The earliest known legal text is not the Code of Hammurabi but a lesser-known text, the Code of Ur-Nammu. Linguistically, the text is composed of If - then statements. It is essentially a script. And the earliest known written example of codified law at over 4,000 years old.
So, as the earliest example of the mechanical adjudication of justice, we have statements like: If a man murders, that man will be executed. If a man commits a robbery, he will be executed. If a slave marries a free man, that slave must turn over their firstborn son to their owner.
And so on. So, it's a mechanical process for resolving disputes such as when your slave fails to turn over their firstborn. The surviving laws become increasingly more disturbing as they go on.
However, there is also a system of torts. If a man severs another man's nose with a knife, he must pay him two-thirds of a mina of silver.
So, it's a process, a script, a spectral machine. If this happens, then that must happen. It works the same way each time. Now, we don't know about matters of procedure or how the truth was determined. In some cases, flinging an individual into the water sufficed to prove what needed to be proved.
The law is a kind of artificial intelligence that takes the decision-making power out of the individual's hands. In this case, judges would not be free to determine a sentence (as they are under U.S. law to some extent). The outcome is mechanized, and thus predictable, and hence it reinforces the order of moral good, and the order of moral gods.
Interestingly enough, Job was based on a Sumerian and Babylonian myth that tackled many of the same issues as the biblical version, and this is also the cradle of Western Civilization, so there's a lot we can understand by going back and looking at the earliest stuff we can find.
So, this is going to be a recurring conceptual motif I'd like to draw out in this blog. The state/government/law as a kind of artificial machine god.
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