We cannot suppose the Book of the Covenant preserved in its original state. Even if we suppose it was promulgated solely to decide those cases on which conflicting usage was causing disturbance, say between nomad Israelites settling down and the long settled Canaanite town dwellers; no one can be prepared to claim that it is complete. There must have been more of it. What we have now preserved may have been cut down to present limits for various reasons. It may be that later legislation superseded some of its regulations which later writers would thus think not worth recording. If the Code had been embodied in a document, that source may have become fragmentary in some way by the time the compiler of Exodus rescued it from oblivion. A careful perusal of the laws of Moses as arranged in their strata, by PROFESSOR KENT for example, will show that Hebrew writers had no hesitation in repeating earlier legislation. Hence we cannot argue that no more was preserved solely because it was embodied in later legislation. Nor can we feel sure that no additions have been made to it. Some clauses seem to be very incongruous in their present context. This phenomenon, however, is not entirely absent from the Code of Hammurabi, which certainly has not been interpolated. But we must start on the Book of the Covenant, as critics have rescued it from its surroundings and set it down for us. At once an external feature strikes us. In the Book of the Covenant many have discerned a systematic arrangement of the laws in pentads or decads. The Ten Commandments at once occur to one’s mind as a parallel. What is the significance of this partiality for five and ten? We are expressly told that the Ten Commandments were on two tables. We should not be surprised had there been seven. Some will think the human equipment of five fingers led to the adoption of five as a convenient method of remembrance. In some such way five or ten may have conveyed the idea of numerical completeness. Unfortunately the division of the laws made by PROFESSOR V. SCHEIL in his _editio princeps_ of the Code is both arbitrary and inaccurate. No one has yet ventured to revise the numbering of the sections into which he divided the text of the Code; though several scholars have pointed out the inconsistencies. The lecturer, however, was struck by the fact that a more natural division at once shows an arrangement in _pentads_; and lately PROFESSOR D. G. LYON has worked out this idea, as can be most conveniently followed in the rendering of the Code given by PROFESSOR R. W. ROGERS in his _Cuneiform Parallels to the Old Testament_. Such an attempt will be resented by some as a purely subjective attempt to work up a likeness to the Mosaic laws and disputed accordingly. But the lecturer was led to it in the beginning solely by the fact that SCHEIL’s division did not agree with that made by the Babylonian scribes in the fragments of their copies which have survived.