Peter Eckstein
POSTING THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
SINCE ROY MOORE, Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, took the first steps toward his eventual campaign for governor by erecting a gigantic Ten Commandments monument in the state's Supreme Court building, officials in other states have jumped on the bandwagon. In December 2005, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma told a crowd rallying at a Ten Commandments monument outside a county courthouse that such monuments should be on every courthouse lawn. “We need more of this,” he said, “not less.”
In my own state, the Michigan House of Representatives passed a resolution in 2005 seeking to have the Commandments displayed in or around the state capitol building. The advocates depicted the Commandments as an infallible guide to morality and as an historical foundation of American law. State Representative Tom Casperson described posting them as an important way to restore “a moral compass to our society.” He claimed that the founders used the Commandments to help draft the federal Constitution and that they “were part of the foundation of the judicial system.” Rep. Robert Gosselin called the Commandments the “bedrock of Michigan law,” while Rep. Jack Hoogendyk—then running for governor himself—called them “the foundation for the freedoms we hold dear.”
1 Are any of these assertions anything more than legislative blather? Is governmental posting of the Commandments sound public policy?
The first problem is the version to be displayed. My own discussion will be largely based on the traditional King James Version. But there are currently well over a dozen other Protestant translations on the mass market,
2 as well as several Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish translations. Should a state legislature choose one translation favored by just one segment of the Judeo-Christian tradition while excluding those favored by all the others?
Should a state legislature choose one translation favored by just one segment of the Judeo-Christian tradition while excluding those favored by all the others?
Most public displays—including Justice Moore's version—are not the full Ten Commandments. They are abridgments of the originals—Reader's Digest versions—that exclude many of the thornier passages. The King James Version contains 334 words, but Moore has taken it upon himself to whittle them down to a mere 75.
The First Commandment begins, “I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the
land of Egypt.” An increasing number of Americans are Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Shintoists, Taoists, Confucians, adherents of Native American religions, animists, agnostics, and atheists—few of whom claim descent from the Israelite tribes who fled Egypt. Should a state government be in the business of declaring to all its citizens that they shall “have no other gods” above the God of the Israelites?
Most public displays—including Justice Moore's version—are not the full Ten Commandments. They are abridgments of the originals—Reader's Digest versions—that exclude many of the thornier passages.
The Second Commandment forbids making any “graven,” or carved, image
3—and bowing down to one. This warning also ignores the wide range of religious practice. Some Hindus bow before graven images of their gods, and some Catholics genuflect before graven images of their saints. The Vatican is filled with graven images of Christ, saints, and popes. Nor are most state governments innocent of this practice. In Michigan the capitol lawn holds at least six graven images—a stone eagle atop a war memorial, two stags on the state seal, a wolverine on an historical marker, two soldiers, and an imposing statue of the state's Civil War governor. Should these statues display a warning from the legislature that God forbids the making of graven images?
The Second Commandment also threatens to visit “the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.” Should a child visiting the capitol start to worry that she may be punished because decades ago a great-grandfather she never knew may have hit his thumb with a hammer and impulsively used the name of the Lord in vain? Does any American law seek to punish children, let alone grandchildren and great-grandchildren, for the transgressions of their fathers?
If the founders used the Ten Commandments in drafting the federal Constitution, they did a masterful job of disguising that fact. Not one key word from the Commandments appears in the text.
4 The only allusion to them is to the Second Commandment, and it is a decidedly negative one—an absolute rejection of “Corruption of Blood,” the philosophy of punishing children for the crimes of their parents. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes wrote, “It is the essence of the institutions of liberty that it be recognized that guilt is personal.” Isn't such recognition a sounder foundation for our laws than the intergenerational vengeance propounded by the Second Commandment?
5The Fourth Commandment forbids any work on the Sabbath. Do the legislatures wish to reinstate “blue laws” that forbid working on Sunday (and presumably on Friday for Muslims and Saturday for Jews)? Do they wish to ban all shopping malls, golf courses, television stations, restaurants, backyard gardeners, and food harvesters from operating on the Sabbath? In Michigan, the legislature overwhelmingly voted a million-dollar subsidy for the 2006 Super Bowl in Detroit, even though the NFL championship is always held on a Sunday. The subsidy was opposed by only nine of the seventy-four legislators who had a few months earlier voted to post the Commandments—and none recorded a reason for that opposition. Why did none of the seventy-four legislators protest the fact that the football players, coaches, officials, cheerleaders, announcers, camera crews, food vendors, security guards, and others would all be working on the Christian Sabbath?
