king was always himself an active participant in the administration of the legal system, he was always its guardian, for the application of justice was the highest trust given by the gods to a legitimate king. This point was made in a letter from eighteenth-century B.C.E. Mari on the upper Euphrates, which reports the message conveyed by a prophet of the god Addu of Aleppo to the Mari ruler Zimri-Lim: “I (Addu) gave the entire country to (your father) Yaḫdun-Lim … He abandoned me and so I gave the