Which Ten Commandments?by William B. Lindley
Yet another right-wing preacher has urged that the United States be made over into a Christian nation with the Ten Commandments made the law of the land. Which Ten Commandments? As we shall see, this is not a trivial question, especially if it helps determine the ways in which the coercive power of the state shall be exercised on the citizenry. First, we give the text of the three versions, and then we discuss some of the details and problems. First Version: Exodus 20:2-17(I) I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me. (II) You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments. (III) 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. (IV) 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. (V) Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you. (VI) You shall not murder. (VII) You shall not commit adultery. (VIII) You shall not steal. (IX) You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. (X) You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor. Second Version: Deuteronomy 5:6-21(I) I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments. (II) 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. (III) 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. (IV) Honor your father and your mother, as the LORD your God commanded you, so that your days may be long and that it may go well with you in the land that the LORD your God is giving you. (V) You shall not murder. (VI) Neither shall you commit adultery. (VII) Neither shall you steal. (VIII) Neither shall you bear false witness against your neighbor. (IX) Neither shall you covet your neighbor's wife. (X) Neither shall you desire your neighbor's house, or field, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor. Third Version: Exodus 34:12-26(I) Take care not to make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land to which you are going, or it will become a snare among you. You shall tear down their altars, break their pillars, and cut down their sacred poles (for you shall worship no other god, because the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God). You shall not make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, for when they prostitute themselves to their gods and sacrifice to their gods, someone among them will invite you, and you will eat of the sacrifice. And you will take wives from among their daughters for your sons, and their daughters who prostitute themselves to their gods will make your sons also prostitute themselves to their gods. (II) You shall not make cast idols. (III) You shall keep the festival of unleavened bread. Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread, as I commanded you, at the time appointed in the month of Abib; for in the month of Abib you came out from Egypt. (IV) All that first opens the womb is mine, all your male livestock, the firstborn of cow and sheep. The firstborn of a donkey you shall redeem with a lamb, or if you will not redeem it you shall break its neck. All the firstborn of your sons you shall redeem. No one shall appear before me empty-handed. (V) Six days you shall work, but on the seventh day you shall rest; even in plowing time and in harvest time you shall rest. (VI) You shall observe the festival of weeks, the first fruits of wheat harvest, and the festival of ingathering at the turn of the year. Three times in the year all your males shall appear before the LORD God, the God of Israel. For I will cast out nations before you, and enlarge your borders; no one shall covet your land when you go up to appear before the LORD your God three times in the year. (VII) You shall not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leaven, and(VIII) the sacrifice of the festival of the passover shall not be left until the morning. (IX) The best of the first fruits of your ground you shall bring to the house of the LORD your God. (X) You shall not boil a kid in its mother's milk. The Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 versions are quite similar. There is no absolute and unique way to number them; the Exodus 20 numbering used here shows the "Philonic division", used by Protestants and Orthodox, and the Deuteronomy 5 numbering shows the "Augustinian division", used by the Roman Catholics. The Jews (Talmud) use yet a different system. It is like the Philonic, except that God's introduction of himself is the first commandment, the Philonic first and second are the Jewish second, and nos. 3 through 10 are the same. Note the differences in the "covet" text. Exodus 20 puts house first, but Deuteronomy puts wife first and adds "field". Thus the Catholics use Deuteronomy to emphasize the importance of not coveting your neighbor's wife by making a separate commandment of it. The two versions offer different reasons for keeping the Sabbath. Bible apologists would consider these complementary rather than contradictory, but the question for inerrantists remains: which reason, if either, was carved in stone on the tablets that Moses brought back down the mountain? Any answer leads to trouble of one sort or another. All such questions are mere quibbles, though, compared with Exodus 34. The Commandments of Exodus 34 are mostly, though not completely, different. (No other gods, no graven images and the Sabbath are the three that Exodus 34 has in common with the other two versions.) The charming thing about Exodus 34 is that it appears to be the only place in the Bible that identifies the text as the Ten Commandments! Were it not for this, nobody would take