Contemporaneous with this work of redaction was the appearance of a new book, the so-called Book of the Covenant. This was of small dimensions; at any rate, all that remains of it is contained in a few chapters of Exodus (xx. 24-xxiii. 33, xxiv. 3-8). It was added, however, to the Prophetic Redaction, and the Mosaic Law for the first time was introduced to the world. But now appeared a book which was of momentous consequences for both the history and the religion of Judah. This was the book of Deuteronomy, or rather the middle portion of the book of Deuteronomy (chaps. xii-xxvi.), the rest of the book being a subsequent addition. This abbreviated Deuteronomy, it is assumed, is ‘the book of the Law’ which Hilkiah the high priest declared he had ‘found in the house of the Lord’ in the reign of Josiah, and it is further assumed that the word ‘found’ is intended to cover a ‘pious fraud.’ The Egyptian inscriptions mention books of early date which had been similarly ‘found’ in the temples, and some of these books really seem to have been forgeries of a later date.[126] Modern criticism has determined that Hilkiah and his friends imitated the example of the Egyptian priests in the case of Deuteronomy. At all events, the results were instantaneous and revolutionary. The king and his court believed that they had before them the actual commands of their God to the great lawgiver of Israel, and the Jewish religion underwent accordingly a radical reform. Nor did the effect of the supposed discovery end here. Like the forged Decretals in mediæval Europe, the book of Deuteronomy had a continuous and wide-reaching influence upon Jewish thought. Its teaching was matured during the Exile, and out of it grew that form of Jewish religion of which Christianity was the heir. The book of Deuteronomy (symbolised by D) in the first as well as in the second or enlarged edition belongs to the latter part of the seventh century B.C. But the Hexateuch was still far from complete. During the Exile a book of the Law, now contained in Lev. xvii.-xxvi., was written and promulgated, the author, it appears, having been incited to his work by Ezekiel’s ideal of a theocratic state. This book of the Law was followed by a far more ambitious production, the ‘Priestly Code’ (generally known as P, and not unfrequently called the ‘Grundschrift’ by German writers). The Priestly Code embodies what earlier critics knew as the work of the First Elohist; it not only in the name of Moses shapes the ritual and religion of Israel to the advantage of the priests, but it attempts to trace the history of the revelation which resulted in that religion back to the Creation itself. The name of Elohim is again a distinguishing feature in the narrative, which is described by the ‘critics’ as formal and pedantic, as affectedly archaistic, and as disfigured by a strong theological tendency. Wellhausen and Stade assure us that it transforms the patriarchs into pious Jews of the Exile.