Seeing, however, that there is not yet full and final acceptance of critical views as to the exact classification of the Hebrew laws into separate codes, and that my audience is probably not completely familiar with either the separate codes in themselves or their dates, anything like a complete comparison of the Laws of Moses with the Code of Hammurabi is impossible without first at least sketching the character of each separate code. For comparative purposes we may begin with the earliest and see how it compares with Babylonian law, for the rest what has already been compared need not be repeated, but as it is necessary to limit our time I must leave all critical reasons for assigning a passage to a particular stratum to be consulted in PROFESSOR KENT’S volume and the extended literature which he names. The usually accepted critical views of the sources of the Pentateuch regard the Book of the Covenant as the oldest code of Hebrew law now preserved to us. What law the people obeyed before we are not told, but it is obvious that they were not without law. Some scholars, attaching great weight to the traditions of the patriarchs and the implications of their story as to the growth of the people of Israel, assume that before the adoption of the Book of the Covenant they were nomad pastoral folk, and obeyed much the same customs as the Bedawin Arabs of the present day. For such a standpoint the late PROFESSOR W. ROBERTSON SMITH’S works on Semitic civilization, religion, and law are simply indispensable. Here, if anywhere, we can find a clear idea of common Semitic custom, so often appealed to to account for the similarities between Jewish law and the Hammurabi Code. But other scholars look on these narratives of the patriarchal life with deep suspicion as being a late attempt to sketch, in the light of a writer’s knowledge of what the nomads of his day were like, an instructive and edifying ancestral background for a set of very dissimilar tribes or clans, whom some political necessity led to amalgamate into the Hebrew people. A great deal in our research naturally depends upon our attitude to the questions, ‘Was Israel ever in Egypt?’ or ‘Was only one party of them ever there?’ Or again, ‘Was the Book of the Covenant promulgated at the unification of the component clans, or did it grow up long after?’ All such and many similar questions we must lay aside, as we start with the Book of the Covenant as accepted Israelite law.