Considerable weight may ultimately have to be laid on the grouping of
the laws by ‘tens’ or ‘fives’. This aspect had been discussed by D. G.
LYON in the _Journal of the American Oriental Society_, vol. xxv, pp.
248-65, as _The Structure of the Hammurabi Code_ (New Haven, Conn.,
1904).
C. F. KENT in his excellent work on _Israel’s Laws and Legal Precedents_
(London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1907) makes considerable use of a division
of Hebrew laws into groups of five or ten, of which the Ten Commandments
forms a well-known example. Whether or no these divisions command
general assent, we should notice that D. G. LYON finds repeated evidence
of the same grouping in the Code of Hammurabi. This naturally cannot be
pressed too far as evidence of dependence. But it is surely
non-essential that laws should be arranged in pentads unless we are to
suppose that a reference to five fingers as a method of recalling the
separate clauses is involved, and would be natural to expect in such
cases. But that Israelite fondness for the number seven, shown in their
seven-day week as against the Babylonian week of five days, or their
partiality for other sacred numbers, did not affect the numbering of the
laws may well be significant. If it turn out that these groups of five
also correspond in contents, even though they show traces of change, we
have a strong argument for dependence which supports any others pointing
in the same direction.