The Ten Commandments
EXODUS 20 AND 34:10–26; DEUTERONOMY 5:6–21
Moses Holding the Ten Commandments by Jan Gossaert.
THE ORIGIN OF PROPHECY. GOD SPOKE TWO AT MOUNT SINAI. WHY TWO TABLETS? HONOR YOUR FATHER AND MOTHER. A “RITUAL DECALOGUE”? NO GRAVEN IMAGES.
The Ten Commandments are probably the most famous bit of legislation in the world. Modern scholars are not sure, however, where exactly the Ten Commandments are, nor what they really mean.
The Ten Commandments were the beginning of God’s great gift of the Torah to Israel, the means of Israel’s becoming a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exod. 19:6). Theoretically, Israel ought to have been eager to be so singled out—yet the Bible seemed to say that, at the time, they were actually rather reluctant:
When all the people saw the thunder and lightning and the sound of the trumpet [shofar] and the mountain smoking, they were afraid and trembled and stood at a distance. They said to Moses, “You be the one to speak to us, and we will obey; but let not God speak to us [directly] or we will die.” Moses said to the people, “Do not be afraid! The reason why God has come is to test you, and in order that the fear of Him will be upon you—so that you will not sin.” But the people still stood at a distance, so Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was.
Apparently, the very process of hearing the divine voice was absolutely terrifying—not only the voice itself, but all that accompanied it, the thunder and lightning and smoke and something that resembled the blast of trumpets. That is why the people say to Moses, “You be the one to speak to us.” But it is not altogether clear from the text at what point God stopped speaking directly to Israel and began to use Moses as a go-between. The above-cited passage is found right after the recitation of the Ten Commandments (Exod. 20:1–17). That might indicate that the people heard the Ten Commandments directly from God and all the rest from Moses—indeed, this might explain why the Ten Commandments are separated off from the rest of God’s laws, a problem that troubled some ancient interpreters. (Certain “heretics” had fixed on this fact to suggest that all that God had really demanded of Israel were these Ten Commandments and that the rest had been the creation of Moses himself.)1
As they pondered this question, however, ancient interpreters came upon a curious fact. The opening part of the Ten Commandments is written as a direct address by God to the people: God speaks of Himself as “I” and calls the people “you”:
I am the LORD your God, who took you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before [or besides] Me. You shall not make for yourself any statue or image [of anything] in the heavens above or the earth below or in the waters beneath the earth—you shall not bow down before them or worship them, since I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the guilt of the fathers on the children, to the third and fourth generations of those who reject Me, but showing kindness to the thousandth generation of those who love Me and keep My commandments.
After these first two commandments, however, the form suddenly changes. The people of Israel continue to be addressed as “you,” but God is now always spoken of in the third person, “He” or “Him”:
You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not acquit anyone who misuses His name.
Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God . . . For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth and the sea and all that is in them, but He rested on the seventh day.
This third-person form is maintained throughout the rest of the Ten Commandments. It thus seemed to interpreters that God must have spoken only the first two commandments to Israel directly—all the rest was mediated through Moses.
In support of this hypothesis, interpreters brought two further proofs. First was a verse from the book of Psalms:
One thing [or one time] God has spoken, two things have I heard:
Might is indeed God’s, yet Yours as well is kindness, Lord;
You do indeed pay a man in keeping with his deeds.
Certainly God had spoken more than once and had said more than one or two things! If the psalm nonetheless says what it says, it must be alluding to those first two commandments that Israel heard at Mount Sinai directly from God (that is, on one occasion God spoke directly to Israel, and it was then that “I” [Israel] heard two things straight from God’s mouth).
The other proof came from a verse at the end of the book of Deuteronomy. Alluding to the great revelation at Mount Sinai, the text said:
The Torah was commanded to us by Moses as an inheritance [to be passed on] to the people of Jacob.
