FROM SACRED TEXT TO STATUTE: HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLES ACROSS RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS, CULTURAL NORMS, AND THE CODE OF HAMMURABI

Objective: This paper compares the human resource management (HRM) principles embedded in the Code of Hammurabi and in the Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Indic, and ancient Chinese traditions, together with the informal institutions of custom and social norm, in order to identify their shared normative core and their principal points of divergence. 
Methodology: It is a conceptual, literature-based study that reads canonical primary sources (legal and scriptural) alongside secondary management scholarship, analyzing each tradition against a common template of seven HRM dimensions: basis of obligation, selection, compensation, performance and accountability, welfare and rest, leadership, and equality. 
Results:Beneath differing idioms, the traditions converge on a common ethical core—the dignity of the worker, fair and prompt payment, prohibition of exploitation, merit and trustworthiness in appointment, provision for rest, and leadership as service and stewardship. They diverge chiefly along a single axis, the basis of obligation, which runs from externally enforced rule (Hammurabi's codified liability), through the law-and-duty blend of Judaism and Islam, to the internalized disposition emphasized in Christian vocation and in Buddhist and Indic thought, with informal norms operating through relational reciprocity. 
Conclusion:Because neither externally enforced rule nor internalized value is self-sufficient, contemporary cross-cultural HRM systems are strengthened when they draw deliberately on both poles, combining enforceable protections with values-based development and culturally congruent, relationship-sensitive practice.