Most Christians believe Moses to be the original lawgiver. Moses gave a written copy of the law he was supposed to have received from the hand of God to the Hebrews in the wilderness. Moses, however, did not supply the first written law code. From the city of Eshunanna archaeologists have discovered legal texts which predate Moses' law by about three hundred years; Moses lived approximately 1700 BCE and the laws of Eshunanna date back to approximately 2000 BCE. Even before Eshunanna, the ruler Ur-Nammu, the founding ruler of the 3rd Dynasty of Ur, published a law code somewhere between 2100 BCE and 2000 BCE.

Probably the most famous law code of Mesopotamia was that of Hammurabi, a contemporary of Moses in Babylon (1728 BCE to 1686). Some of the laws include: "If a seignior (a nobleman) stole the property of church or state, that seignior shall be put to death; also the one who received the stolen goods from his hand shall be put to death", "if outlaws have congregated in the establishment of a woman wine seller and she has not arrested those outlaws and did not take them to the palace, the wine seller shall be put to death"; "if a seignior has knocked out a tooth of a seignor of his own rank, they shall knock out his tooth"; and "if a seignor made a breach in a house, they shall put him to death in front of that breach and wall him in."(1) We can plainly see the similarity of thought between the code of Hammurabi and the Deuteron cal canon. 

As Moses, Hammurabi was also believed to have received the law from the hand of his god. At Susa an eight foot high block of black diorite known as a stele was found which contained this code of laws, at the top of the stele Hammurabi is depicted as receiving the scrolls from Marduk, the god of justice.

Christianity stems from the Jewish faith and the Jews would like to take the credit for having given forth the first laws, but archaeology proves this not to be the case. Since many of the Jewish ideas originated in Babylon it would not be surprising to find many of these ideas carried over to the Christian church, such as Holy Water, the order of nuns, the mitre of the pope and other holy vestments.