⚠ The eleven categories are ours

The 613 arrive as a numbered sequence, not as a shape. To make them browsable this app sorts them into eleven headings. ⚠⚠ This grouping is the app's, made for reading. Rambam does not categorise his list this way and neither does anyone else.

The eleven: God and how He is spoken of · Torah and the things worn and written · the turning year · the sanctuary and its service · the table, and what may be eaten · the land and what is left in it · courts, testimony and punishment · between one person and another · household and lineage · kings, war and the nations · purity and defilement.

⭐ The eleventh was forced by the data, not chosen. Ten headings were drawn up first; the corpse and its shadow, the leper and the leprous house, the zav and the zavah, immersion and the Red Heifer would not sit under any of them, and a residue that large is a category refusing to be filed rather than a set of exceptions.

No category number is ever printed in this app, and the reason is not squeamishness. A per-category total would mean adopting one enumeration and then taking sides in several live disputes at once — see taryag-counting. The classes are not in dispute; the arithmetic is.

⚠⚠ And the guard changed shape when the list was published, so it is said out loud: now anyone can count a category for themselves, and the number they get is ours too. It is not a fact about the 613. It is a fact about how this app filed Rambam's list.

If you want a classical arrangement instead: the Mishneh Torah organises all of Jewish law into fourteen books, and the Sefer HaChinuch walks the commandments in the order of the weekly Torah portions. Both are somebody's, too — but they are somebody named.