19. The Same True of Legal Forms

The Same True of Legal Forms With regard to the laws it may be said that, not merely in the form in which the individual laws are stated, but also in the manner in which they are collected together in a kind of code, there was a pattern for the Israelites already existing at least from the time of Hammurapi, a contemporary of Abraham. This code of Hammurapi, it is true, deals almost entirely with civil and criminal laws such as we find in parts of Deuteronomy. But the plan of the tabernacle in Exodus 25-29 may be likened to the plans of the Babylonian temples which were placed in their foundation stones, to which Nebuchadnezzar and Nabunaid so often refer. Laws similar to those concerning leprosy and other diseases have also come down from the old Sumerians. It is almost certain, also, that the elaborate ceremonies of the Egyptian and Babylonian temples must have been regulated by written laws, though thus far we have discovered no complete code treating of such matters. That Moses with his education in all the wisdom of the Egyptians at 1500 B.C. might have produced the laws of the Pentateuch under the divine guidance seems beyond dispute. Lycurgus, Mohammed, Charlemagne, Peter the Great, and Napoleon have performed similar feats without any special divine help. It does not follow that systems of law and constitutions were not written, or inaugurated, because they were never carried out nor permanently established. Theodoric and Alfred the Great and even Charlemagne organized governments which scarcely survived their demise. The critics are in the habit of stressing the fact that so little mention of the law is made in the period before Hezekiah, or even Josiah, and assert that the law of the Priest-code was not fully established before Ezra.