called "contracts" exist in the thousands, including a great variety of deeds, conveyances, bonds, receipts, accounts, and most important of all, actual legal decisions given by the judges in the law courts.
The laws are written in the Old Babylonian dialect of Akkadian. Their style is regular and repetitive, and today they are a standard set text for introductory Akkadian classes. [ 134 ] However, as A. Leo Oppenheim summarises, the cuneiform signs themselves are "vertically arranged ... within boxes placed in bands side by side from right to left ...
The laws are arranged in casuistic form of IF (crime) THEN (punishment)—a pattern followed in nearly all later codes. It institutes fines of monetary compensation for bodily damage as opposed to the later lex talionis ('eye for an eye') principle of Babylonian law. However, murder, robbery, adultery and rape were capital offenses.
Hittite texts from Anatolia include laws regulating the institution of slavery. Of particular interest is a law stipulating that reward for the capture of an escaped slave would be higher if the slave had already succeeded in crossing the Halys River and getting farther away from the center of Hittite civilization — from which it can be ...
As in most ancient empires, slaves were an accepted part of Neo-Babylonian society. In contrast to slavery in ancient Rome, where slave-owners often worked their slaves to death at an early age, slaves in the Neo-Babylonian Empire were valuable resources, typically sold for money matching several years of income for a paid worker. Slaves were ...
Thus, the Babylonian Talmud (redacted in 500 CE) contains an extensive set of laws governing slavery, which is more detailed than found in the Torah. The major change found in the Talmud's slavery laws was that a single set of rules, with a few exceptions, governs both Jewish slaves and non-Jewish slaves.
The code speaks of witchcraft and the flight of slaves. c. 1934-1924 BC – Code of Lipit-Ishtar of Isin – With a typical epilogue and prologue, the law deals with penalties, the rights of ordinary people, right of kings, marriages, and more. c. 1800 BC – Laws of the city of Eshnunna (sometimes ascribed to king Bilalama) Babylonian law
In Exodus 21, as in the Code of Hammurabi, the concept of reciprocal justice seemingly applies to social equals; the statement of reciprocal justice "life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe" [29] is followed by an example of a different law: if a slave-owner ...