History as past ethics; an introduction to the history of morals

by P. V. N. Myers

Since the law code of a people embraces all those duties the performance of which the state or public authority attempts to enforce, the ethical spirit of an age or people finds one of its truest embodiments in its laws. It is this fact which renders of such extraordinary interest to the student of the history of morals the recent discovery of the code of the Babylonian king Hammurabi,[107] the oldest known code of public and private morality. This law system exhibits in some departments of life an enlightened and advanced morality, yet one with serious limitations and defects, a morality in many respects like that of the Mosaic code of the kindred Semitic nation of Israel.

The code informs us that the Babylonian feeling as to what is right and wrong, just and unjust, in the ordinary business relations of life was much like the average conscience of to-day. In some matters the Babylonian law held ground morally in advance of that held by modern codes, as, for instance, in providing that in case of misfortune the debtor should have both his rent and the interest on his debt remitted.[108]

But in its provisions touching the family relations the code reveals ethical conceptions very different from our own. As in other Oriental law systems, ancient and modern, polygamy was regarded as a moral institution. A man in debt could bind his wife and children out to service or sell them as slaves, but not for a longer period than three years.

The punishments meted out to offenders were harsh and cruel, yet not much more atrociously cruel than those provided by the English laws of three hundred years ago. Impaling, burning, cutting out the tongue, gouging out the eyes, cutting off the fingers, breaking the bones of the hands were common penalties.

Sometimes the punishment was measured by the primitive principle of the Lex talionis; it was eye for eye, bone for bone, tooth for tooth.[109] This law of retaliation was carried out so rigorously as to result in the punishment of the innocent for the guilty. Thus if a man caused the death of another man’s daughter, the law required that his own daughter should be put to death.[110] If a builder, through the faulty construction of a house, caused the death of the son of the owner through the falling of the house, the son of the builder was to be put to death.[111] It is in these provisions of the code that we find the greatest divergence between the Babylonian feeling and our own as to what is right and just. Yet this Babylonian conscience which sanctioned the visiting of the iniquity of the father upon the children is a conscience which we shall meet with in societies much more advanced than that for which the Hammurabi code was formulated.

The Babylonian conscience in regard to slavery as embodied in the code was about like our own conscience respecting negro slavery of a generation or two ago. The slave was viewed as a mere chattel, and the master possessed over him the power of life and death. Kind treatment, however, was enjoined by the law. There was a fugitive-slave law which reads curiously like our negro-slave laws of two generations ago, in which the aiding and harboring of a fugitive slave is made a crime punishable with death.[112]

The slave class was recruited, as in other lands of the ancient world, from prisoners of war, foundlings, debtors, criminals, and through the sale by fathers and husbands of their children and wives. The system seems to have undergone no essential changes or ameliorations, such as we shall see effected in the Hebrew system, by growth in ethical feeling during the four thousand years of Babylonian history. It is true that enfranchisement of slaves was not uncommon, the freed man becoming the dependent of his old master, but it does not appear that moral sentiment afforded the motive for manumission.[113]

International morality; war ethics

The international ethics of the Babylonians and Assyrians was in every essential respect the international ethics of their age in the Semitic world. It was the character of the religion of these peoples which determined in large measure international relations in the Mesopotamian lands throughout the period of Semitic ascendancy. “The conception of religion as an alliance between God and man against other peoples and their gods never ceased in Mesopotamia.”[114] This conception was essentially the same as that held by the Hebrews down to the time of the great prophets. “Let us go up against them, for our god is greater than their god,” is the war cry of four thousand years of history of the Semitic world.

The Assyrians far surpassed the Babylonians in their ferocious cruelty in the treatment of war captives. Notwithstanding their advanced morality in some departments of life, in this domain they stood, if we except the practice of cannibalism, on practically the same level as savages. Witness the following inscription of Assur-natsir-pal, in which he tells of his treatment of certain prisoners of war: “The nobles, as many as had revolted, I flayed; with their skins I covered the pyramid. Some [of these] I immured in the midst of the pyramid; others above the pyramid I impaled on stakes.... Three thousand of their captives I burned with fire. I left not one alive among them to become a hostage.... I cut off the hands [and] feet of some; I cut off the noses, the ears [and] the fingers of others; the eyes of the numerous soldiers I put out. In the middle [of them] I suspended their heads on vine stems in the neighborhood of their city. Their young men [and] their maidens I burned as a holocaust.”[115]