of monumental royal inscriptions, namely propaganda. The stela, set
up in a temple, was intended to demonstrate to public opinion,
human and divine, that Hammurabi had fulfilled his divine man-
date to be a just king.^16
The debate on the law codes turns on two issues: whether the lit-
erary contexts in which they are found, scribal schools and royal
monuments, determine their function, and whether the absence of
reference to their practical application in any of the sources is evi-
dence that they were not applied by the courts. Arguments from
silence should always be treated with caution, but in this instance it
is a very powerful one, given the contrast with contemporary evi-
dence for the practical application of known legislative acts such as
royal decrees. At the same time, the silence of the sources is strictly
true only for the third and second millennia; from about the seventh
century onwards changes are noticeable in the way certain sources
refer to the codes. They may point to a conceptual change that
affected not only law codes but legislation in general. The very fact
of that change suggests that assumptions should not be made about
ancient Near Eastern law on the basis of later, familiar models.1.2.5 Citation and Authority
References to decrees are to their existence; they are not citations
of the text. The closest that the early sources come to citation are
references to actions or decisions being in accordance with the words
of the stele or tablet. By contrast, in the classical systems of the
Hellenistic and Roman periods, we can see an explosion of citation.
The exact words of the statute are quoted, analyzed and obeyed by
the courts, or in the inverse process, a legal ruling is justified by ref-
erence to the exact words of the statute. The reason is that, as in
modern law, the words of the text have become the ultimate point
of reference for the meaning of the law. The text is both autonomous,
meaning that once a law is promulgated, it is regarded as the law-
giver itself, and it is exhaustive, meaning that what is not in the text
is not regarded as law (unless covered by another text). As a result,
interpretation of statutes becomes from the Hellenistic period on a
specialized form of close reading, usually requiring the services of
experts trained in the law—jurists.(^16) Finkelstein, “Ammi-ßaduqa’s Edict...”
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