These collections state law as chained conditional cases: 'if a man does X, then consequence Y follows,' rather than as general abstract principles or prohibitions. The law is built by enumerating specific fact patterns and their resolutions, so coverage expands by adding more cases rather than by stating a rule that subsumes them.
In the Code of Hammurabi, the same physical injury carries different penalties depending on the social class of the victim: harming a member of the free elite is punished more severely (often by retaliation in kind) than harming a commoner or a slave, for whom monetary compensation substitutes. The value of a body and the form of redress are functions of legal status, not of the injury alone.
Certain offenses are met with equivalent injury inflicted on the offender, the 'eye for an eye' logic, but this talion applies within and between specific status groups rather than universally. The principle fixes the measure of punishment to the measure of harm, substituting a calibrated equivalence for open-ended vengeance.
Hammurabi's collection is wrapped in a prologue and epilogue presenting the king as divinely appointed to establish justice, so the legal provisions function partly as a monument to just kingship rather than solely as operative statutes. Reading the code this way treats the rules as evidence of a ruler advertising order and protection of the weak, not necessarily as the courts' actual working manual.