Probably more than anything else, a knowledge of Akkadian language and literature has taught the world of twentieth-century scholarship about the Bible within its Ancient Middle Eastern context. One of the most important sources of this knowledge stems from the many publications in the earlier part of that century concerned with the laws of Hammurabi. In his previous book on the subject the author provided a complete index of the vocabulary of that long inscription. He now provides a complete grammar, so that a student of Akkadian can learn the elements of the language by reading the stele as a whole. The standard hand-copy of the cuneiform text is set out in columns opposite a phonetic transcription, thus the comprehensive set of citations illustrating various points of Akkadian grammar presented in subsequent chapters can be easily checked within their wider linguistic context. This is supplemented with an alphabetically arranged list of the phonetic values of all the cuneiform...