Hammurabi's Code Summary

In the article Hammurabi’s Code, Nancy L. Stockdale explains how the Hammurabi’s Code is a useful source for the discussion of Mesopotamian government and society. Stockdale introduces the article explaining the structure of her teaching and how she uses the text of the Hammurabi’s Code to give concrete evidences. The text of Hammurabi’s code provides concrete examples such as: the growing centralized government’s influence on the individual lives in the Babylonian population, and why Babylonians invested God’s power in their secular leaders. Stockdale gives introductory lectures to her students about the social, spiritual, and political values of Mesopotamia, and then she gives exercises and short textbook readings to support the lecture points. Stockdale believes it is important to cover the unit on cuneiform before the discussion of the Hammurabi’s Code. The reason she does this is to show gradual “transition from pictographs and hieroglyphics to cuneiform, and its possibilities for the spread of …show more content…
She focuses on particular sections illustrating the different punishments for crimes depending on one’s gender and class. Stockdale explains her students’ reactions and how they interpret the information after being exposed to it. For an example, students were “really shocked to see the way Hammurabi’s Code laid out different punishments for the same crimes according to the class and gender of victims and the perpetrators” (Stockdale). Her students come to an ultimate conclusion that the Code illustrates the Babylonian state’s attempt to regulate morality in effort to maintain social order. The laws involving marriages and adultery demonstrate the extensive power the government had in Hammurabi’s time, and government’s power to consistently enforce laws of morality, the government extended over the private lives of the