Should a state government be in the business of declaring to all its citizens that they shall “have no other gods” above the God of the Israelites?
The Fourth Commandment justifies itself by asserting that “in six days the Lord made the heaven and earth” and “rested on the seventh day.” Some legislators may actually believe this, but they should understand that there isn't a single shred of geological or paleontological evidence for this assertion. Geologists currently estimate that the earth is 4.5 billion years old and that it has taken nearly all that time—some 1.6 trillion days—to reach its present form.
6 This estimate may change, but can anyone imagine some new discovery that will suddenly compel geologists to compress their estimate of 1.6 trillion days to the six days stated as historical fact in the Fourth Commandment?
The great antiquity of the earth isn't disputed in most religious or in any truly scientific circles. In 1996 Pope John Paul II noted the “increasing precision” with which scientists were describing “the multiple manifestations of life” and correlating them with a “time line.”
7 Even the proponents of “intelligent design” don't dispute this basic timeline for the emergence of different species. Their principal textbook points out that “the vast majority” of the known groupings of organisms appeared within a range of “10 to 40 million years”—a far cry from the six days described in Genesis and reaffirmed in the Fourth Commandment.
8Several other Commandments express commonly-held moral values but are not foundations of state law.
Violation of at least eight of the Ten Commandments is subject to the death penalty—typically by stoning.
The Third Commandment forbids taking “the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” Important or not, its observance cannot be legally required, as courts have held that the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech protects even blasphemy.
The Fifth Commandment enjoins us to “honor thy father and thy mother.” Most parents deserve to be honored, though no law requires it. In 2003 some 725,000 American children were victims of abuse or neglect perpetrated by a parent.
9 Should all these children be required to honor their parents? Should we condemn Joseph Stalin's daughter Svetlana for defecting from the Soviet Union in 1967 and denouncing her father's regime? As for the Commandment's injunction to observe it so that “thy days may be long,” has any medical study verified that filial piety is statistically correlated with longevity? Svetlana, as least, made it to 80 years of age in 2006 without being struck down for her transgression. As of this writing, she's still very much alive.
The Seventh Commandment says, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” This was the foundation for some laws in the past, but, like many other states, Michigan has had no prosecutions for adultery for several decades. Has the practice just disappeared? If so, could this have happened even without the Seventh Commandment being posted in the state capitol? Or, as seems more likely, have the laws against it simply become a dead letter? In 2005 a Michigan public official called a press conference to admit that he had committed adultery, but neither the state Attorney General's office nor any county prosecutor has pressed charges.
The Tenth Commandment forbids coveting not only “thy neighbor's house” but also his wife, servants, ass, and “anything that is thy neighbor's.” Half a century ago Frank Loesser articulated a clear principle of American law—“Brother, you can't go to jail for what you're thinking.” More important, doesn't it seem just a little quaint today to be listing a wife as among a man's possessions? Consider, too, that the “maid servant” referred to in the Commandment was commonly a concubine or sex slave—often purchased from her own father.
10 Indeed, several of the additional laws Moses is said to have received from God seek to regulate slavery, not at all to forbid it.
11 How reliable is a “moral compass” that permits one man to purchase a sex slave but sees sin only when another man covets her?
So none of these seven Commandments can be seen in any way as part of the “bedrock” of law today. Only three enjoin behavior for which most states currently punish people: the Sixth forbids killing, the Eighth forbids stealing, and the Ninth forbids bearing false witness.
12 But these have been criminal offenses in many societies the world over that were quite innocent of the Ten Commandments. They were part of criminal law in ancient Babylon and Egypt centuries before the time of Moses. The Romans included them as early as the fifth century B.C.E., when they were still worshipping a whole stable of morally flawed gods, led by the lecherous Jupiter.
13 Many indigenous peoples of North America, Africa, and the South Pacific islands had comparable taboos.
14 “Thou shalt not kill” is a powerful statement, but anyone who reads further in the texts will find its force vitiated. Violation of at least eight of the Ten Commandments is subject to the death penalty—typically by stoning. One such violation is murder, still subject to the death penalty in many states. But other execution-worthy violations are cursing one's parent, sacrificing to the wrong god, idolatry,
adultery, blasphemy, working on the Sabbath, and bearing false witness.
