Hammurabi, the sixth king of the First Babylonian Dynasty, reigned approximately 1792–1750 BC — a contemporary of Abraham's descendants in Canaan. Under his rule, the city of Babylon rose from a minor provincial city to the capital of an empire stretching across most of Mesopotamia, from the Persian Gulf in the south to the upper reaches of the Euphrates in the north. He was a military genius, a skilled administrator, and the author of one of the most remarkable documents in human history.
The Code of Hammurabi, inscribed on a nearly eight-foot-tall basalt stele discovered at Susa in 1901 and now housed in the Louvre in Paris, contains 282 laws governing commercial transactions, family law, criminal punishment, and social obligations. The prologue declares that the gods Anu and Enlil appointed Hammurabi "to promote the welfare of the people, to cause justice to prevail in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil, that the strong might not oppress the weak." The famous lex talionis — "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" — appears in the Code of Hammurabi centuries before it appears in Mosaic law, and scholars have noted both parallels and significant differences between the two legal traditions.
Babylon itself was the physical embodiment of human ambition organized without God. The city the code describes was magnificent — the Euphrates ran through its center, crossed by great bridges; temples and palaces lined its broad avenues; the Ishtar Gate, reconstructed today in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, was faced with brilliant blue glazed tiles depicting lions and dragons. Yet it was a city built on human pride and the worship of false gods, and the prophets of Israel — Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel — pronounced its eventual total destruction, which history confirmed. The name Babylon echoes through Scripture from Genesis to Revelation as the symbol of human civilization in rebellion against God.
For students of biblical chronology, Hammurabi's reign helps anchor the patriarchal age. The mention of four eastern kings in Genesis 14 — who defeat the five kings of the plain and carry off Lot — reflects exactly the kind of political geography that characterized Mesopotamia during this period, when shifting alliances and military campaigns between city-states and emerging empires were constant features of ancient Near Eastern life.