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Updated: May 18, 2025
But on the whole, the Hebrew laws place a higher estimate on life and less on property. They reflect also a simpler type of civilization than the Babylonian. When three or four obviously later additions have been removed, the Judgments are found to consist of five decalogues, each divided into two pentads which deal with different phases of the same general subject.
It is in this direction, then, that we must face the great question, not by analytical examination of the system of prizes and punishments, of the principle of emulation, of the most opportune and practical manner of inculcating moral principles, nor by the creation of new decalogues.
In the process of transmission they have been somewhat disarranged, but, with the aid of the fuller duplicate versions in Deuteronomy, four complete decalogues can be restored and part of a fifth. The following analysis will suggest their general character and contents: HUMANE AND CEREMONIAL LAWS First Decalogue: Kindness. First Pentad: Towards Men, Ex. xxii. 2la, 22-23, 25a, 25b, 26-27.
The simple life of the desert and early Canaan required no written records. Custom and memory preserved all the laws that were needed. Also, as we have seen, before the Hebrews came into contact with the Canaanites and Phoenicians, they do not seem to have developed the literary art. Instead, they cast their important commands and laws into the form of pentads and decalogues.
Although in part contemporary, the next stage in the development of Israelitish law is represented by the civil, social, and humane decalogues in Exodus xx. 28 to xxiii. 19. The best preserved group is found in xxi.1 to xxii.20, and bears the title Judgments, which recalls Hammurabi's title to his code, The Judgments of Righteousness.
The primitive accounts, in Exodus xix., of the establishment of the covenant by Jehovah with his people mark the real beginning of the process of canonization, a process, that is, of attributing to certain laws a unique and commanding authority. Likewise the successive civil, humane, and ceremonial decalogues appear from the days of the united kingdom to have occupied a similar position.
Like the Judgments, these decalogues bear testimony to their northern origin, and probably they also have had much the same history, although their relation to the primitive decalogue and the fact that they are prefixed and added to the solid group of Judgments, would seem to indicate that they were somewhat later.
It was long enough before all this grew into Decalogues and the Sermon on the Mount and the latter chapters of Paul's great letters to his churches and our present system of Christian ethics, but we discover the beginning of the lordship of religion over conduct even in the most primitive cults.
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