Document C: Hammurabi's Code: Society

 

Document C: Hammurabi’s Code—Society

The following selections from Hammurabi’s Code discuss rules for Babylonian society. As you read, pay attention to how society was structured. Was everyone treated equally?

 

 

117. If any one fails to pay a debt, and sells himself, his wife, his son, or daughter for money or give them away for forced labor: they shall work for three years in the house of the man who bought them and in the fourth year they shall be set free.

138. If a man wishes to separate from his wife who has borne him no children, he shall give her the amount of her purchase money and the dowry which she brought from her father's house, and let her go.

141. If a man's wife … wishes to leave it: if her husband offer her release, she may go on her way, and he gives her nothing as a gift of release. If her husband does not wish to release her, and if he take another wife, she shall remain as servant in her husband's house.

196. If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out.

199. If he put out the eye of a man's slave, or break the bone of a man's slave, he shall pay one-half of its value. 

202.    If any one strike the body of a man higher in rank than he, he shall receive sixty blows with an ox-whip in public. 

203.    If a free-born man strike the body of another free-born man or equal rank, he shall pay one gold mina.  

Source: “Code of Hammurabi,” 1780 BCE.

 

Vocabulary dowry: money or property that a wife’s family gives to her husband when they marry


Questions:

Document C: Society

 

 

1.    Equality

a.    Code 196: What is the punishment for putting out the eye of “another man”? 

 

 

 

 

b.    How might code 196 be seen as an attempt to promote “equality”? 

 

 

 

 

 

c.    Code 199 describes a different punishment for putting out the eye of an enslaved person. What might this suggest about equality in Babylonia? 

 

 

 

 

d.    Find two other passages that provide evidence of inequality in

Hammurabi’s Code. (Be sure to cite the number of the code.)

 

i.      Evidence 1:

 

 

 

 

ii.    Evidence 2:

 

 

 

 

 

2.    What do codes 117, 138, & 141 suggest about the status of women in Babylonian society? 

 


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