§ 66. If a man has received money from a merchant, and his merchant puts him under bonds and he has nothing to give, and he gives his orchard for management unto the merchant and says: “The dates as many as are in my orchard take for thy money,” that merchant shall not consent; the owner of the orchard shall take the dates that are in the orchard and the money and its interest according to the tenor of his agreement he shall bring to the merchant. The remaining dates from the orchard shall belong to the owner of the orchard.
As in Palestine, there was no system of rental; the Bible contains almost no horticultural laws. “Orchards” in Babylonia were, as the last section shows, date orchards. The corresponding fruit in Palestine was the grape. Hebrew laws deal with vineyards as with fields. If a man destroys the crop in another’s vineyard, he is to give the best of his own (Exod. 22:5). He is to leave his crop unpicked every seventh year for the poor (Exod. 23:11). He is not, when he gathers it, to glean it carefully, but leave some for the poor (Lev. 19:10). When one goes into his neighbor’s vineyard, he may pick what he wishes to eat, but must carry nothing away. Horticulture among the Hebrews was not so highly developed as in Babylonia.
Five columns of writing have been erased after § 65 from the column on which the laws are written. This erasure was probably made by the Elamite conqueror, who carried the column as a trophy to Susa, in order to inscribe his own name on it, but unfortunately, if that was the intention, it was never carried out. We are accordingly in ignorance of his name. It is estimated that 35 sections of laws were thus lost. As already noted, one can be supplied from a fragment found at Susa, and from other tablets fragments of two or three other sections can be made out. One of these incomplete fragments refers to the rights of tenants of houses. It reads:
[If] a man rents a house for money, and pays the whole rent for a year to the owner of the house, and the owner of the house orders that man to vacate before the expiration of his lease, the owner of the house from the money that he received shall ............
Unfortunately, the tablet is broken and the penalty for breaking the lease is unknown. It is interesting to know that Babylonian tenants were protected from avaricious landlords, even though no parallel law exists in the Old Testament.
Two other sections of laws that once stood in this lacuna can now be supplied from a considerably defaced tablet from Nippur in the University Museum in Philadelphia, which once contained a part or all of the code of Hammurapi. These sections are as follows:
A Bankrupt Law[464]
If a man borrows grain or money from a merchant and for the payment has no grain or money, whatever is in his hand he shall in the presence of the elders give to the merchant in place of the debt; the merchant shall not refuse it; he shall receive it.
A Partnership Law[465]
If a man gives money to a man for a partnership, the gain and profit that accrue are before the gods; together they shall do business.