Now on such a view of the general similarities many have expressed the opinion that the Hebrew laws are a more or less revised adaptation of the Babylonian law, perhaps as locally already modified in Canaan to suit the prejudices of the invaders while they were changing their habits of life and became a settled people. But this view is not vivid enough for others. There is a certain delight which some feel in propounding views calculated to shock some one. The cruder view that the Hebrew lawgiver, call him Moses or some higher critical periphrasis for the same thing, sat down with a cuneiform copy of the Code before him and copied out the Babylonian laws with some adaptations, may have been enunciated with some such amiable wish, but was too crude to disturb any one. It is barely worth record. The differences between the Codes are too important for us to adopt it. If he made a copy it was a very bad copy. Some allowance for the difference in age must also be made. Such a length of time as five hundred to a thousand years must have been marked by great changes in Babylonia or in Canaan. The advent of the Israelites must have introduced new forces into the life of Palestine. Here we have to weigh carefully our evidence, which points on the whole to the Israelite contribution being more primitive in type, and in some degree a return to early conditions which held before the time of Hammurabi in Babylonia. Dear as these changes were to the later Jewish mind, they were not what we should call improvements. But when merely considering such general resemblances, along with such marked differences, we can readily see that a theory of common origin will suffice to account for the likenesses; while many subordinate theories can be put forward to account for the differences. Between the theories of these differences it must be impossible to decide until we know more accurately the exact circumstances of the Israelites at, or soon after, their conquest of Canaan. We may, for example, have to regard the conquest as extending over a long period and admitting of many gradations of supremacy in different parts. It is not likely that a clean sweep was made of the old inhabitants and their customs at any one epoch or place. We may have to extend this period of conquest down to the end of the time of the Judges. Parallels are not wanting in the history of Babylonia. The so-called Amorites had been some centuries in the land before Hammurabi’s supremacy, even before they appear as founding a dynasty.