had been agreed upon.  The last result of this labour of many years is the Priestly Code.  It has indeed been said that we cannot ascribe the creation of such a work to an age which was bent on nothing but repristination.  Granted that this is a correct description of it, such an age is peculiarly fitted for an artificial systematising of given materials, and this is what the originality of the Priestly Code in substance amounts to. 1

******************************************** 1.  Dillmann arrives at the conclusion that the assumption is the most natural one in the world, and still capable of proof from ACD (!) that the priesthood of the central sanctuary wrote down their toroth even in early times; and that it is absurd to suppose that the priestly and ceremonial laws were first written down, or even made, in the exile and in Babylon, where there was no worship.  We will let it be absurd, if it is true.  It is not progress, though it is a fact, that the kings were succeeded by the high-priests, and the prophets by the Rabbis.  Yet it is a thing which is likely to occur, that a body of traditional practice should only be written down when it is threatening to die out, and that a book should be, as it were, the ghost of a life which is closed. ********************************************

The Priestly Code, worked into the Pentateuch as the standard legislative element in it, became the definite “Mosaic law.”  As such it was published and introduced in the year 444 B.C., a century after the exile .  In the interval, the duration of which is frequently under-estimated, Deuteronomy alone had been known and recognised as the written Torah, though as a fact the essays of Ezekiel and his successors may have had no inconsiderable influence in leading circles.  The man who made the Pentateuch the constitution of Judaism was the Babylonian priest and scribe, Ezra.  He had come from Babylon to Jerusalem as early as the year 458 B.C., the seventh of Artaxerxes Longimanus, at the head of a considerable company of zealous Jews, provided it is said with a mandate from the Persian king, empowering him to reform according to the law the congregation of the temple, which had not yet been able to consolidate itself inwardly nor to shut itself off sufficiently from those without.

“Thou art sent of the king and of his seven counsellors to hold an inquiry concerning Judah and Jerusalem according to the law of thy God which is in thine hand....And thou Ezra, according to the wisdom of thy God which is in thine hand, set magistrates and judges which may judge all the people that are beyond the river, all such as acknowledge the laws of thy God, and teach ye them that know them not.  And whosoever will not do the law of thy God and the law of the king, let him be prosecuted.”  So we read in the commission of the Persian king to Ezra, vii. 12-26; which, even should it be spurious, must yet reflect the views of his contemporaries.  The expression taken from Ezra’s own memoirs, vii. 27, leaves no doubt that he was assisted by Artaxerxes in the objects he had in view. 1