The Number Ten

Ten is the number of our fingers, and that simple fact made it the base of counting in ancient Egypt, India and China and, eventually, most of the world. A list of ten is one that can be held in two hands. It is no surprise, then, that ten often appears in religion as the number of a complete set: a full body of law, a full line of teachers, a full series of divine appearances.

The best-known example is the Ten Commandments. The Hebrew Bible calls them the “ten words” or “ten statements”, aseret ha-devarim, and gives their text twice, in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5. Tradition holds that they were written on two tablets of stone given to Moses on Mount Sinai. The Bible itself does not number the individual commands, so later communities divided them differently: Jewish tradition treats “I am the Lord your God” as the first statement, Catholics and Lutherans join the ban on other gods with the ban on images, and Orthodox, Anglican and Reformed churches separate them. In all three systems the total is still ten.

Ten runs through other parts of Jewish life. Egypt is struck by ten plagues before the Exodus. A rabbinic saying in the Mishnah holds that the world was created through ten divine utterances. Communal prayer requires a minyan of ten adults, traditionally ten men and, in many non-Orthodox communities today, men and women. The autumn holy days form the Ten Days of Awe, from Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, to Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, a period of self-examination in which, tradition holds, each person’s fate for the coming year is decided.

Jewish mysticism took ten further. The early, short and enigmatic Sefer Yetzirah, the “Book of Formation”, speaks of ten sefirotsefirot In Kabbalah, the ten powers through which the hidden God becomes known and acts in the world. Glossary alongside the twenty-two Hebrew letters as the building blocks of creation. Medieval Kabbalists, above all in the Zohar, turned the sefirot into a map of the divine life: ten aspects or emanations through which the hidden God becomes known, from Keter, the Crown, to Malkhut, the Kingdom. They are usually drawn as a diagram of ten circles joined by paths, often called the Tree of Life.

Sikhism counts ten human Gurus. The line begins with Guru Nanak, born in the Punjab in 1469, and ends with Guru Gobind Singh, who died in 1708. Sikhs believe the same divine light passed from one Guru to the next. Shortly before his death Guru Gobind Singh declared that there would be no further human Guru: authority would rest with the scripture, which Sikhs since then have honoured as the Guru Granth Sahib, and with the community of initiated Sikhs, the Khalsa. For Sikhs the number ten is therefore a closed and complete line.

In Hinduism the Dashavatara, the “ten descents”, tell how the god Vishnu enters the world whenever order is threatened. A common list runs from the fish Matsya, the tortoise Kurma and the boar Varaha, through the man-lion Narasimha and the dwarf Vamana, to Parashurama, Rama and Krishna, then the Buddha, and finally Kalki, who is still to come at the end of the present age. Historians note that earlier texts give different numbers, the Bhagavata Purana counting twenty-two or more, and that the ten-fold list became the standard one over the first millennium CE. Some regional lists replace the Buddha with Krishna’s brother Balarama.

Islam does not give ten a central symbolic role, but the number appears in the calendar. The tenth of Muharram, Ashura, was a fast day in the Prophet’s time and remains a voluntary fast for many Sunni Muslims; for Shi‘a Muslims it is above all the anniversary of the killing of the Prophet’s grandson Husayn at Karbala in 680 CE. The first ten days of the month of pilgrimage, Dhu al-Hijja, are counted among the most blessed of the year. Sunni tradition also speaks of ten Companions promised paradise in a hadith. In Theravada Buddhism the path of a future Buddha is described through ten perfections, and novices keep ten precepts.

The Greeks gave ten a philosophical meaning. The followers of Pythagoras, from the 6th century BCE onwards, taught that number underlies the order of the world. They called ten the perfect number, the dekad, and drew it as the tetractys: ten points arranged in a triangle of four rows, one, two, three and four. The rows could stand for the point, the line, the surface and the solid, or for the ratios of musical harmony. Later sources report that Pythagoreans swore an oath “by him who gave us the tetractys”. Most of what we know about the early school comes from much later writers, so historians treat these reports with caution.

The Ten Commandments remain among the most quoted texts in the world, displayed in synagogues above the ark, taught in Sunday schools and argued over in courtrooms. Jews gather a minyan daily and keep the Ten Days of Awe each autumn. Sikhs mark the birthdays and martyrdoms of the ten Gurus in their calendar, and Hindu temples show the ten avatars carved in rows on their walls. Ashura draws vast processions in Iraq, Iran and South Asia.

Behind all these examples lies the plain fact of human anatomy. Ten fingers produced the decimal system, and the decimal system made ten feel like a natural whole. Religious traditions did not invent that feeling, but they gave it content: laws to keep, teachers to honour, divine descents to remember, and, in Kabbalah and Pythagorean thought, a key to the structure of reality itself.