rly the
obligations of the nation to Jehovah, and to place these
obligations before the people so definitely that they would be
understood and met. As the term "decalogue," that is "ten words,"
indicates, the Biblical decalogue originally contained ten brief
sententious commands, easily memorized even by children. Each of
the decalogues is divided into two groups of five laws or pentads.
This division of five and ten was without reasonable doubt intended
to aid the memory by associating each law with a finger or thumb of
the two hands. Exodus 20-23 and its parallels in Deuteronomy
contain ten decalogues, that is a decalogue of decalogues,
suggesting that originally a decalogue was associated with each of
the fingers and thumbs of the two hands even as were the individual
words or commands. This system of mnemonics was useful in teaching
a child nation. It is still useful to-day. It is important to
impress upon the child in this concrete way certain of the
fundamental obligations to God and man. The form of the ten
commandments in part explains the commanding place which they still
hold in religious education throughout Christendom.

The Biblical accounts of the two decalogues in Exodus 20 and 34
vary in details. The early Judean prophetic narrative in Exodus 34
states that these commands were inscribed by Moses himself on two
stone tablets. In the later versions of the story Jehovah
inscribes them with his own fingers on the two tablets which he
gave to Moses. That the older decalogue was written on two tablets
and set up in the temple of Solomon is exceedingly probable, for by
the days of the United Kingdom the Hebrews were beginning to become
acquainted with the art of writing and therefore could read the
laws in written form. The recently discovered code of Hammurabi,
which comes from the twentieth century B.C., was inscribed in
parallel columns on a stone monument. In the epilogue to this
wonderful code the king states: "By the order of Shamash, the judge
supreme of heaven and earth, that judgment may shine in the land, I
set up a bas-relief to preserve my likeness in the great temple
that I love, to commemorate my name forever in gratitude. The
oppressed who has a suit to prosecute may come before my image,
that of a righteous king, and read my inscription and understand my
precious words and let my stele elucidate his case. Let him see
the law he seeks, and may he draw in his breath and say: 'This