The Relations between the Laws of Babylonia and the Laws of the Hebrew Peoples / The Schweich Lectures

by C. H. W. Johns

The Higher Critics do not mend matters. They would bring down the date of the early Mosaic laws much later, necessitating a period of more than a thousand years between the two codes. It would take hours to argue out the merits of various systems of chronology, and the truth probably is that we have not yet recovered reliable data to fix either Babylonian or Biblical chronology with sufficient accuracy. Babylonian chronology is, however, in much the better state, and late rulings make the death of Hammurabi fall somewhere near 1916 B.C. But how we are to reconcile such a date for Abraham with the Biblical data is a knotty question to which I can contribute no help to solution.

We have here made some assumptions which may be all wrong. I am often asked with much concern whether Hammurabi really is Amraphel. Now that is a question which cannot possibly be answered until much else has been answered first. Hammurabi we know; his life and reign are as well or better known than those of the Saxon kings of England. But who was Amraphel? All we know of him is contained in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis. He is there said to be King of Shinar. If Shinar in that passage means what it clearly means elsewhere, he was a king of Babylonia, or at least of some part of that land for which Shinar is used as a synonym. But even if Shinar does not certainly mean Singara, part of Assyria, it could quite well be a part of the Mesopotamian area with which the early Israelites became acquainted, and so transferred its name to all Babylonia. But Hammurabi is never said to be King of Shinar, nor of any land but Amurru, Akkad, Elam, &c., or Sumer. The latter name means South Babylonia, where Rîm-Sin of Larsa maintained his supremacy in spite of Hammurabi until his thirty-first year. Till then no one could call Hammurabi King of Sumer, and then it is certain he could be no ally with Rîm-Sin. Hammurabi was, however, always King of Babylon. He could hardly have been called King of Shinar by any one who knew anything about his history.

How comes Hammurabi’s name to be rendered by Amraphel? We know that his name was variously rendered in cuneiform, being a foreign name to the Babylonian scribes. But they never spell his name as ending in l. It has been suggested that one character which denotes bi and can also be read bil may have misled some Hebrew writer who transcribed the cuneiform account which he found among the archives of some ancient city in Palestine. There is nothing whatever improbable in such ancient cuneiform records being kept. The discovery of the Tell-el-Amarna tablets proves that the kings of Palestine before the Israelite invasion wrote to their neighbours far and near in cuneiform and in the Babylonian language, and also that they spoke a language closely related to Hebrew. But there is no evidence that they misread cuneiform. Let us go on with the assumptions supposed to have restored the credibility of the fourteenth chapter of Genesis. The first point has been that, assuming a cuneiform record to be translated by a Hebrew writer (? Moses) who knew some cuneiform Babylonian, that writer blundered into misreading the name of one of the most celebrated kings of Babylon, with whose history he must have been little acquainted and whose name he found written in a way to which there is no known parallel. Further, he called him King of Shinar. No tenable suggestion has yet been made as to what cuneiform signs he rendered by Shinar. There also he must have found something to which there is no parallel in the native titles of Hammurabi. There is not a single reason in anything said of Amraphel to suggest anything properly said of Hammurabi, except that the names have two out of four letters in common.

But we are told that this identification is supported by the identification of Rîm-Sin of Larsa with Arioch of Ellasar. Rîm-Sin and Arioch have only one letter in common, though Larsa and Ellasar have three. It is a perfect triumph of ingenuity to identify Rîm-Sin and Arioch, and it has been done on various suppositions. But it is also clear that on no supposition was a Hebrew right in reading Rîm-Sin as Arioch, nor has the former name been yet found written in the form which he has been supposed to have so misread. The confirmation of one blunder turns out to be the assumption of another as bad or worse. But the others, Chedorlaomer King of Elam and Tidal king of ‘Nations’, are also accounted for by a series of misreadings either in cuneiform or out of it into Hebrew or in Hebrew. Grant, then, all that is claimed for this astounding blunder-exegesis. Amraphel was meant for Hammurabi by a man who persistently misread cuneiform. The cuneiform account being reliable history, we can reconstruct what it said about Hammurabi and Rîm-Sin with two somewhat vague allies in Palestine. But what credence are we to give to this Hebrew writer’s reading of cuneiform in the case of the name of Abraham? At what period of Hammurabi’s reign was an alliance with his life-long enemy Rîm-Sin likely or even possible? When did either make an expedition to the West under the suzerainty of Elam?

