For now, when one fancies he can discern a surprising likeness between some clause in the Code of Hammurabi and some verse in the Bible, he is wise to keep his surprise to himself until he has procured and studied the latest critical subdivision of the laws of Israel and satisfied himself to which source or sources his verse belongs. Then one has to ransack other authorities to know whether this ruling is one which is widely accepted, and even more important, whether it had been independently reached or was constructed with an eye to the very likeness to Babylonian law which it dreaded to acknowledge. Consequently we have to be very careful to-day. We cannot use our comparisons, even if they should suggest identity, to restore to more ancient dates the Mosaic items which seem to be most closely in accord with Hammurabi’s laws. For here tradition itself imports many difficulties. If we set Moses the lawgiver at his old place in history, just before the entrance of the Israelites into Canaan, and accept the traditional synchronism of Abraham and Amraphel, then if we accept the modern identification of Amraphel with Hammurabi we are landed in this difficulty: the Hammurabi Code is thus as much older than the Mosaic law as Abraham is before Moses. On the authority of Moses himself that means 430 years. Now the Babylonians reckoned 650 years from the death of Hammurabi to the death of Kadashman-Ellil, who was corresponding with Amenophis King of Egypt while that king was still sovereign of Palestine, and therefore before Moses. This is the lowest figure yet suggested based on documentary sources, and gives at least 700 years between the two codes. How can we reconcile the disparity in dates? The Higher Critics do not mend matters. They would bring down the date of the early Mosaic laws much later, necessitating a period of more than a thousand years between the two codes. It would take hours to argue out the merits of various systems of chronology, and the truth probably is that we have not yet recovered reliable data to fix either Babylonian or Biblical chronology with sufficient accuracy. Babylonian chronology is, however, in much the better state, and late rulings make the death of Hammurabi fall somewhere near 1916 B.C. But how we are to reconcile such a date for Abraham with the Biblical data is a knotty question to which I can contribute no help to solution.