Many visitors who rush to the Paris Louvre to gaze at Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, or La Joconde as the French call her, miss seeing another of the museum’s prize exhibits: one of the most ancient legal codes in the world. Engraved on a tall black basalt obelisk, the Code of Hammurabi takes pride of place in the Richelieu wing on the ground floor.
These laws of Hammurabi, the king of the Babylonian empire from 1792 BC – 1750 BC, are written on this obelisk, known as a stele, which is decorated with an exquisite bas relief of the sun god Shamesh giving Hammurabi the laws.
Since its discovery in 1901, scholars have debated whether Hammurabi’s code was a source of the laws of Moses, who according to St Jerome was born around 1592 BC. For instance, Hammurabi’s law 196 decrees that if a man destroys the eye of a man, he may destroy his – “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”. Moses in Exodus similarly rules: “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot …”
Among the academics who suggest that the laws of Moses are dependent upon those of Hammurabi is Professor David P Wright.
In Inventing God’s Law, subtitled “How the Covenant Code of the Bible Used and Revised the Law Codes of Hammurabi”, he says that the “biblical text imitated the structure of this Akkadian text”. Although acknowledging the overlap, other scholars fiercely disagree.
As the late Fr Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, who deciphered sections of the Dead Sea Scrolls – some of which provoked a wide range of interpretations – once told me, “the pen is mightier than the spade”, and the impact of the unearthed object depends on what is written about it.
Hammurabi’s code is just one example of biblical scholars putting dissimilar explanations on an archaeological discovery. Another that has caused debate is connected to Jesus’s prohibition on divorce. Although most correlations between the Dead Sea Scrolls and early Christianity are now dismissed, there is one which some scholars, such as Joseph Fitzmyer, a Jesuit priest and professor emeritus of biblical studies at the Catholic University of America in Washington, see as being indisputable.
It is a prohibition on divorce in the Temple Scroll of the Essenes, the Jewish separatist community who lived on the shores of the Dead Sea, which mirrors the sayings of Jesus. Although the similarity has been known ever since the scroll was transcribed in the 1970s, it has received little publicity outside academia. But with Pope Francis widening the welcome to divorced Catholics, the subject is now particularly relevant.
The Essenes’ Law of the King prohibited divorce for the king, who “shall take no other wife in addition to her for she alone will be with him all the days of her life” (11QTa LVII, 17–18). This took away the Jewish autonomy of a husband to divorce his wife at will and only permitted him to remarry after the death of his wife. At the time, this outlook was unique. Divorce was accepted throughout the ancient world and in Jewish communities regulated by Mosaic Law, or Halakha.
Until the Essene document was transcribed, the first known prohibition on divorce and remarriage was thought to have come from Jesus. However, in Fitzmyer’s book The Dead Sea Scrolls and Christian Origins, he goes so far as to say: “Moreover, Jesus’s prohibition of divorce may echo the Essene prohibition of it.”
Interestingly, the sayings by Jesus on which the divorce prohibition is based are unequivocal. As David D’Avray, professor of history at University College, London, and author of Papacy, Monarchy and Marriage, who is also a practising Catholic, points out: “Few core Catholic, or for that matter Protestant, doctrines are clearly evident from New Testament texts – there being ‘‘no three persons in one God’’ as a verbal formula; no clear list of seven sacraments; no knock-down text to help one decide ‘between transubstantiation and consubstantiation’, or even a symbolic interpretation of Last Supper texts.”
However, despite the prohibition on divorce in both the New Testament and Catholic doctrine, Fitzmyer on another occasion stated that the Dead Sea Scroll discoveries “may shed some light on the Matthean divorce texts and is the occasion for a fresh consideration of those controverted verses”.
He further suggested that when confronting broken marriages, another slant to the controversial question should be raised: “Whether one looks solely at the absolute prohibition, traceable to Jesus, or at the process of understanding and adaptation which is in the New Testament itself and with which the modern Church can identify only by entering into the process and furthering it.”
But it must be remembered that whether writing about Hammurabi and Moses or on divorce and the Dead Sea Scrolls, hundreds of books have been written on the subject. One object can generate a thousand arguments.
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