The Comparison with the Bible, and What It Does and Does Not Show

The provisions on retaliation in kind, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, are the reason this collection is quoted in almost every discussion of biblical law, and the resemblance is real. So are the differences. The Babylonian penalties are graded by the class of the person injured, so that the same act costs a different amount depending on whether the victim was an awilum, a mushkenum or a slave, while the formulation in Exodus does not make that distinction in the same way. Both traditions treat the goring ox, the deposit left for safekeeping and the negligent builder, sometimes in a similar order.

What the resemblance proves is argued rather than settled. Positions range from direct literary dependence, through a shared stock of legal formulations circulating across the ancient Near East for a thousand years, to independent solutions to the same problems. The atlas records the debate rather than picking a side. One further fact is worth keeping in view: the stele is in the Louvre because an Elamite king carried it off from Babylonia as plunder, which is how a Babylonian monument came to be excavated in Iran in 1901. A column of its text was chiselled away, apparently to make room for an inscription that was never cut.