Just as the Jewish religion was in a highly developed form at the time of the Exile, so the Law was very fully developed. That the entire Law, as embodied in the Pentateuch, was promulgated by Moses is not altogether likely, but that any considerable fraction of it is later than 586 B.C.E. is equally unlikely. Interpolations doubtless occurred often. To insert into an authoritative text an inference from the words which the interpolator honestly believed to be true, was not a generally reprehended practice. Perhaps some of the emphasis upon sacerdotal organization which parts of the Pentateuch show, may have so been imported into the constituent codes of the Torah. But on how slight a scale this was can be readily seen by comparing the Pentateuch with any of the apocryphal books consciously designed to magnify the priesthood.[66] The actual civil law bears every mark of high antiquity. The religious law is at least not inconsistent with such antiquity. Now neither in civil law nor in religious thought did the community that slowly formed itself about the acropolis of Zion remain stationary. We must suppose that the energies of the returning exiles were pretty well concentrated upon the economic problems before them. But an actual community they were from the start, and although the communal life was far from attaining at once to the richness of former days, it contained all the elements necessary. Without a common law, _i.e._ a regulation of conflicting claims to property, and without a common cult, _i.e._ a regulation of the communication between the divine and the human members of a state, no state was conceivable to the ancient world. Changed conditions will infallibly modify both, and some of these modifications it will be necessary to understand.