HAMMURABI’S CODE 

Shown here is Hammurabi before the sun god Shamash. This relief is found at the top of the stone.

Hammurabi was a famous king that lived at the same time as Abraham. This king of the city of Babylon became very powerful and is remembered for writing down some laws and codes for the people to live by. The code is written out on a stone 8 feet long and 2 feet wide and has about 4000 lines of text.

” And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly, And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confounded their language, one another’s speech.So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. ” ( Genesis 11:3-9)

The city of Ur during Abraham’s time had a huge temple in it that was built after the pattern of the Tower of Babel. At this temple the people worshiped the moon god, Sin, and his wife, Ningal ( also known as Ishtar, and Nina after which the city of Nineveh was named). She was the goddess of sexual passion, and all of her temples had special rooms where her male worshipers would make love to the priestesses. Also it was required that the maids, and widows, and wives in the Babylonian Kingdom of those days offer their services in the temple at least once in their lives. Certainly, Abraham and his beautiful wife Sarah, living in Ur did not go unnoticed by the official religious system of  their day and most certainly were called upon to attend the services  However, it did not seem to be the sexual practices of the people that offended Abraham seeing how he was so disposed himself to let others court his wife as though she were his sister, but rather it was the fact that the people did not worship the true God.