ABSTRACT
The earliest peoples supposedly saw the source of the law as being with the gods: ‘Anu and Bel called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness’ and ‘When he had finished speaking with Moses on Mount Sinai, the Lord gave him the two tablets of the Testimony, stone tablets written with the finger of God.’1 Historians, however, know that law emerged at a certain stage of civilization, say, some time in the beginning: countless college courses covering the longue durée of western history start with the Law Code of Hammurabi or the Ten Commandments. All that has happened in human history, it seems, happened on account of the law.
