ABSTRACT
The earliest rule by the elders of the community and the essentially democratic freedom inherited from nomad society would seem to imply a respect for inherited custom and some more or less crude sense of justice. Certainly the traditions that are presented in the Old Testament as the early history of the nation reveal a sense of law beyond and supreme above mere individual whim. Israel inherited the law of the Canaanites, and her life among their relatively cultured communities must have exerted a moderating influence upon primitive violence. The kingship in spite of the obloquy it receives from certain Biblical writers, clearly entailed a national law that all must recognize. Slavery in the primitive days of Israel's history had humane features. The foreign slave, who was generally a captive in war, owed his life to the institution; apart from it he would almost certainly have been slaughtered at the time of his people's defeat.
