A^A) BEV. JOHN URQUHAKT, ON THE BKAKING OF RECENT 



Egyptian literature, we find the same enthusiastic reverence for 

 learning."* In the XVIIIth Dynasty, the time of Moses, this 

 earnest pursuit of literature was in full career. It was an age 

 of writing and of books. From what we now know, it would 

 have been an almost fatal objection to any account of the work 

 of Moses had there been no writing and no books in connection 

 with a movement of sucli vast historic importance. It would have 

 been urged, and urged with irresistible force, that the absence 

 of literature and the presence of other marks of a rude and 

 illiterate time showed that the mission of Moses could not 

 possibly belong to the place and to the age with which it is said 

 to have been associated, and that above all it could have had no 

 such connection as it is said to have had with the Eorypt of the 

 XVIIIth Dynasty. 



A second assumption is that the time of Moses was much 

 too early for so elaborate a body of laws as is contained in the 

 Pentateuch. With the then current notions as to the state of 

 Eastern society in 1600 B.C. — notions whicli were due to the 

 dense ignorance of those times which prevailed previously to 

 the middle of last century — this conclusion was natural. As a 

 matter of fact, we may, indeed, go further. Notwithstanding 

 what was already known of the literary character of antiquity, 

 the idea that there was no law book in ancient Babylonia, for 

 instance, was clung to tenaciously. On the very eve of the 

 discovery of the Laws of Hammurabi, Dr. Pinches, one of 

 the princes of archeology, wrote : " It may be noted that the 

 ancient Babylonians had to all appearance no code of laws 

 in the true sense of the term."t All that they were supposed 

 to have had were "customs and precedents," the only legal 

 equipment, it was said, in the age of Moses and in Israel for 

 centuries afterwards. All tliis now belongs to the past. A 

 glance at the full and able translation of the Laws of 

 Hammurabi supplied by Dr. Pinches in his appendix to the 

 book from which I have just quoted, dissipates the notion that 

 the age of Moses was too early for a regularly codified body of 

 laws. Here, five hundred years earlier, we have an equally 

 elaborate law-book, dealing with agriculture, commerce, social 

 relations, evidence, etc., and occasionally presenting suggestive 

 parallels to tlie Laws of Moses. And this important discovery 

 takes us furtlier still. It shows not only that the Mosaic law 



* Life iv Ancient Egy}>t^ p. 328. 

 t The Old Testament, etc., ]). 190. 



