ideological agenda of the biblical codes is obvious, but the cuneiform
codes, some of which served the purposes of royal propaganda, may
have been no less colored by ideology, idealization, or hyperbole.
There is also the suspicion, especially strong in the case of the Middle
Assyrian Laws, that some of the punishments reflect the scribal com-
pilers’ concern for perfect symmetry and delicious irony rather than
the pragmatic experience of the law courts. Certainly, the few doc-
uments of practice, including those contemporary with the codes,
show striking discrepancies in matters of detail, especially as regards
punishments, which tend to be milder than in the codes. But they
do conform to the general principles, structures, and procedures
found in the law codes.
Since the intellectual method of the codes was to set out princi-
ples by the use of often extreme examples, and they were based, if
at some remove, on the activity of the courts, it is probable that
they inform us what the courts could do and in perfect justice should
do, whereas the courts themselves, in dealing with less tidy situa-
tions, were more flexible in their judgments, within the given para-
meters. Accordingly, we can reconstruct a picture of how the ancients
thought about crime—what they regarded as wrongs and what means
they devised for redressing them—even if we cannot always be sure
how they applied their ideas on a day-to-day basis.8.2 Development
In considering the overall patterns of criminal law in the ancient
Near East, the influence of evolutionary theories from the nineteenth
century has been the cause of a great deal of confusion. The clas-
sic theory, which dates from before the discovery and decipherment
of cuneiform legal records, drew upon Roman law, biblical law,
diverse “primitive” systems such as medieval Germanic law, and
anthropological observations of tribal customs.^48
The theory envisaged several stages in the development of the
criminal law. In the pre-state period, wrongs were redressed not by
law but by feud between families or clans, a condition marked by
unrestrained revenge. The appearance of organized society, with(^48) E.g., Jhering, Geist.. ., 127–140; Kohler, Blutrache.. ., 9–12; cf. Sulzberger,
Homicide.. ., 1–6; Cherry, “Evolution...”
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