It was by accident that the thesis of this book came to be. I had accepted and operated according to the standard critical understanding of the Covenant Code and its relationship to Mesopotamian legal tradition. This viewed the biblical law collection as the result of stages of development over several centuries. The similarities it had with texts such as the Laws of Hammurabi were due to Israel’s and the Bible’s inheriting oral traditions that circulated in Syria and Canaan before Israel appeared on the historical scene. I assumed, too, that the laws of the Covenant Code in large part reflected the practice of early Israel.

Then, one day in the fall of 1998 while preparing a lecture for a course on biblical and Near Eastern law at Brandeis University, I noticed that passages from the Covenant Code and the Laws of Hammurabi that I had assigned for an upcoming class session on a new topic happened to follow, in sequence, passages in these texts that I had assigned from the previous class session that was devoted to a different topic. I spent the next several hours looking for other sequential correlations between the two collections. By dinner time, I had charted a list of ten such laws or legal topics. Thus this study was born.