The Similarities Between Hebrew Law And Hammurabi

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Moore 1
Connor Moore
Mr. Doty
HUM 121
18 September 2014
The Originality of the Hebrews

The Hebrew people from the beginning was a developed community that had a very special gift that not many civilizations had. The Hebrew people had the chance to build an entirely new civilization on a clean slate. Building a civilization from the ground up was not an easy task, but they did have opportunity to create values and a religion. They had faced many hardships before, and they would face many more, but that would have only made their views and ideas for a community stronger and broader. Observing how they built their civilization today is at parts confusing, such as why would people only recently freed freedom slavery allow any type of slavery …show more content…

Yahweh (the Hebrew God) on the Hebrew belief was always concerned for the wellbeing and overall success of his followers. Yahweh gives moral pronouncements to the Jewish people in the Decalogue (Ten Commandments) with the preface “You shall not...” with the addition of positive obligations towards others. Hammurabi’s Code was a Babylonian set of laws to govern the Babylonian people nearly three hundred years before Moses did the same for his people. There are many similarities between the Hebrew laws and Hammurabi’s Code, but by far the most significant difference is the negative frame surrounding Hammurabi’s Code. Hammurabi’s Code was very clear cut to the Babylonian people about if they committed a certain crime what the punishment would be. The Torah gave ethical guidelines to for the Hebrews to build their lives on, with consequences for disobeying the ethical guidelines. A very reasonable answer to why the Hebrews followed the laws given to them so closely was because the punishment for disobeying was …show more content…

It is very important to keep in mind that as legend has it, they had been wandering through the desert for forty years after being freed from the Egyptians. The Hebrew’s views on slavery, theft, and overall human value would be fresh and evolved, perfect for building the foundations of which an empire could stand. Yet, the Jewish views on slavery is to remember that you were slaves, yet simultaneously you can own a human being. Slavery was abolished in 1865 in the United States, and nearly one hundred and fifty years later slavery

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