Middle Assyrian Laws

Historical source page 17

16 Morris Jastrow, Jr. other testicle of itself 39 is destroyed, compensation 40 shall be offered; or if in a fight the second testicle is (also) crushed, the fingers 41 of both hands they mutilate. 42 9 If a man stretches (his) hand against the wife of a man, treating her roughly 43 (?), they seize him and determine his guilt 44 . His fingers are cut off. If he bites her, his lower lip with the blade 46 (?) of a sharp (?) axe is cut off. 10 (Covering Col. I, 97 to II, 13.) (Deals with murder, but the text is too fragmentary to be translated.) 11 If a man's wife goes out into the highway (and) a man seizes her, without even proposing intercourse with her 46 and not giving her the chance to protect herself, 47 but seizes her by force and "iUv-Sd=istisa, occurring again, col. 3, 56 (§ 23) in the sense of 'by itself, independently, etc. 40 1 read [mu]-ri-im-ma tar-ti i-si. Murim from ramu 'offer' or 'grant'. "I supply [Rit-Lal] Mel=n«e (like Hammurabi Code §§ 195, 218, 226, 253) or perhaps we are to read [Sii-si] Meh=ubarwte) 'fingers'. a i-naAm-lu. *ki-i bu-ri e-pu-us-si. The context points to some violent assault, like scratching or tearing the flesh. Burn ordinarily means a 'young animal', which however is hardly in place here. 44 ub-ta-e-ru-u-v& ufc-ta-i-ntt-iS-ws, the standing phrase throughout the Code for what we call arrest and trial. See above, p. 8. From the same stem ba'aru 'catch', we have in the Hammurabi Code the official Su-rja = ba'iru as the 'constable' (§§ 26-28, 30 and 32, 36, 37, etc.), while uktin 'to fix the guilt' occurs in §§ 1-3 and 127 of the Hammurabi Code. « [me]-rt-im-«i, the meaning of which is to be deduced from the context. " la-a ni-ik-ki-me ik-ti-bi-a-aS-se 'does not say to her nikkime', the latter term being the proposal to the woman to give herself to the man. The under- lying stem naku was recognized many years ago by Oppert as denoting sexual intercourse. It occurs in the Code in a variety of verbal forms; also the noun form rmikdnu for the ravisher or adulterer. See Meissner, Assyrische Studien, 4, p. 10 and the passages there quoted. 47 1, e., there is no attempt on the part of the man to try to persuade the woman, but he uses force, while she makes no advances on her part.