Now the answer to such a question depends upon what we can find elsewhere in the people’s previous experience in the desert, in Canaan, or in dim memories of far-off Babylonian days. That is to say, if these really denoted distinct epochs in their history with distinct civilizations. For if a law on these points already existed, was recalled, or observed in force, which proves to be practically the same as that here adopted, or could be ascertained on inquiry by Hebrew legislators, then the view that they did not attempt to ascertain it, nor recalled it, nor observed it, but independently concocted a fresh law, and in so doing hit upon exactly the same result as they might have ascertained, recalled, or observed, needs only to be stated to refute itself. An appeal to inspiration to explain this kind of miracle is only laughable, and if the best of men professed to so account for any of his actions in ordinary life, we could only doubt his sanity so long as we believed his sincerity. The Code of Hammurabi had existed for five hundred years or more, and it shows what a settled folk of same racial type under much the same conditions did achieve on the subject. We must, then, show that the Book of the Covenant treats things differently, or that its author could not well be aware of this Code, before we can safely deny that he is indebted to it. Such reasoning has led many scholars to assert roundly that the Hebrew legislation is derived directly from the Babylonian. But for argument’s sake let us start by assuming that the regulations in the Book of the Covenant are original and devised solely to meet the circumstances in Canaan at some early period in the Israelite predominance there, and let us consider these regulations more closely. The regulations appear to concern a Hebrew slave. The first question we ask in astonishment is: How came a Hebrew to be a slave? We probably all know of amazing feats of exegetical dexterity achieved over this question. The Book of the Covenant, however, only adduces the one case of a man sold by the judicial authority for a theft which he was unable to restore (Exodus xxii. 3). The later law in Deuteronomy xv. 12 appears to add the slave acquired by purchase. Who had then the right to sell him? If a Babylonian was captured by the enemy and offered for sale as a slave to his compatriots he had to be ransomed by his own family, his city, or the state, and was restored to freedom and not enslaved any longer. Surely a Hebrew would not be worse treated. The law of P. explains the case more clearly (Leviticus xxv. 39): ‘If thy brother be waxen poor with thee, and sell himself unto thee.’ We may regard this as later, but can we deny that the case itself was not supposed all along? It is most probable that the only way in which a Hebrew could become a slave in his own land to serve a Hebrew master was in some such fashion, which is not really slavery at all.