cajela

I keep seeing Xians claiming that the 10 commandments is humanity's oldest legal code. Is this true?

I'm no archaeologist or bibilical scholar, but IIRC the torah was written only about 500 BCE. How does it compare to the dates of Solon or Hammurabi or Buddha? Are there older codes extant?

lpetrich

Rome, 450 BCE -- Twelve Tables

Solon: Athens, Greece; 638? BCE – 558 BCE -- issued his laws and reforms soon after 594 BCE

Draco: Athens, Greece -- issued his laws around 621 BCE; they were notable for being very harsh, featuring the death penalty for even minor offenses.

Egyptian Negative Confession: according to the Book of the Dead, a guidebook for the Egyptian afterlife, one has to assert at one point that one had not committed any of a long list of sins. One will then be judged by how honest one has been in doing so. The best-known version of this book is the Papyrus of Ani, from 1240 BCE

Hammurabi: Babylon, Mesopotamia; 1780 BCE, issues his laws
Lipit-Ishtar: Isin, Mesopotamia; 1868 BCE, issues his laws

Furthermore, there's a lot of law that the Ten Commandments do not cover -- and one can follow the 10C's to the letter and be an absolutely vile person.

And the Bible itself does not stop with its three versions of the 10C's; it includes hundreds of other laws.

cajela

Thanks heaps. I knew it sounded like a dubious claim, but had no facts to back up my feeling. I had no idea Hammurabi was so old!

Can a Biblical scholar complete the picture by adding actual & purported dates for the OT commandments?

Diogenes the Cynic

The traditional dates range from about 1400-1200 BCE. The actual date is probably 7th century BCE if not later.

As you can see, even by the earlist traditional date, Hammurabi still beats the Pentateuch by more than 300 years. If you count the real dates, Hammurabi beats the crap out Moses by more than 1000 years.

Chris Weimer

I think the best range you can give the ten commandments is late 9th to early 8th century BCE when the Yahwist cult began to emerge in Palestine. Recall, s'il vous plait, that the J & E authors were older then the D authors.

French Prometheus

BTW, unlike the Bible's 10 Commandments, we can still see the original Code of Hammurabi that dates back to the 18th century BCE. It can be seen at the Louvre musem :



Actually, Hammurabi had his code carved on several such stones that were sent all over his empire to try and make a uniform judicial system.

In the Louvre we can also see Sumerian legal edicts that predate Hammurabi's code by several centuries.