For What It's Worth Department:
Here are various quotes from JW literature regarding the code of Hammurabi:
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w8711/1p.12par.8"You Must Be Holy..."***
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True, the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, which is said to predate the Mosaic Law, covered a similar span of subjects. Some of its statutes, such as the law of ‘eye for eye,’ or talion, are similar to Mosaic principles. Critics thus claim that Moses merely borrowed his laws from Hammurabi’s code. Hammurabi’s code, however, did little more than glorify Hammurabi and serve his political interests. God’s Law was given to Israel ‘for their good always, that they might keep alive.’ (Deuteronomy 6:24) There is also little evidence that Hammurabi’s law was ever legally binding in Babylon, serving as little more than "legal aid for persons in search of advice." (TheNewEncyclopædiaBritannica, 1985 edition, Volume 21, page 921) The Mosaic Law, though, was binding and carried just penalties for disobedience. Finally, Hammurabi’s code focuses on how to deal with wrongdoers; only 5 out of its 280 laws are direct prohibitions. The thrust of God’s Law, however, was toward preventing, not punishing, wrongdoing.
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w5511/15p.702QuestionsFromReaders***
Questions
FromReaders
How can the claim that the law of Moses was copied from the code of Hammurabi be answered?—F.M.,UnitedStates.
Even if two law codes cover similar situations it would not prove one was copied from the other. People face the same general misdemeanors and crimes, and two separated groups might very logically cover these same crimes in their laws. Because of the faculty of conscience that Jehovah put in man, persons have similar reactions to what is right and what is wrong in human conduct, unless their conscience has been calloused. Romans 2:14, 15 (NW) says: "Whenever people of the nations that do not have law do by nature the things of the law, these people although not having law are a law to themselves. They are the very ones who demonstrate the matter of the law to be written in their hearts, while their conscience is bearing witness with them and, between their own thoughts, they are being accused or even excused." So here is specific evidence or admission that sometimes nations without the Mosaic law took a course similar to that law, doing by nature what is right because of conscience and being accused by their conscience when they did what was wrong.
This must not be overlooked. Even before the Babylonian king, Hammurabi, who seems to have been contemporaneous with Abraham, there were organized groups and societies of men with laws and judicial precedents to govern their life and practice. From the time of the Noachian flood forward, for instance, Jehovah dealt with a patriarchal society, a society under the leadership of righteous family heads like Noah and Abraham. The actions of these societies were governed in such matters as contracts and purchases, property rights, rules of work, family and community responsibility for individual members thereof, real estate transfer, theft, violation of marital vows, slavery, and so forth, by written or unwritten codes of law.
So instead of godly law and order being drawn from Hammurabi’s code or other pagan codes, it seems to have been the other way around. Sir Charles Marston, on page 51 of his book TheBibleComesAlive, says: "It seems certain that Hammurabi’s laws were a codification of the older and existing laws and customs of the Semitic Race—the race that sprung from Noah’s son Shem, the race to which the Hebrews belonged." The evidence is, therefore, that heathen nations carried over many ancient laws and customs from the Noachian system of law and order, which pattern the faithful Hebrew patriarchs followed.
Moreover, examining the two systems of law, that of Hammurabi and that given through Moses, the latter is seen to be the more just and equitable of the two and hence the more faithful to the original legal system that came into being among God’s faithful people. For instance, if an Israelite slaveholder became brutal and struck a male or female slave so that an eye was lost he was forced to let the slave go free, while under Hammurabi’s code he was let off with merely paying half the slave’s value. (Ex. 21:26; Ham. No. 199) Hammurabi’s code said: "If it [a poorly constructed house] cause the death of a son of the owner of the house, they shall put to death a son of that builder." (Ham. No. 230) But the Mosaic law code specifically forbade putting to death a son for his father’s sin: "Fathers should not be put to death on account of children and children should not be put to death on account of fathers. Each one should be put to death for his own sin."—Deut. 24:16, NW.
So it cannot be said that the statutes of the Mosaic law were borrowed from or mirrored the same spirit of the Hammurabic code. Rather, if anything, the Hammurabic code was a heathen corruption of earlier righteous statutes put forward by the Semitic patriarchal society under Jehovah’s direction.—TheWatchtower, July 15, 1952, page 434, paragraph 8.
I always find it interesting that "true believers", like most fundy religions, will NEVER, EVER concede that the Bible comes from earlier source material. And god forbid that the source be Babylonian in origin!
For instance, the Creation story has roots in Babylonian mythology. NO!, says the true believer, the Babylonian story is obviously a corrupt version of the true version (except there is no proof to back up this "obvious" conclusion...)
Parts of the book of Jude quote, almost word for word, from the Apochryphal book of Enoch. So the writer of Jude accepted the book of Enoch as sacred text, right? Wrong! "Obviously, the writer of Jude quoted from the same original source that the writer of Enoch did!" Except, once again, there is no proof for that assertion.
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w019/15p.30Enoch Walked With God in an Ungodly World*** Does
the Bible Quote From the Book of Enoch? The Book of Enoch is an apocryphal and pseudepigraphic text. It is falsely ascribed to Enoch. Produced probably sometime during the second and first centuries B.C.E., it is a collection of extravagant and unhistorical Jewish myths, evidently the product of exegetical elaborations on the brief Genesis reference to Enoch. This alone is sufficient for lovers of God’s inspired Word to dismiss it.
In the Bible, only the book of Jude contains Enoch’s prophetic words: "Look! Jehovah came with his holy myriads, to execute judgment against all, and to convict all the ungodly concerning all their ungodly deeds that they did in an ungodly way, and concerning all the shocking things that ungodly sinners spoke against him." (Jude 14, 15) Many scholars contend that Enoch’s prophecy against his ungodly contemporaries is quoted directly from the Book of Enoch. Is it possible that Jude used an unreliable apocryphal book as his source?
How Jude knew of Enoch’s prophecy is not revealed in the Scriptures. He may simply have quoted a common source, a reliable tradition handed down from remote antiquity. Paul evidently did something similar when he named Jannes and Jambres as the otherwise anonymous magicians of Pharaoh’s court who opposed Moses. If the writer of the Book of Enoch had access to an ancient source of this kind, why should we deny it to Jude?—Exodus 7:11, 22; 2 Timothy 3:8.
How Jude received the information about Enoch’s message to the ungodly is a minor matter. Its reliability is attested to by the fact that Jude wrote under divine inspiration. (2 Timothy 3:16) God’s holy spirit guarded him from stating anything that was not true.
Speaking for myself, I just remember a really cool computer game from the 1970's, written in Basic, called "Hammurabi", which was a text based, economics and agriculture simulation. That was the first time I ever heard of Hammurabi, until later when we learned about the code in World History.
