Abstract
I thank Bruce Wells for his carefully considered response to my paper, “The Laws of Hammurabi as a Source for the Covenant Collection,” published in
Maarav in 2003. He raises issues that must be contemplated in evaluating the historical significance of correspondences between the Covenant Collection (CC) and the Laws of Hammurabi (LH) and other Near Eastern law collections and documents. On the whole his response seeks to demonstrate that CC is too dissimilar toLH to be dependent upon it. Specifically, in sections I and II of his re-sponse, he proposes and employs a method for evaluating the degree of similarity between laws. This involves grading the likeness of individual motifs within compared laws in order to judge the overall similarity of a particular law.