Hammurabi
Seat: Babylon
Old Babylonian; the law stele of 282 provisions, carved on diorite
Babylon — law, exile, and the writing on the wall
← Kingdoms & Rulers · Glossary
Region: Babylon, southern Mesopotamia
Era: Old Babylonian c. 1894–1595 BC; Neo-Babylonian 626–539 BC
Two separate empires under one city. The first gave the world its most famous law code; the second destroyed Jerusalem, and its last night is the source of a phrase still in use.
Two separate empires under one city, 299 years and 87 years, separated by nearly a thousand years in between.
Rulers (6)
Samsu-iluna
Seat: Babylon
Son of Hammurabi; the empire contracts under him
Nabopolassar
Seat: Babylon
Founded the Neo-Babylonian empire by breaking Assyria
Nebuchadnezzar II
Seat: Babylon
Destroyed Jerusalem and the First Temple, 587/586 BC; the king of Daniel 1–4
Nabonidus
Seat: Babylon
Spent ten years at Tayma in Arabia, absent from his own capital
Belshazzar
Seat: Babylon
Son of Nabonidus, regent in his absence — which is why Daniel 5 can offer him only THIRD place in the kingdom
Belshazzar: a detail that turned out to be right
Daniel 5 calls Belshazzar king of Babylon, and for a long time that was treated as an error, because no king list had him. Then cuneiform records surfaced showing Nabonidus was absent at Tayma for around ten years, with his son Belshazzar left as regent in Babylon.
The detail that settles it is small and easy to miss: Daniel 5:16 offers the interpreter “third ruler in the kingdom”. Not second. If Nabonidus was king and Belshazzar regent, third is the highest post left to give. A narrative inventing a king would have offered second place.
This is filed here as a documented convergence, not a proof of anything wider. It says the text preserves a specific administrative fact about the last years of Babylon.
Recorded by
Date: c. 1754 BC
282 provisions carved on a 2.25 m diorite stele, topped by Hammurabi receiving the rod and ring from Shamash, god of justice.
Genuinely contemporary - carved in Hammurabi’s own reign, and the stele survives intact in the Louvre after being carried off to Susa as plunder. Not the earliest law code (Ur-Nammu precedes it by ~300 years) and probably not a working statute book: no court record cites it. Its lex talionis provisions run closely parallel to Exodus 21.
Date: Achaemenid period copy of a Babylonian chronicle
Records the reign of Nabonidus, including his prolonged absence at Tayma in Arabia while his son held Babylon.
The tablet that made sense of Belshazzar. Daniel 5 calls him king and offers his interpreter only THIRD place in the kingdom - which fits exactly a regent standing in for an absent father, and fits nothing else.
Date: c. 750–280 BC
A series of tablets recording principal events year by year, including Nebuchadnezzar II’s capture of Jerusalem.
Terse and unadorned - the Jerusalem entry gives a date and an outcome and no theology at all. That flatness is what makes them useful for chronology: they are not arguing anything.