courts of law and legislatures, introduced in the first instance limits
on revenge. The next stage was that composition, an agreement
between the parties for a payment in substitution for revenge, was
allowed. Later, the state was strong enough to impose composition
on the parties, often with fixed tariffs for the loss of life or limb. In
the final stage, the state took over entirely, imposing criminal sanctions.
With the discovery of the cuneiform law codes, scholars tried to
impose the theory on the evolution of ancient Near Eastern legal
systems, since some codes seem to embody revenge while others con-
centrate on payments.^49 The codes, however, do not follow the
chronological order postulated by the evolutionary pattern: it is in
the earliest examples of their genre that fixed payments are found.
Consequently, a counter-theory was proposed: the earliest stage was
payment, since human life was seen in terms of its economic value
to the group. As civilization developed, human life came to be
regarded as more precious and the state became stronger, leading
to the development of criminal sanctions.^50 Unfortunately, the chrono-
logical pattern of the codes does not fit this theory, either. Accordingly,
proponents of these theories and subsequent refinements upon them
have assigned the societies of different periods and places in the
region to primitive and advanced categories, or a mixture of both,
depending on where the penalties in their law codes stand in the
proposed evolutionary model.^51
In my opinion, the scholarly debate over the evolution of crimi-
nal law is irrelevant to the ancient Near Eastern systems. If any such
developments took place in the region, they were over and done
with long before the appearance of written legal records. By that
time, the civilizations to which those records attest were based on
centralized states with well-established courts and settled laws. Those
states may not have had a police force or all the apparatus of a
modern state for imposing law and order, but they certainly could
and did enforce rules punishing crimes and redressing wrongs.
Consciousness of the state’s responsibility was such that when the
culprits could not be brought to justice for crimes such as murder
and robbery, there were established procedures for compensating the
victims and their families from the public purse (LH 22–24; HL 4).(^49) Driver and Miles, Babylonian Laws.. ., 501–2.
(^50) Diamond, “An Eye for an Eye.”
(^51) Cardascia, “La place du talion.. .”; Finkelstein, “Ammi-ßaduqa’s Edict...”
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