A Law Collection That Is Also a Prayer

The monument found at Susa is a black stele more than two metres high, and the laws occupy only its middle. Above them is a relief of the king standing before Shamash, the sun god who is also the god of justice, seated on his throne and holding out the rod and the ring. Below and after the laws comes a long epilogue: blessings on any future ruler who preserves the text, and an extraordinarily detailed sequence of curses, deity by deity, on anyone who erases his name or alters what he wrote.

That frame is not decoration. The prologue says the gods called him to make justice appear in the land, to destroy the wicked, and to stop the strong from oppressing the weak, and the collection is offered as evidence that he did. Assyriologists have long noticed that Babylonian court records almost never cite these provisions when deciding cases, which suggests the stele is a royal monument and an account rendered to the gods rather than a statute book a judge consulted. The practical instrument of relief was something else: the periodic royal edict, the mesharum, which cancelled certain debts and released people who had been pledged against them, and which a king issued as an act rather than as a text.