Understanding The Scriptures

There is much obscurity about the beginnings of the laws of the Hebrews. One characteristic of those laws, however, is evident from a very early date--the regard for human life as such and the aim to make human existence increasingly worth while. It is a common quality of primitive religions that they are apt to lay stress on merely ceremonial cleansings, for example. The ceremony is gone through for the sake of pleasing a deity.