Hammurabi’s Code

  Hammurabi was one of the great rulers of ancient times. He is best known for putting together a uniform code of laws. His purpose in making these laws was "to cause justice to prevail in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil, to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak, and to further the welfare of the people."

The Code of Hammurabi contained 282 laws arranged under headings such as trade, family, labor, real estate, and personal property. The basic principle behind Hammurabi’s Code was "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." Under these laws, a man who blinded another was punished by losing an eye. If a house collapsed and killed the owner, the builder was put to death.

I do not agree with Hammurabi’s code or the main principle behind it. Under this principle there is no judgment of any kind for people who commit a crime. If you did it, you have the same thing done to you. This, in my opinion, is not morally right. I believe that people deserve at least a chance to justify what they have done. Their testimony, the testimony of others, and evidence supporting both the defending and prosecuting sides should then be judged by a group of that person’s peers to decide what punishment they should receive. It may not be perfect, but I believe it is a much better system than that of Hammurabi. In some murder cases I believe in the death penalty, which is doing to that person what they did to someone else. This does not follow Hammurabi’s code, though. I think that if someone takes the life of another and did it purposely with no decent excuse (such as self-defense), most of the time they should be put to death. What I believe does not follow Hammurabi’s code because for one, I don’t think everyone who has killed should die for it, and two, even when I do believe some should be put to death, it would only be after a fair trial and judgment by his or her peers.

Most of the time there are extenuating circumstances in a case where someone has broken the law, especially in cases as serious as murder or theft. Suppose I was walking down the street with my family of seven. A man comes up behind us, grabs me, puts a gun to my head, and tells my family to give him all their money or he will shoot them and me. They then tell him that they have no money, so he cocks his gun and starts shooting at my family. I pull a knife out of my pocket and push him down. There is a struggle but eventually I stab him. I then call an ambulance to the scene, but the man dies on the way to the hospital. Under Hammurabi’s code, I would be executed for killing that man, even though what I was doing was out of defense for my family and myself. It would not even be taken into consideration that I was doing it to save my family. I killed him, so I too would be killed. That is not right. All the circumstances of the case should be considered. It should be considered that even though I took a life, which I do not believe is right, I did it to save the lives of seven people. Also, I was not acting as a vigilante and did not take the law into my own hands. I had to make a decision about which was more important, the lives of seven people or the life of one. In my opinion, it is better to save seven and have one die, than have seven die and save one. In today’s system of democratic government, all of these things would be taken into consideration, but not in Hammurabi’s time.

To give another example, under Hammurabi’s code, if you steal something, you should have your hands cut off. Does this mean that every child who ever stole a piece of candy from the grocery store should be walking around with only one hand? It is asinine to put such harsh consequences on someone who either just made a mistake or was perhaps not yet able to decipher right from wrong. What about if a builder built a house and it collapsed in on the owner and killed him. Why should the builder be put to death without any investigation at all? What if the person in the house had been trying to make some minor adjustments to the framework of the house and caused it to collapse. That would have nothing to do with the builder. Things like this should be looked into to be able to decide a fair punishment, if any, for a person.

I do believe in punishing people for the crimes they commit, but I do not believe in overpunishing them. I believe that if a person commits a crime and it is deemed that they did it with no saving grace (such as self defense in murder), they should pay the price by going to jail and in some cases being put to death. I do not believe that everyone should be punished with the return measure of the crime they committed because often times there are extenuating circumstances, and many people would be overpunished. I think that under Hammurabi’s code, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, people would be overpunished for the crime that they committed.