To quote Indigo Montoya, “I don’t think it means what you think it means.”

Do you know people who like to quote that famous line from Hammurabi’s code? The famous judgment 196 reads, “If a superior man should blind the eye of another superior man, they shall blind his eye.”

What’s more interesting is that if a man of lower class were to blind the eye of a man with lower class, 60 shekels of silver should be the punishment.

What’s most interesting is that in many of the judgments involving women, the highest judgment is 30 shekels of silver if a woman dies because a man beats her.

I believe that you and I can do more to know the history of our language - the framework we use for communicating our ideas and our history. I use questions as my starting point for the journey.

Questions I’m asking myself to better understand:

• Why has “an eye for an eye” stood the test of time but the other judgments haven’t?

• Was Hammurabi wrong? By what standard? When was that standard set? Who set the standard? What if, given his worldview, his code was an appropriate and palatable framework?

• How might we encourage those closest to us to look at other frameworks? Or evaluate their existing frameworks for every angle possible? How might Hammurabi write that code today?

• Who did Hammurabi’s code best serve? If Hammurabi wrote it today, who would Hammurabi be serving? Who wins? Who loses?