Norton Critical Edition of Ancient laws?

I was reading a copy of the Code of Hammurabi printed out from Google Books, and it made me wonder if there was a great modern volume, perhaps something that combined several ancient codes of laws with copious commentary, comparison and contrasting. It feels like sections and section headings postdated the Code of Hammurabi, but logical or not, I'd prefer to work with the original, not a reordered or paraphrased version.

I'm not aware of a single book. Part of the problem is in the word 'code' which is used variously for constitutions, political/legal settlements, comprehensive and systematic expressions of the law, and collections of enactments bound together in a book with a spine ('codex').

You could try James Pritchard's Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. It's not just ancient legal texts, of course, and you'd want to find another book for Greek and Roman law as it is restricted to the ancient Near East, bit it's a good source.

Or https://www.librarything.com/work/1932392

>1 prosfilaes:

If you're interested in the so-called Code of Hammurabi, you might check out Mesopotamia : writing, reasoning, and the gods by Jean Bottero. He argues, among other things, that the whole genre of the thing is misunderstood.