But we might consume hours discussing each thread of the web of fancies which some modern scholars have woven over and about the fourteenth chapter of Genesis. There is no mention in Babylonian or Assyrian documents of any one of the persons there named, nor any event recorded similar to those there placed. This fact neither confirms nor contradicts the Hebrew narrative. The doubts thrown on the historicity of the chapter by higher critics were based on arguments which, sound or not, are in no way touched by any cuneiform texts.

So our question must be put differently. It should be: Was the writer of the fourteenth chapter of Genesis of opinion that Abraham was a contemporary of Hammurabi? I am not sure that he ever heard of Hammurabi or knew who he was. The whole story, if reliable, may apply to some other kings than those usually supposed, and this would suit what little we know of chronology much better. It is precisely the identification of Amraphel with Hammurabi which professedly rehabilitates the fourteenth chapter of Genesis, but at the expense of other Biblical statements equally important. It is always well to distinguish the statements of archaeologists and Assyriologists on unrelated subjects from the results of science. No matter how distinguished an Assyriologist may be, his opinion on other matters than Assyriology cannot be laid to the charge of that branch of knowledge. The statements made in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis may yet be shown to be affected by Assyriological research, but most of the recent speculations about them deserve neither the name of Archaeology or Assyriology.

The effect of modern criticism is to make us cautious in another direction. I have hitherto spoken of the Laws of Moses, and I shall continue to do so throughout my lectures. But I trust you will not misunderstand my position. To speak of the Laws of Moses is simply to use the title which was given to them before the rise of modern criticism and by which they are still most widely known. It does not necessarily assume that any one ever existed at all like the Moses described in the Old Testament. Some regard Moses as the name of a mythical hero—a national ideal into whose personification were run all the mythological material which the Hebrew writers deemed appropriate. This need not be the same thing as to deny absolutely the personality of Moses; for another great conqueror of men, Alexander the Great, most assuredly lived, and one clear proof of it, if we had no other, is that his deeds so impressed men that the Arabic historians ascribe to him just as many mythical stories as they know. You have only to read A. Jeremias’s Old Testament in the Light of the Ancient East to see how almost every incident in the life of Moses may be paralleled by some astral motif in the mythical story of other ancient heroes or demigods.

But the effect of modern criticism, astral theory, comparative mythology, &c., on the history of Moses leave him much like a lump of sugar in a cup of tea. We know it was there because the tea is sweet, but details as to size or shape are now very unreliable. Nor does Assyriology help us much, for it never mentions or refers to Moses any more than it does to Abraham, or to Israel even until the days of Shalmaneser, 859-825 B.C.

In speaking of the Laws of Moses then, the use of the word Moses is not meant to imply any opinion or to prejudice any question as to the personality or history of the lawgiver or the date of the law. It is used solely as a convenient periphrasis for the current Hebrew lawgiver, just as Hammurabi may be taken as a periphrasis for the Babylonian legislator. That the Babylonian king originated all or even any of the laws enacted in his Code is not asserted. But the historical case of Hammurabi does remove all a priori improbability that a Hebrew legislator could draw up a code of laws at a much later date. Further, it should make us beware of arguing anything from the absence of mention in such documents as have come down to us, for, until the excavation of his monuments, no one among modern scholars had guessed his name or surmised his existence.

This analogy, while it forbids us to deny the existence of Moses, does not show that any or all of the laws ascribed to Moses were in any sense due to him. But that a leader in the position to which tradition assigned Moses could perfectly well promulgate a code of laws as full and complete as the whole Mosaic law, even for a people in the primitive state of society in which Israel is often supposed to have been at the Exodus, is obvious. He had only to avail himself of the knowledge of cuneiform, available at that time both in Canaan and in Egypt, and import copies of the Hammurabi Code from Babylonia if they were not at hand where he then was. He could exercise his judgement as to what would be suitable for his people, add what he chose, and reject what he disliked. That he did this or anything like it is not asserted, but it would be so natural for any one in his position then that we have no excuse for surprise if we should find indications of his having done exactly that.