Crime and Punishment the two halves of the novel, as David Bethea has argued, is organized according to a mirror-like principle, whereby the "left" half of the novel reflects the "right" half. The seventh part of the novel, the Epilogue, has attracted much attention and controversy. Some of Dostoevsky's critics have criticized the novel's final pages as superfluous, anti-climactic, unworthy of the rest of the work, while others have defended it, offering various schemes that they claim prove its inevitability and necessity. Steven Cassedy argues that "Crime and Punishment" "is formally two distinct but closely related, things, namely a particular type of tragedy
Crime and punishment in the Torah 'Do not accept a ransom for the life of the murderer who deserves to die' (Num 35:31). . . . Traditional wisdom, both in the Jewish and Christian communities, interpreted this verse in Numbers 35:31 to mean that out of the almost twenty cases calling for capital punishment in the Old Testament, every one of them could have the sanction commuted by an appropriate substitute of money or anything that showed the seriousness of the crime, but in the case of what we today call first-degree murder, there was never to be offered or accepted any substitute or bargaining of