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Pre-roman Hammurabi Law code in 8th century BC of
Babylonia ruler was an eye for eye and a tooth for tooth. Strict law was applied to women too. If her husband suspected adultery,
in presence of priest she could swear to her innocence and then return to her husbands home. But accused is not wanted by
her husband, she had to undergo test to prove her innocence she had to swear on god and jump into sea if drowned she was culprit
and if she survived she was honest. A man could divorce his wife without giving a reason, but if she had borne his children
the plus point for woman was that she could claim the share of the property to raise children, and the dowry back. Opposite
to it if woman wanted to be separated from her husband, she had to prove her innocence failing which her husband keep her
as servant untill her death and also escape from returning dowry. If the case turned serious and she failed to establish the
proof of her innocence court could sentence her to be drowned into water. Proving innocence was difficult in husbands house
as long as she did not have support from his family.
BOOKS:
Inventing God's Law : How the Covenant Code of the Bible Used and Revised the Laws of Hammurabi. Most scholars believe that the numerous similarities between the Covenant Code (Exodus 20:23-23:19) and Mesopotamian
law collections, especially the Laws of Hammurabi, which date to around 1750 BCE, are due to oral tradition that extended
from the second to the first millennium. This book offers a fundamentally new understanding of the Covenant Code, arguing
that it depends directly and primarily upon the Laws of Hammurabi and that the use of this source text occurred during the
Neo-Assyrian period, sometime between 740-640 BCE, when Mesopotamia exerted strong and continuous political and cultural influence
over the kingdoms of Israel and Judah and a time when the Laws of Hammurabi were actively copied in Mesopotamia as a literary-canonical
text. The study offers significant new evidence demonstrating that a model of literary dependence is the only viable explanation
for the work. It further examines the compositional logic used in transforming the source text to produce the Covenant Code,
thus providing a commentary to the biblical composition from the new theoretical perspective. This analysis shows that the
Covenant Code is primarily a creative academic work rather than a repository of laws practiced by Israelites or Judeans over
the course of their history. The Covenant Code, too, is an ideological work, which transformed a paradigmatic and prestigious
legal text of Israel's and Judah's imperial overlords into a statement symbolically countering foreign hegemony. The study
goes further to study the relationship of the Covenant Code to the narrative of the book of Exodus and explores how this may
relate to the development of the Pentateuch as a whole.
Oldest Code of Laws in the World : The Code of Laws Promulgated by Hammurabi, King of Babylon, B. C. 2285-2242
(1903)
WOMEN AND CIVILISATIONS
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