THE LAWS OF THE BABYLONIANS. 



249 



famous, we must also remcml^er as instancing the fact that he and 

 his dynasty have nothing to do with Bal)ylonia, that they l)elong to 

 the same race that gave this early dynasty to the South Arabian 

 District, that on the inscriptions were found the names of two members 

 of the same dynasty exactly as they appear now on this inscription, 

 so we have come to call this the South Arabian dynasty. Some 

 people have been troubled (I do not know why) to find that a large 

 number of enactments and laws which related to the civil status of 

 the Jews, should have been found existing amongst the neighbours 

 of the Jews at this very early date. Surely nothing could be more 

 natural. You cannot, by any process under heaven, impose a great 

 code of laws by a jump. Such codes are all the result of a long 

 process of preparation, and they cannot go very far ahead of the 

 moral standard of the people whom they affect. If they do, they 

 fall in abeyance. They represent a long period of growth, a gradual 

 development which we call the ethics of jurisprudence, and it is very 

 natural that we should find that a large number of those enact- 

 ments should relate to people so closely connected Avith the Jews. 

 Vaghler has published a beautiful edition of the text and transla- 

 tions, and a German pastor has published, within the last fortnight, 

 an admirable monograph of the whole code, in which he takes the 

 line I am trying to argue, and it is of great interest to us all to find 

 that these laws, about which questions of all kinds have been raised, 

 should have been proved to be the Laws of Western Semites in their 

 growth and progress. 



There is one point upon which I am inclined to difi'er from my 

 friend. This enormous monolith, when I saw it in Paris, seemed to 

 be a ver}'' difficult stone for even the Elamite king to carry across 

 the country and up to the mountains of Susa. No doubt Cush was 

 actually once a province of the empire of Hammurabi, and there 

 were perpetual fights in those provinces. I have written many 

 papers on the struggles of these people, and I believe when Ham- 

 murabi formed his great empire, extending into the countries of 

 the west and into Palestine, that he also conquered and appropriated 

 the kingdom which was afterwards the seat of the empire of the 

 Elamite Kings, but which during his time was part of his empire, 

 and that this monolith was simply planted in one of the cities of his 

 empire and formed a portion of his own legal enactments, and that it 

 is not a question of the removal of the stone. 



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