One type is that which is perhaps best seen in the customs of the Arabs, as still surviving among the modern Bedawin, and known to us from the ancient Arabic writers. This has been called primitive Semitic custom. The Israelites, before their entrance into Canaan, as a nomad pastoral people, would be governed by such law, if it can be called law. The dynasty to which Hammurabi belonged was foreign to Babylonia. It owed its rise to an incursion of a Semitic people. That Semites were in Babylonia long before is true, but this was a fresh invasion by a probably nomad pastoral race. They had previously obeyed the same primitive laws as it is assumed the Israelites did before their settlement in Canaan. Forming as they did the ruling race in Babylonia, they yet clung with Oriental conservatism to their ancient customs. Even such a powerful ruler as Hammurabi could not, or at any rate did not see fit to, entirely change those customs. In the period when the Laws of Moses were instituted, the Israelites were similarly the ruling race in Canaan. Their earlier laws, as known to us, show the same conservation of primitive custom, and that of the same type. The other type of law is that due to a settled community. In Babylonia it may have been evolved through long ages. It may have been, and probably was, largely due to a non-Semitic people, usually called Sumerians, whose racial affinities are not yet well made out. These were conquered by the Semites of Hammurabi’s race. In Canaan too the invading Israelites found a long-settled people in possession. They were governed by very similar laws to those of the settled Babylonians. That these laws had been imported from Babylonia is open to question. Much that is common to the laws of the two settled communities may have arisen independently. There is as yet no evidence that the Canaanites were of the Sumerian stock.[7] But Babylonian influence on the Canaanite law is quite conceivable, and is supported by historical evidence of long-continued intercourse between Babylonia and the West. As the Israelites became a settled population many of their nomad customs must have become inappropriate. They might have evolved new laws. They might have taken over the laws of the Canaanites, so far as these were innocent, or not too obnoxious to Hebrew prejudices. Exactly which course they followed in each case is a matter of history. The historical evidence may be inconclusive. We must make the best of it.