Normally one would think it more appropriate to say that God had commanded the Torah, not Moses; if the text said “Moses,” it seemed to be highlighting his role as a go-between in the Torah’s transmission. More than that, however, was the word “Torah” itself, appearing emphatically as the first word of this sentence in Hebrew. In the time of the ancient interpreters, Jews and Christians did not have our present set of special symbols to represent numbers (1, 2, 3, and so forth); instead, they simply used letters of the alphabet. One common system thus used A for 1, B for 2, and so on up to ten (J in the Hebrew alphabet); after that, JA was used to represent 11, JB for 12, and so forth; next, K could stand for 20, KA for 21, etc.; then L for 30, and so on until the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet, tav, which represented 400. Using this system, the word Torah itself was found to equal exactly 611. This might seem to be too bad, since, by the traditional count, the Torah was said to contain 613 commandments. Unless . . . that was precisely the point! God Himself had spoken the first two commandments directly to Israel, and then Moses took over: “Torah [that is, 611] were commanded to us by Moses as an inheritance [to be passed on] to the people of Jacob.”2
The Etiology of Prophecy
In contemplating the above-cited passage, in which the Israelites ask Moses to act as a go-between (Exod. 20:18–21), modern scholars noticed that the same moment was discussed again later on, in the book of Deuteronomy. There Moses strictly warns the people against consulting soothsayers or sorcerers or the like; instead, he says:
The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own people; you shall do what he says. This is [after all] what you requested of the LORD your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly, when you said: “Let me not hear the voice of the LORD my God any more or see this great fire, lest I die.” Then the LORD said to me: “It is good that they have said what they said: [in the future as well,] I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their own people. Then I will put My words in his mouth, so that he can tell them everything that I have commanded him. And I myself will hold accountable anyone who does not heed the words that the prophet speaks in My name.”
To modern scholars, both this passage and the earlier one (Exod. 20:18–21) seemed to be designed to answer the same question: why do we have prophets at all? Ancient Israelites must have often wondered why, if God had a message to deliver to them, He did not do so directly, with the divine voice booming forth out of heaven so that everyone could hear it and make no mistake about its source. The answer given by both passages is the same: God tried this once, at Mount Sinai/Horeb, but it did not work. People found the act of listening directly to God so frightening that they demanded that God use human intermediaries to carry His words; ever since then, we have had prophets.
As we will see in a later chapter, modern scholars have earnestly studied the institution of prophecy in biblical times, seeking to connect the office of biblical prophet with earlier social niches that existed in Israelite society (sage, priest, professional curser) as well as with prophetlike figures from elsewhere in the ancient Near East. Few would probably take the Bible’s etiological explanation here (that prophecy originated by popular request at Sinai) at its word. Most scholars would probably prefer to see in the biblical prophet an Israelite representative of a much broader, perhaps universal, phenomenon, the “religious genius” whose ear is especially attuned to the realm of the divine—the mediums, diviners, shamans, and others known from many different cultures and civilizations. If so, the Deuteronomy passage can be seen to have a dual role. On the one hand, it legitimates the institution of prophecy: I Myself created it, God says, in response to your terror at Sinai. At the same time, however, this passage establishes certain limits: prophets are the only legitimate intermediaries in the supernatural realm—no soothsayers or sorcerers or those who can communicate with the dead are to be permitted (Deut. 18:10–14). What is more, even the prophet may not “speak in the name of other gods” or “presume to speak in My name something I have not commanded”; anyone who does so is to be condemned to death (Deut. 18:19–20).
Five and Five
When Moses came down from Mount Sinai, he had in his hand two stone tablets (Exod. 31:18; 32:15–16). It might seem, in context, that these tablets contained all the laws that God had passed on to Moses on Mount Sinai, but elsewhere the Pentateuch makes it clear that the tablets contained the Ten Commandments alone:
He was there with the LORD forty days and forty nights; he neither ate bread nor drank water. And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant, the Ten Commandments.