it any more seriously than Leviticus 19 (which, for a while, I thought was a good candidate for the fourth version of the Ten Commandments-after all, it has six of those of Ex. 20. Check it out.). Bernard Katz, in his article elsewhere in this issue, refers to the Exodus 34 version as "the Ritual Set." Anne Nicol Gaylor, in her fine book Lead Us Not Into Penn Station, writes: "(A third version,) in Exodus, chapter 34, is wildly different, containing commandments about sacrifices and offerings and ending with the teaching: 'Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother's milk.' This is the only version referred to in scriptures as the 'ten commandments.'" I must thank Ms. Gaylor especially, since reading her book was the first time I became aware of this situation. A review of Exodus 34 has been extracted from the 11th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica (1911) and accompanies this article. Dennis McKinsey, who publishes Biblical Errancy, urges that we be cautious. The case for claiming that the Bible says Exodus 34 has The Ten rests on these two verses, which immediately follow the commandments: Exod. 34:27 The LORD said to Moses: Write these words; in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel. Exod. 34:28 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. McKinsey, in his issue #98, writes: "Moses wrote the rules listed in verses 10 through 26 and in the following 40 days he wrote an additional set of laws entitled the Ten Commandments. That is how I interpret the text." He addresses the issue again in #124, noting that the phrase "ten commandments" also appears in Deut. 4:13 and Deut. 10:4, adding: "So that could mean that the commandments in Deut. 5 which are the same as those in Ex. 20 are the real Ten Commandments. However, the waters are muddied even further by the fact that Deut. 4 has a list of commandments that resemble those in Ex. 34, which implies that the rules most people know as the Ten Commandments are not the real Ten Commandments after all... I discovered this discrepancy over 15 years ago and you might want to approach with caution." Ignoring McKinsey's advice and throwing caution to the winds, I suggest that when you encounter somebody trying to gain some civil sanction for the Ten Commandments (e.g., putting them on the wall of a school classroom or in stone in a public park, or even enacting them in some sense), ask them: "Which Ten Commandments do you want to use, the commandments which Judaeo-Christian tradition considers to be the Ten Commandments, or the ones which the Bible says are the Ten Commandments?" Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th Ed., on the Ten Commandments of Exodus 34 The Decalogue of Exodus xxxiv.-In the book of Exodus the words written on the tables of stone are nowhere expressly identified with the ten commandments of chap. xx. In xxv. 16, xxxi.18, xxxii. 15, we simply read of "the testimony" inscribed on the tables, and it seems to be assumed that its contents must be already known to the reader. The expression "ten words" first occurs in xxxiv. 28, in a passage which relates the restoration of the tables after they had been broken. But these "ten words" are called "the words of the covenant," and so can hardly be different from the words mentioned in the preceding verse as those in accordance wherewith the covenant was made with Israel. And again, the words of verse 27 are necessarily the commandments which immediately precede in vv. 12-26. Accordingly many recent critics have sought to show that Ex. xxxiv. 12-26 contains just ten precepts forming a second decalogue. [Footnote: So Hitzig (Ostern und Pfingsten im zweiten Dekalog, Heidelberg, 1838), independently of a previous suggestion of Goethe in 1783, who in turn appears to have been anticipated by an early Greek writer (Nestle, Zeit. fur alt-test. Wissenschaft (1904), pp. 134 sqq.).] These consist not of precepts of social morality, but of several laws of religious observance closely corresponding to the religious and ritual precepts of Ex. xxi.-xxiii. The number ten is not clearly made out, and the individual precepts are somewhat variously assigned... If such a system of precepts was ever viewed as the basis of the covenant with Israel, it must belong to a far earlier stage of religious development than that of Ex. xx. This is recognized by Wellhausen, who says that our decalogue stands to that of Ex. xxxiv. as Amos stood to his contemporaries, whose whole religion lay in the observance of sacred feasts. To those accustomed to look on the Ten Words written on the tables of stone as the very foundation of the Mosaic law, it is hard to realize that in ancient Israel there were two opinions as to what these "Words" were. The hypothesis that Ex. xxxiv. 10-26 originally stood in a different connexion, and was misplaced at some stage in the redaction of the Hexateuch, does not help us, since it would still have to be admitted that the editor to whom we owed the present form of the chapter identified this little code of religious observances with the Ten Words. Were this the case the editor, to quote Wellhausen, "introduced the most serious internal contradiction found in the Old Testament." [Footnote: The last three sentences of this paragraph are taken almost bodily from Robertson Smith's later views (Old Testament in the Jewish Church, pp. 335 seq.).] Table of Contents | 1993 Issues | Subscribe Credit card Orders call: 800-321-9054 or fax: (619)676-0433 Truth Seeker is published by Truth Seeker Co., Inc. (ISSN 0041-3712) © 1996 |