15 Would legislatures ask us to emulate these archaic and brutal standards?
The judicial processes are illustrated in the case of observing the Sabbath. The Book of Numbers (15:32-36) recounts how the Israelites found a man who “gathered sticks” on a Saturday. They brought the man to Moses and Aaron, and “the Lord said unto Moses, The man shall surely be put to death,” so the congregation “stoned him with stones, and he died; as the Lord commanded Moses.”
How does any of this lay the foundation for the Bill of Rights in our Constitution? How can this be “part of the foundation” of our judicial system? Is there any allowance for “free exercise” of religion, any right to have charges presented only by a grand jury, any “due process of law” before being deprived of life itself, any jury trial, or any evidence of “assistance of Counsel” for the defense? Was there any concern over “cruel and unusual punishment”? Stoning to death for picking up stray sticks may not have been statistically “unusual” by the standards of the day, but would it not be considered “cruel” by any standard short of barbarism?
Proponents may call the Commandments “the foundation of the freedoms we hold dear,” but the Commandments grant no freedoms except the choice of obeying or being killed. The US Constitution enumerates at least twenty-five non-economic rights.
16 Not one of them—from habeas corpus through the ban on slavery to the right of women to vote—is anticipated in any way by the Ten Commandments.
James Madison, the father of our Bill of Rights, advocated “total separation of the church from the state.” He considered that separation a standard for political health and for a limited government that abstains from actions properly reserved for the domain of personal beliefs and personal religious practices.
17 We should not reject his wisdom. It is the modern embodiment of the line drawn by Jesus: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's.”
181 . Coburn quoted in the Ann Arbor News (10 Dec 2005). Michigan legislator quotes are found in: Michigan House floor debate, 24 Mar 2005, taped by Michigan Government Television; Bailey, Amy F., and Chong W. Pyen. “Ten Commandments Bill OK’d.” Ann Arbor News (25 Mar 2005): A8; Christoff, Chris. “Thou Shalt Study Thy Ten Commandments’ Context.” Detroit Free Press (14 Mar 2005); Bailey, Amy F. “Alabama Commandments Visit Capitol.” Lansing State Journal (17 Mar 2005).
2 These include the New King James Version, the New International Version, the National Equivalent Translation, Today's New International Version, the New Reader's International Version, the American Standard Version, the New American Standard Version, the New Century Version, the Revised Standard Version, the New Revised Standard Version, the Holman Christian Standard Version, the English Standard Version, The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language, the Good News Translation, the New Jerusalem Bible, the New American Bible, and the New Living Translation.
3 Pfeifer, Charles F. The New Combined Bible Dictionary and Concordance. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1961; paperback edition, 1999: 204.
4 Among the key words from the Commandments that don't appear in the body of the Constitution: God, Lord, bondage, graven, image, bow, commandments, vain, Sabbath, holy, heaven, hallow, father, mother, kill (or murder), adultery, steal (or theft, thief, or robbery), false witness (or perjury, libel, or slander), covet, neighbor, maid-servant, man-servant, wife, or ass (or donkey). The word Lord does appear in the signature portion of the document, where the date is expressed as “in the year of our Lord” 1787, a common way of expressing dates in documents of the era. In this case, of course, the Lord is Jesus, not the God of the Ten Commandments. Nor did the authors of the Federalist Papers, the classic explanation of the Constitution, anywhere use the terms Bible, scripture, or Ten Commandments. (The word search of the Federalist Papers is reported in: Finkelman, Paul. “The Ten Commandments on the Courthouse Lawn and Elsewhere.” Fordham Law Review, Vol. 73 (2005): 1513.)
5 Quoted, for example, by Justice Hugo Black in his dissenting opinion in American Communications Assn. v. Douds, 339 U.S. 382, 8 May 1950, footnote 10. Legal scholar and historian Paul Finkelman makes clear: “The founding generation...was influenced by many English sources of law, such as the Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights, as well as non-legal sources like the works of...Enlightenment thinkers.... Other sources of American law include Roman law, the civil law of continental Europe in the post-Roman period, private international law, biblical law, and Germanic tribal law. While English law had some biblical roots, by the time of...the Revolution, the Bible and religious issues had long been surpassed by more practical concerns, especially in the American colonies.” See Finkelman: 1500-1.
6 Smithsonian Institution. Earth. James F. Luhr, ed. New York: DK Publishing, 2003: 22, 107, 161.
7 At the same time John Paul insisted that “the moment of transition into the spiritual cannot be the object of this kind of observation.” From the “Message to Pontifical Academy of Science,” 22 Oct 1996, Catholic Information Network website <
cin.org>.