[Later, Moses recalls:] Then the LORD spoke to you out of the fire. You heard the sound of words but saw no form; there was only a voice. He declared to you his covenant, which He charged you to observe, that is, the Ten Commandments; and He wrote them on two stone tablets.
There was something a bit troubling about all this. Ancient interpreters knew full well that the Ten Commandments could easily fit on a single stone tablet. (Indeed, modern-day archaeologists have unearthed inscriptions with far more writing than this on a single tablet.) If, nevertheless, the Torah says that there were two tablets, there must have been a reason. Perhaps, interpreters reasoned, God had intended to highlight some fundamental division within the Ten Commandments by separating them into two groups. And indeed, one such separation seemed clear enough: while the opening commandments have to do with relations between God and man (not worshiping other gods; not making divine images; not misusing God’s name; keeping the sabbath), the last five were clearly about relations among human beings (no murder,3 adultery, theft, false testimony, or coveting). To many it thus seemed obvious that the two tablets had been intended to stress this division:
Further, the ten words on them . . . are divided equally into two sets of five, the former comprising duties to God, and the other duties to men.
Philo, Who Is Heir 168
There was only one problem with this. The fifth commandment—which should have been the last of the between-God-and-man laws—dealt instead with relations between children and their parents: “Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you” (Exod. 20:12). This was indeed troubling. One could, of course, claim that the first tablet contained four commandments and the second six, but such asymmetry would have seemed an imperfection. Instead, ancient interpreters sought to claim that honoring one’s parents was, in a sense, like honoring God:
After giving the commandment concerning the seventh day, he gives a fifth commandment concerning the honoring of parents, putting it on the borderline between the two sets of five. For it is the last of the first set, in which laws of the sacred are given, and yet it is connected as well to the second set, which deals with the duties of man to man. I believe the reason to be this: the very nature of parenthood places it on the borderline between the immortal and the mortal, the mortal because they [that is, parents] belong to [the class of] men and other animals through the perishability of the body; the immortal because the act of generation assimilates them to God, the parent of all.
Philo, Decalogue 106–7
Honor your father [even] in your poverty and your mother [even] in your difficulties. For as God is to a man, so is his father [to him], and as a lord is to a person, so is his mother [to him]; for they are the smelting pot of your conception. [Moreover,] He is the one who gave them dominion over you and formed . . . the spirit; serve37 them therefore.
4Q416 Instruction, fragment 2 column 3
The Torah ranks the honoring of parents second only to that of God . . . It requires respect to be paid by the young to all their elders because God is the most ancient of all.
Josephus, Against Apion 2:206
It says “Honor your father and mother,” whereas elsewhere it says “Honor the LORD . . .” [Prov. 3:9]. Honoring one’s father [and mother] is thus to be equated with honoring God.
Mekhilta deR. Shimon b. Yohai, p. 152
Why These Ten?
There was still one unanswered question: why had God singled out these ten commandments in particular? It was not that they were necessarily the most important commandments of the Torah, since other obviously important ones (for example, “You shall love the LORD your God with your whole heart and your whole soul and your whole might” [Deut. 6:5] and “You shall love your neighbor like yourself” [Lev. 19:18]) had not been included in these ten. Some ancient interpreters therefore concluded that the Ten Commandments had been created for mnemonic purposes, to help people remember all the commandments of the Torah. Each one of the ten was thus a “general heading”: the commandment to keep the sabbath, for example, might suggest all the other commandments concerning holy days and festivals, and the prohibition of false oaths might bring to mind all the other commandments concerning courts and courtroom behavior.4 Indeed, the prohibitions of worshiping other gods and of swearing falsely against one’s neighbor might have been intended to suggest, among others, precisely the two important commandments mentioned above, loving God “with your whole heart” (that is, not dividing that love between God and some other deity) and loving one’s neighbor (since the prohibition of false oaths mentioned one’s “neighbor”).
If so, then the picture was now complete. Moses had gone up to Mount Sinai and stayed there with God for forty days and forty nights, during which time God taught him all the laws of the Torah. He then inscribed on two tablets ten of those laws, each of which was intended to help Moses—and the people of Israel—to recall all the other laws.
