Ten Commandments

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The Ten Commandments, or Decalogue, are the short list of injunctions that the Hebrew Bible presents as spoken by God to Israel at Mount Sinai and written on two tablets of stone. The Hebrew phrase behind the name is not “ten commandments” but aseret ha-devarim — the ten words, or sayings — and the slight difference matters, because the count and even the content of those ten have never been fixed in one form. The text never numbers itself. The phrase that names it appears in only three verses of the whole Tanakh — Exodus 34:28, Deuteronomy 4:13, and Deuteronomy 10:4 — and each time it says words, not commandments. The Greek dekalogos, ten-word, is a translation of that Hebrew; the English commandment is a later hardening of it. In rabbinic Hebrew the phrase shifts again, to aseret ha-dibbrot, the ten utterances, from a verb reserved for divine speech. What every form of the name preserves is that these are first of all things said.

The two versions

The text appears twice, and not identically. The fuller statement comes in Exodus 20, set within the Sinai narrative at the moment the people stand at the foot of the mountain and the voice speaks out of fire and cloud. A second version stands in Deuteronomy 5, spoken not by God but by Moses, who recalls the event to a generation born after the exodus — children of those who heard it the first time — on the plains of Moab before the crossing into the land. The framing already differs: the first is theophany, the second is memory of theophany, rehearsed by a man who will not enter the land himself. The relationship between the two belongs with the larger doubling that runs through Deuteronomy, which restates and quietly revises law given earlier in the Pentateuch.

The two agree closely. The injunctions in both are the familiar ones: against other gods and against images, against misusing the divine name, for the Sabbath and for honoring parents, and against killing, adultery, theft, false witness, and coveting. Where they part most sharply is in the reason given for the Sabbath. Exodus grounds the day in creation — God made heaven and earth in six days and rested on the seventh, so the seventh is set apart — and uses the verb remember. Deuteronomy grounds it instead in deliverance: Israel was a slave in Egypt and the LORD brought them out, and so the household, down to its servants and its animals, must be given rest; the verb there is observe, and the motive is mercy rather than cosmology. The same day carries two different weights. A long line of scholarship reads the divergence as the trace of more than one hand — an earlier core, perhaps giving no reason at all, overlaid in Deuteronomy with that book’s recurring appeal to the memory of slavery; older readings, within the tradition, hold the two motives together, taking the Sabbath to mean both the rest of creation and the freedom of the redeemed at once.

Three ways to count to ten

How the clauses are numbered is where the traditions divide, and the divisions are real rather than cosmetic. Because the text does not number itself, three questions have to be answered before a list of ten can be drawn from it: whether the opening declaration “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt” is itself one of the words or a preface to them; whether the ban on other gods and the ban on images are one command or two; and whether the prohibition of coveting is one command or two. Each tradition answers differently, and each still arrives at ten.

Jewish tradition treats the opening declaration as the first word — a word, after all, need not be a command, and this one is a statement of who is speaking — and folds the prohibitions of other gods and of graven images together as the second. Coveting is left whole, a single tenth word. The Reformed and Eastern churches, following an older reckoning sometimes traced through Hellenistic Jewish writers, keep the declaration as preface and split the first command in two: no other gods, and, separately, no images — a division that gives the image-ban a standing of its own, which mattered greatly in Reformed and Eastern Orthodox disputes over what may and may not be depicted. Coveting, in that scheme, stays single. The Catholic and Lutheran traditions, following Augustine, combine the opening commands — other gods and images together, the image-clause absorbed into the first — and to keep the total at ten they split coveting in two, separating the coveting of a neighbor’s wife from the coveting of his goods. Here a further small divergence opens: Luther, numbering from the Exodus wording, puts the neighbor’s house before his wife, while the Catholic reckoning, following the Deuteronomy wording, puts the wife first. No church has made the counting a matter of dogma; the Catholic catechism simply follows Augustine’s division as the one that became customary. Each scheme reaches ten; each draws the lines elsewhere; and the lines they draw are tied to what each tradition most needs the list to say.

The two tablets are read along the same fault. Tradition takes them as two tables of obligation — duty toward God on the one, duty toward neighbor on the other. The Jewish and Calvinist reckonings divide them five and five; Augustine’s division yields three and seven. Where the first table ends and the second begins is itself a function of how the words were counted, so that the shape of the stone follows the arithmetic.

Sinai and the covenant

Within Judaism the giving of the Decalogue at Sinai is the founding event of the covenant, and the rabbis treated the moment as charged far beyond its plain words. The whole Torah, they held — in some tellings the whole of creation — was somehow present in what was spoken there; later mystical reading pressed the point further, hearing in the very letters of the words a density that the plain sense could not exhaust, a reading that Kabbalah would extend to the Torah entire. Saadia Gaon, the tenth-century head of the academy at Sura, composed liturgical poems for the feast of Shavuot — the festival that marks the giving of the law — in which he arranged all six hundred and thirteen commandments of the Torah under the headings of the ten, as branches of ten trunks. The Decalogue, in that arrangement, is not one law among the others but the frame on which the rest are hung.