8 This, the authors point out, is “a geologically ‘brief’ period,” given the vastly longer early age of the earth and the 500 million years that have followed. They list a dozen “living fossils”—organisms with very long histories on earth—as having originated in a range between 1,900 million years ago (for a particular protozoan) to 20 million years ago (for aardvarks). See: Davis, Percival, and Dean H. Kenyon. Of Pandas and People. Dallas: Haughton Publishing Co., 1989: 92, 95, 99.
9 Website of the Administration for Children and Families, US Department of Health and Human Services. “Summary: Child Maltreatment 2003.” Updated on 24 Feb 2006. The number is based on approximately 906,000 children abused or neglected and approximately 80 percent of the perpetrators being parents.
10 Servant is often used as a euphemism for slave in the King James Version (Pfeiffer: 377). For example, in the version of the Ten Commandments in Exodus (20:2), the Lord tells the Israelites that he has “brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” The version in Deuteronomy (5:15) says, “thou was a servant in the land of Egypt.” Psalm 105:17 refers to Joseph as having been “sold for a servant.” Leviticus 25:6 distinguishes between “thy hired servant” and “thy servant,” the latter presumably a slave. Several other translations of the Tenth Commandment use the term slave rather than servant (e.g., the Natural Equivalent Translation and the New Century Version).
11 For example, a newly bought slave may not eat a Passover meal until he has been circumcised. Someone buying a Hebrew slave must emancipate him after six years, but not any wife the master may have given the slave nor any children they may have had together. If a man sells his daughter into slavery, she need not be freed as the male slaves are. (Exodus 12:44, 21:2,4,7.) The Natural Equivalent Translation makes clear that all these references are to slaves.
12 Editor's note: And even then, lying is a criminal offense only when done in certain narrow circumstances, such as while testifying in court or filling out your income tax return. It's not against the law, for example, to lie to your spouse about how much you spent on a new jacket, or to your boss about why you missed work yesterday.
13 Finkelman: 1505-6, footnote 153. Murder, robbery, theft, fraud, libel, and false witness were all crimes in ancient Rome, and under some circumstances all but theft were subject to the death penalty. (Morey, William C. Outlines of Roman Law, second edition. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1914: 25, 41-2.) The Babylonian Code of Hammurabi (1728-1686 B.C.E.) had groupings that included false accusations, theft, burglary, robbery, embezzlement, and slander. (Van Den Ploeg, J. “Law, Ancient Near Eastern.” In New Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 8. Detroit: Thomson-Gale, 2003: 393-4.) During Egypt's Middle Kingdom (2040-1650 B.C.E.), the list of Judgments of the Dead included “murder and manslaughter, robbery, theft, perjury” and blasphemy. (Assmann, Jan. The Mind of Egypt. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002: 165-6.)
14 Homicide, a noted anthropologist tells us, “is, under one set of conditions or another, legally prohibited everywhere.” A century ago the Ashanti chiefs in present-day Ghana sat on their sacred stools and conducted trials for a variety of crimes and violations of taboos, including murder, theft, and slander. As for false witness, priests would require someone believed to have committed perjury to refund all the expenses of the party wrongly found guilty and to sacrifice a sheep to one of the local gods. See, for example: Hoebel, E. Adamson. The Law of Primitive Man. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954: 286; Rattray, R.S. Ashanti Law and Constitution. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929: 295, 324-7, 384-7. Many forms of adultery were also punished under Ashanti law; blasphemy against the king was a capital offense, and in some areas farm work was forbidden on Wednesdays. (Rattray: 138, 163, 304, 317-8, 375.)
15 Murder: Exodus 21:12; dishonoring parents: Exodus 21:17; worshipping other gods: Exodus 22:20 and Deuteronomy 17:2-5; idolatry: Exodus 32:28; adultery: Leviticus 20:10; blasphemy: Leviticus 24:16; working on the Sabbath: Exodus 31:15 and 35:2 and Numbers 15:32-36; false witness: Proverbs 19:9 and 21:28.
16 These are contained in Article I, Section 9; Amendments I-VIII; and Amendments XIII, XV, and XIX. The only reference to religion in the body of the original Constitution is not a requirement that all Americans act in accordance with God's wishes but rather an explicit ban on religious tests for public officials.
17 Madison, letter to Robert Walsh, 2 Mar 1819, and letter to F.L. Schaeffer, 3 Dec 1821, in: Padover, Saul K. The Complete Madison: His Basic Writings. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1953.