The Ten Commandments

I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
... Thou shalt not bow down thyself to [strange gods], nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;
And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.

-- Exodus 20: 2-3, 5-6 (KJV)

The Hebrews, having had a taste of the Lord's power, would rather not have anything directly to do with him. "Let not God speak with us," they plead to Moses, "lest we die" (verse 19).

So it is Moses' job to parley with Yahweh whenever the Lord has a message for his people. And in this case the message is crucial: God has decided to spell out the laws to which he intends to hold his chosen people, at least if they want to make it to the Promised Land in one piece.

The first (and most important) table of laws is known as the "Decalogue" or "Ten Commandments" (and there are hundreds more). Jews, Catholics, Protestants, and Eastern Orthodox Christians alike accept these names for the laws, but they disagree on how to number them. Jews, for example, traditionally regard verse 2 as the first commandment (or "utterance" in Hebrew), though it's really a self-proclamation rather than a commandment: "I am the Lord thy God." They then group together what Protestants take to be the first and second commandments, the prohibitions against other gods and against graven images. But the Jews' second commandment is the Catholics' first, and as you can see trying to sort all this out quickly becomes a nightmare.

For the sake of convenience, I'll list the remaining eight commandments in the order favored by Jews and Protestants:

3. "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain" (Exodus 20: 7) -- in other words, you shall not employ the divine name for base or trivial purposes, such as swearing falsely or performing magic;
4. "Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy" (verse 8) -- no working allowed on Saturday (Christians, believing Christ died on a Sunday, made that their holy day);
5. "Honour thy father and thy mother" (verse 12) -- on penalty of death (Exodus 21: 15-17);
6. "Thou shalt not kill" (Exodus 20: 13) -- except those who break the law;
7. "Thou shalt not commit adultery" (verse 14) -- broadly intepreted in some quarters as condemning all extramarital sex;
8. "Thou shalt not steal" (verse 15) -- self-explanatory;
9. "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour" (verse 16) -- don't make up mean lies about other people;
10. "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's" (verse 17) -- which could have been put more concisely.

Once he's through delivering these laws to Moses, God puts on a show for the Hebrews: "And all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking: and when the people saw it, they removed, and stood afar off" (verse 18). I don't blame them; God clearly means business.

So that they don't forget any of these laws -- say, the seventh -- God proceeds to etch them out on two tablets for Moses (Exodus 24: 12). This takes quite a while, though, which understandably gives the Hebrews the jitters. Who knows what God is prohibiting, if it's taking him forty days and forty nights to write it all down.

 
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Michael Macrone is Associate Site Producer of GraceCom and the author of nine books on language, literature, and ideas, including the best-selling Brush Up Your Shakespeare!