The idea of God as the ultimate source of punishment is inferred as characteristic in the Book of the Covenant from Exod. xxi. 6; xxii. 8, 9, where the offender is brought ‘unto the judges’. These words are now more usually rendered ‘before God’, as there is no apparent reason why the word usually rendered ‘God’ should here be rendered ‘judges’, beyond a late opinion that such was the meaning of the phrase. This opinion is correct in so far as that analogy with Babylonia leads us to suppose that in every trial before judges the parties and the witnesses were put on oath before God. This direct appeal to God as the all-seeing Judge of men is in complete accord with the Babylonian practice, as revealed by the Code of Hammurabi. The conscience of the criminal and the fear of God’s vengeance on the perjured were in old times very powerful motives. It is often said that the Jewish law is theocratic. So it is, when regarded as a whole and in the sense noted in the last paragraph. But this is not the attitude of the Judgements contained in the Book of the Covenant. At any rate they are not more theocratic than the Code of Hammurabi, which is extraordinarily free of religious motive. The type of a theocratic code is the Laws of Manu, a much more primitive type than the Laws of Moses. In some respects the Code of Hammurabi is practically a civil code, and so ahead of the Laws of Moses. But it must not be taken as a criterion of age that the Mosaic law is theocratic, nor pressed as a mark of primitive law. For it is theocratic mostly in a peculiar sense. The civil law of Israel comes to us embedded in a mass of religious law, and prefaced by a narrative of its production, serving to connect it with its divine author. Some portion of this framework bears a strong formal likeness to the Code of Hammurabi. This has been pointed out by S. A. COOK who, however, does not regard it as a sign of dependence. We must, however, allow some weight, one way or another, to this likeness. Either this setting is original, or it is not. If it essentially belongs to the Book of the Covenant, that is theocratic to about the same extent as the Code of Hammurabi, and another striking similarity is added to the list of arguments for dependence. If it is not original, then the Book of the Covenant, unlike the rest of the Hebrew law, was originally purely civil unless it had a different religious setting (Babylonian or Canaanite?), and so still more like the body of the Code of Hammurabi.