The same list furnished the prophets with their charge sheet. When the prophetic voice indicts Israel for breaking faith, it reaches for these clauses by name: Hosea counts the land’s sins as swearing, lying, killing, stealing, and adultery, and Jeremiah, standing in the gate of the Temple, asks whether the people will steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, and burn incense to other gods and then come to stand before God in his house. The prophets do not cite the Decalogue as a catalog of statutes; they cite it as the terms of the covenant, the breach of which is not lawlessness merely but betrayal. That the same short series of verbs recurs in their mouths is part of what marks the list as fixed in substance long before its wording or its numbering settled.

That centrality made the list, for a time, a fixture of daily prayer. In the late Second Temple period the priests recited the Decalogue each day together with the Shema before the morning sacrifice, and a second-century-BCE papyrus — the Nash Papyrus, the oldest Hebrew biblical fragment known before the Dead Sea Scrolls — preserves exactly that pairing, the ten words running straight into “Hear, O Israel,” in a text that blends the Exodus and Deuteronomy wordings as if for memory or for the small scrolls bound in prayer. Yet in the early Talmudic period the daily recitation was dropped. The reason the sources give is pointed: to deny the minim, the sectarians — a category the rabbis understood to include the early Christians — the argument that only the ten were spoken at Sinai, and that the rest of the Torah might therefore be set aside. The list was removed from the liturgy precisely because it had grown too easy to mistake for the whole. Its weight had become a hazard to the body of law it was meant to crown.

Reception in Christianity

Christianity received the commandments as enduring moral law. Where much of the ceremonial and judicial legislation of the Old Testament was read as fulfilled or set aside, the Decalogue was kept as binding — taught to converts, set into the catechism, learned by heart for centuries. The Gospels themselves quote it: questioned about the path to life, Jesus recites a string of its clauses, and the apostolic letters of the New Testament treat them as a standing summary of the law toward one’s neighbor. The two tables themselves gave Christian teaching its summary of the law: the first table, the duties toward God; the second, the duties toward neighbor — folded in turn into the two great commandments, to love God and to love one’s neighbor, under which the medieval schoolmen ranged the ten as a single double love unfolded into precepts. The list thus did double work, read at once as ten distinct words and as the expansion of two. The two tablets became one of the most legible images in Western Christian art — a pair of rounded stone boards, sometimes inscribed with Roman numerals, sometimes only suggested — carried by Moses, set above altars, worked into manuscript margins and the sculpture of cathedral fronts. In the churches of the Reformation the image turned into furniture: painted commandment boards were hung behind the communion table, often flanking the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, so that the congregation read the ten words off the wall as the central text of instruction. The disputes over numbering followed the list into these settings, since a board or a catechism had to choose a division, and the choice marked the tradition that made it.

Scholarship and the textual record

Modern study reads the Decalogue against the legal and diplomatic forms of the ancient Near East. The decisive move came from George Mendenhall, whose 1954 essay in The Biblical Archaeologist — expanded the following year as Law and Covenant in Israel and the Ancient Near East — set the Sinai covenant beside the second-millennium Hittite vassal treaties studied by Viktor Korošec. Those treaties run to a fixed pattern: a preamble naming the sovereign, a historical prologue rehearsing his past dealings with the vassal, the stipulations themselves, and a clause requiring that a copy be deposited in a sanctuary and read aloud at intervals. The Decalogue’s own opening — “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” — reads as preamble and prologue together, the sovereign named and the rescue recalled before a single demand is made; the deposit of the tablets in the ark and their periodic public reading answer to the document clause. The argument is laid out in Mendenhall’s study of the covenant forms, and it reframed the giving of the law as the making of a treaty between unequal parties. Brevard Childs, in his 1974 commentary on Exodus — the standard critical treatment, and the one that gathered the prior debate — works the Decalogue on three levels at once: the prehistory of the text and its growth, the meaning of the form that finally stands in the canon, and that form’s sense within the whole of scripture. Much of the field’s argument turns on which clauses belonged to an earliest core and which were added — the long motive-clauses attached to the Sabbath and the image-ban are the usual candidates for expansion — without settled agreement on the list’s original shape.

The manuscript record runs deep and is itself a witness to how the list was used. The Nash Papyrus, held at Cambridge, joins the Decalogue to the Shema in a single mixed text and was, for half a century, the oldest fragment of the Hebrew Bible in existence; the Dead Sea finds since have produced further copies, several of them composite in the same way, confirming that the two versions circulated and were combined in practice long before any one wording was fixed. The descriptive overviews of the list — its names, its versions, and the history of its numbering — trace the same fact from a different angle: that there has never been a single authoritative form of the ten, only a set of closely related ones held by different communities, each certain of its own count.

What survives across all of this is a compression. A long body of biblical law runs to hundreds of statutes; the ten words are the part that detached from that body and traveled — recited, carved, numbered, argued over — as a thing small enough to be held whole. The disagreement over how to count them is, in its way, evidence of how much weight the short list was made to carry.

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