But one of the Hebrew Scriptures does attempt to account for the change, and evidently regards it as a change to be accounted for. The Deuteronomic writer argues that the creditor ought not to deem it hard that he should release his debtor at the end of six years because he had so served a double term. We may note that as it now stands the text says ‘double the hire of a hireling’. That is purely irrelevant. A slave’s value was surely less to the holder, not more than that of a hireling, for his keep had to be subtracted, and his work was hardly likely to be so valuable as that of a freeman. The profit of a hireling is the excess of the value of his work above what is paid for it. The hire of a hireling was surely not just half the value of his own work or of a slave’s work. Indeed, it is not easy to see what the double of a hireling’s hire has to do with the question. The writer was right in saying the term of six years was double something, and there can be no question that it was double three years, and therefore double the term fixed by Hammurabi five hundred or more years before. The creditor seems to have resented letting the debtor go at all, at any rate till he had worked off all his debt. The writer clearly knew that the creditor had already obtained twice what he had to expect under other circumstances, and believed he would admit the fact. It was double the Babylonian allowance. Can this undesigned coincidence be accidental? Is either Semitic custom or human experience competent to explain the significance of the doubleness being pointed out in this way? If Canaanite custom before the Exodus had a term of three years’ service in such cases, the same as the Hammurabi Code, surely that was due to Babylonian law, unless, as some would maintain, the Amorite dynasty to which Hammurabi belonged really came from Canaan, in which case Hammurabi imposed Canaanite law on Babylonia. It was a non-essential, anyway; it could nowhere have been the outcome of special circumstances likely to occur again. It was not a creditor’s law, for he obviously wanted liberty to keep the debtor’s hostage till he had satisfied his own desires; it was not a debtor’s law, for he would have surely preferred the three years’ limit. It was a concession to the creditor to meet that hard-hearted person’s wishes. It is not the large stock of common matter in the two legislations about a hostage for debt but the disguised yet undeniable adaptation which seems so significant.