The nucleus of all Israelitish law appears to have been a simple decalogue, which gave the terms of the original covenant between Jehovah and his people, and definitely stated the obligations they must discharge if they would retain his favor. The oldest version of this decalogue is now embedded in the early Judean narrative of Exodus xxxiv. There is considerable evidence, however, that it once stood immediately after the Judean account of Jehovah's revelation of himself at Sinai, and was transposed to its present position in order to give place for the later and nobler prophetic decalogue of Exodus xx. 1-17. Its antiquity and importance are also evidenced by the fact that it has received many later introductory, explanatory, and hortatory notes. Exodus xxxiy. 28 preserves the memory that it originally consisted of simply ten words. The slightly variant version of these original ten words Is also found in Exodus xx. 23, xxiii. 12, 15, 16, 18, 29, 30. Furthermore, it probably once occupied a central position in the corresponding Northern Israelltish account of the covenant at Sinai. [Sidenote: _The oldest decalogue_] With the aid of these two different versions, that of the North and that of the South, it is possible to restore approximately the common original: I. Thou shalt worship no other God. II. Thou shalt make no molten gods, III. Thou shalt observe the feast of unleaven bread. IV. Every first-born is mine. V. Six days shalt thou toil, but on the seventh thou shalt rest. VI. Thou shalt observe the feast of weeks and ingathering at the end of the year, VII. Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leaven. VIII. The fat of my feast shall not be left until morning. IX. The best of the first-fruits of thy land shalt thou bring to the house of Jehovah. X. Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother's milk. [Sidenote: _Its date_] These laws bear on their face the evidence of their primitive date and origin. They define religion not in the terms of life, as does the familiar prophetic decalogue of Exodus xx., but, like the old Babylonian religion, in the terms of the ritual. Loyalty to Jehovah, as the God of the nation, and fidelity to the demands of the cult is their watchword. Their antiquity and the central position they occupy in Old Testament legislation are shown further by the fact that all of them are again quoted in other codes, and most of them four or five times in the Old Testament. Three of them apply to agricultural life; but agriculture is not entirely unknown to the nomadic life of the wilderness. Possibly in their present form certain of these commands have been adapted to conditions in Canaan, but the majority reflect the earliest stages in Hebrew history. In all probability the decalogue in its original form came from Moses, as the earliest traditions assert, although comparative Semitic religion demonstrates that many of the institutions here reflected long antedated the days of the great leader.