The decalogues of Exodus 20-23 clearly represent the earliest canon of the Old Testament. These are intended to define clearly the obligations of the nation to Jehovah, and to place these obligations before the people so definitely that they would be understood and met. As the term "decalogue," that is "ten words," indicates, the Biblical decalogue originally contained ten brief sententious commands, easily memorized even by children. Each of the decalogues is divided into two groups of five laws or pentads. This division of five and ten was without reasonable doubt intended to aid the memory by associating each law with a finger or thumb of the two hands. Exodus 20-23 and its parallels in Deuteronomy contain ten decalogues, that is a decalogue of decalogues, suggesting that originally a decalogue was associated with each of the fingers and thumbs of the two hands even as were the individual words or commands. This system of mnemonics was useful in teaching a child nation. It is still useful to-day. It is important to impress upon the child in this concrete way certain of the fundamental obligations to God and man. The form of the ten commandments in part explains the commanding place which they still hold in religious education throughout Christendom. The Biblical accounts of the two decalogues in Exodus 20 and 34 vary in details. The early Judean prophetic narrative in Exodus 34 states that these commands were inscribed by Moses himself on two stone tablets. In the later versions of the story Jehovah inscribes them with his own fingers on the two tablets which he gave to Moses. That the older decalogue was written on two tablets and set up in the temple of Solomon is exceedingly probable, for by the days of the United Kingdom the Hebrews were beginning to become acquainted with the art of writing and therefore could read the laws in written form. The recently discovered code of Hammurabi, which comes from the twentieth century B.C., was inscribed in parallel columns on a stone monument. In the epilogue to this wonderful code the king states: "By the order of Shamash, the judge supreme of heaven and earth, that judgment may shine in the land, I set up a bas-relief to preserve my likeness in the great temple that I love, to commemorate my name forever in gratitude. The oppressed who has a suit to prosecute may come before my image, that of a righteous king, and read my inscription and understand my precious words and let my stele elucidate his case. Let him see the law he seeks, and may he draw in his breath and say: 'This Hammurabi was to his people like the father that begot them!'" Thus this devout king of ancient Babylonia graphically defines the motive which, at a later period, led Israel's spiritual leaders to set before the people those principles which made for the welfare both of the nation and of the individual. Each was keenly conscious that the laws which brought social and spiritual health