Excerpt from Israel's Laws and Legal Precedents: From the Days of Moses to the Closing or the Legal Canon That inner history, however, is almost completely obscured by the con fused order in which the laws at present are found. Civil and ceremonial, criminal and humane, secular and religious, ancient and late laws and legal precedents are all mingled together, with little trace of systematic classification. The one who seeks to read or study them is constantly distracted, as in the book of Proverbs, by the sudden transitions; if he desires to determine the teaching of the Old Testament on a given theme, it is only after the most laborious research that he is able to bring similar laws together. Even when this preliminary work has been done, the result is often perplexing, for many of the laws contradict each other. The present confused order is the inevitable result of the complex process of collecting, editing and supplementing through which each of the legal books has passed. The laws of many ancient and modern nations present close analogies. Since law through gradual growth is adapted to the varying needs of succeeding generations, there is an inevi table lack of order unless the whole body of enactments is frequently and thoroughly codified. The first requisite, therefore, if the Old Testament legal literature is to be studied intelligently and profitably, is that similar laws be grouped together, and then that those in each resulting group be arranged in their chronological order. For practical purposes it is important that all the regulations relating to a given subject be reproduced, even at the cost of occasional repetitions. It is also desirable to follow, as far as it can be discovered, the original Hebrew order of classification. In Exodus 211 2319, which contains the oldest collection of laws in the Old Testament. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.