Respecting the lot of the dead, the Babylonians held views like those of the early Hebrews. This was the continuance as opposed to the retribution theory.[106] Arallu, “the land of no return,” was a vast underground region where were gathered all, without distinction, who went down to the grave. It was a sad, dolorous life that the drowsing shades lived in this dark underworld, where the bats flitted in the twilight and the dust gathered on the lintels of the doors. An undiscriminating fate allotted the same destiny to all. In so far as the moral consciousness of the Babylonians demanded that a distinction be made between the good and the bad, this demand was met by the assumption--which was also that of the Hebrews so long as they held the Babylonian view of the life after death--that the evil man is punished in this life, and the good man rewarded here on earth with numerous flocks, reputation, many children, and long life. For four thousand years the masses in Babylonia seem to have remained satisfied with this view of the moral government of the world. In the later periods of Babylonian history, however, we find in the literature traces of a protest against this nonethical conception of life in the afterworld--a protest which shows that, in the case of the more spiritually minded at least, the moral consciousness was deepening and the ethical judgment becoming clearer and truer. [Sidenote: The ethical spirit of the laws; the code of Hammurabi] Since the law code of a people embraces all those duties the performance of which the state or public authority attempts to enforce, the ethical spirit of an age or people finds one of its truest embodiments in its laws. It is this fact which renders of such extraordinary interest to the student of the history of morals the recent discovery of the code of the Babylonian king Hammurabi,[107] the oldest known code of public and private morality. This law system exhibits in some departments of life an enlightened and advanced morality, yet one with serious limitations and defects, a morality in many respects like that of the Mosaic code of the kindred Semitic nation of Israel. The code informs us that the Babylonian feeling as to what is right and wrong, just and unjust, in the ordinary business relations of life was much like the average conscience of to-day. In some matters the Babylonian law held ground morally in advance of that held by modern codes, as, for instance, in providing that in case of misfortune the debtor should have both his rent and the interest on his debt remitted.[108] But in its provisions touching the family relations the code reveals ethical conceptions very different from our own. As in other Oriental law systems, ancient and modern, polygamy was regarded as a moral institution. A man in debt could bind his wife and children out to service or sell them as slaves, but not for a longer period than three years.