Now the first thing to deal with is the general similarity of the Code to the Book of the Covenant, considered as our best witness to the primitive Hebrew law. It has been calculated that out of forty-five, or possibly fifty-five judgements preserved in this old Hebrew law, thirty-five have points of contact with the Hammurabi Code, and quite half are parallel. Of course, there are also marked differences to be accounted for. The Hebrew law appears to have legislated for a small people, among whom human life was precious and property scanty. The Babylonian law protects property with far severer penalty, and makes little account of a criminal’s life. This is appropriate to a nation of commercial instincts and a wealthy populous state. It recognizes grades of wealth and position. The theft of an ox is punished by a five-fold restoration in the Hebrew law, in the Babylonian by thirty times its value, or in the plebeian’s case by a ten-fold penalty. We may estimate the difference by saying that in the desert five oxen was about all a man had, and his family would probably have to help him to pay, and so the penalty was an effective restraint; while in Babylonia, thirty oxen were to many men not more costly, and even the commoner was twice as wealthy as an Israelite. It is, however, more likely that the penalties were not calculated at all upon an estimate of what they meant to the criminal, but on an artificial system of the value of numbers. For example, in Israel, five may have been ideally complete. PROFESSOR D. H. MÜLLER has most ingeniously worked out the possible significance of the numbers. It is not particularly profitable to insist upon the superior humanity of either code. Impartial judges, acquainted with ancient codes, will perceive that the balance between the rights of the individual and those of the State is always very difficult to hold level. Severe penalties may be due to the determination to suppress crime at any cost. The desire to save the criminal from the results of his crime is not to be expected of any early legislator. Only when his life was worth more to the State than the loss he was likely to cause could the criminal hope for pardon. As Hammurabi put it, the king might wish to save his servant’s life. Points of close agreement are numerous. The treatment of sorcery, the law of deposit, the punishment of kidnapping, injury to a pregnant woman, regulations as to shepherds, and a score more may be noted as very similar. These are given in many books, very conveniently in PROFESSOR S. R. DRIVER’s _Genesis_ in the _Cambridge Bible for Schools_.