Such were some of the laws promulgated under the shadow of the sacred mountain, when Israel first encamped before Mount Sinai. They concluded with an exhortation to march against Canaan. Yahveh declared that He would send His Angel before His people to guide them in their way, like the _sukkalli_ or ‘angels’ of the Babylonian gods. Yahveh would fight for them, and they should drive out the older inhabitants of the land and take their place. They were in no wise to mingle with them or worship their gods; like the idolaters themselves, the idols they adored were to be destroyed. ‘From the Yâm Sûph to the sea of the Philistines and from the desert to the river’ were to be the bounds of their new home, a promise which was fulfilled in the kingdom of David.[200] That, too, extended to ‘the river’ Euphrates, and included the land of Edom with its two ports on the Yâm Sûph. ‘The sea of the Philistines’ is a new name for the Mediterranean, and bears testimony to the maritime fame those pirates from the north had already acquired.[201] The laws thus promulgated at Sinai became the first code of Israel. They rested on the covenant that had been made between Yahveh and His people, of which the first clause was that they should worship none other gods but Him. The book in which they were written by Moses was accordingly called the Book of the Covenant, and its words were read aloud to the assembled multitude (Exod. xxiv. 7). The audience, it must be remembered, included not the Israelites only, but the ‘mixed multitude’ as well (Numb. xi. 4). Once more Moses ascended the sacred mountain, to learn the ‘pattern’ of the tabernacle in which Yahveh was henceforth to be worshipped. It was to be a tent, moving along with the people, and containing all the objects of Israelitish veneration. Chief among these was the ark of the Covenant, surmounted by the mercy-seat and its two cherubim, between which Yahveh sat enthroned when He revealed Himself to His worshippers. Babylonia also had its arks, its mercy-seats, and its cherubim, and Nebuchadrezzar speaks of ‘the seat of the oracles’ in the great temple of Babylon ‘whereon at the festival of Zagmuku, the beginning of the year, on the 8th and 11th days, Bel, the god, seats himself, while the gods of heaven and earth reverently regard him, standing before him with bowed heads.’[202] The cherubim, indeed, were of Babylonian origin, and their presence in the tabernacle seems somewhat inconsistent with the prohibition to make a carven image. But the Israelites were the heirs of the ancient culture of Western Asia, and the tabernacle and its furniture embodied familiar forms of architecture and older religious conceptions.