Then Moses turned and went down from the mountain, carrying the two tablets of the covenant in his hands . . . The tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, engraved upon the tablets.
If only the people could keep these Ten Commandments constantly in mind, they would be able to remember the rest and thus would always have a sure guide to lead them wherever they should go.
The Ten Commandments in Modern Scholarship
One of the remarkable things about the Ten Commandments is their scope. If, as modern scholars believe, these commandments are basically presented as the covenant stipulations of a suzerainlike God, then it is certainly striking that this divine suzerain is not interested only in relations between Himself and his subjects. He cares about what they do to one another—which is why He prohibits such things as murder, adultery, and theft. In fact, in this respect God’s covenant really stretches the implied analogy to human covenants between suzerains and vassals; it is much, much broader.
Since the rise of the Documentary Hypothesis, modern scholars have carefully studied the wording of the Decalogue (as the Ten Commandments are sometimes known in modern scholarship)—or rather, the wordings of the Decalogue, since there are actually two versions in the Bible, one in Exodus (20:2–17) and the other in Deuteronomy (5:6–21). Considering these two, many have concluded that they both represent the end product of a long process of transmission. Some scholars postulate that the earliest written source to contain these commandments was that group of texts designated as E, but that the present version in Exodus shows signs of the text having been augmented by a priestly editor. On the other hand, the Deuteronomy version of the Decalogue features parallel modifications indicative (not surprisingly) of D’s favorite themes and turns of phrase. For example, the two texts differ greatly in what they say about the sabbath:
Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.
Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy, as the LORD your God commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God; you shall not do any work—you, or your son or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.
While the two versions have some formal features in common, they differ markedly as to why people should rest on the sabbath: Exodus says our resting is in imitation of God’s rest after the creation of the world, while Deuteronomy says it comes in memory of the period of slavery in Egypt. Scholars suggest either that one of these versions is a free rewriting of the other or that the original commandment was much shorter, a simple prohibition of working on the seventh day, and that this simple law was subsequently expanded in different ways by both sources.
No Idols
The Decalogue’s prohibition of making idols has also been the subject of debate. Some time ago, scholars noted that in the present form of the Decalogue this prohibition appears as an intrusion in an otherwise smooth-running text:
I am the LORD your God, who took you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before [or besides] Me. You shall not make for yourself any statue or image [of anything] in the heavens above or the earth below or in the waters beneath the earth—you shall not bow down before them or worship them, since I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the guilt of the fathers on the children, to the third and fourth generations of those who reject Me, but showing kindness to the thousandth generation of those who love Me and keep My commandments.
If one eliminates the highlighted portion, this entire paragraph has only one theme: Israel is not to worship other gods. The highlighted words, by contrast, prohibit making any kind of statue or image, even one of Israel’s God. Such a ban on image making, scholars point out, is an entirely different matter from a prohibition of worshiping other deities. Someone, this theory goes, must at some point have inserted this further prohibition.5 This is not to say that such a ban was not in existence from a very early period—indeed, archaeologists have yet to find a single, undisputedly cultic, representation of Israel’s God.6 But if scholars are right, the prohibition of image-making did not originally have any place in the traditional Decalogue.38
In short, modern scholarship has not been kind to traditional religious views of the Ten Commandments. Their very form now appears to most scholars to assimilate them to the covenant stipulations found in old Hittite and other ancient Near Eastern treaties. This fact itself raises disturbing questions about the divine origin of these laws. For why should God, in this crucial act of binding the people of Israel to Himself, have chosen to rely on an utterly human set of conventions instead of going about things in some very different, divine sort of way? Moreover, doubt hovers over the content of the Ten Commandments: the Exodus and Deuteronomy versions have striking divergences from each other. As a result, most modern scholars are unable to say with certainty what the original Ten Commandments might have been, or when or where the various texts preserved in our Bible might have originated.