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 appears twice. The fuller statement comes in Exodus 20, set within the Sinai narrative; a second version stands in Deuteronomy 5, where Moses recalls the event to a later generation. The two agree closely but not exactly — most visibly in the reason given for keeping the Sabbath, which Exodus ties to God’s rest after creation and Deuteronomy to the deliverance from slavery in Egypt. The injunctions themselves are familiar: against other gods and images, against misusing the divine name, for the Sabbath and honoring parents, and against killing, adultery, theft, false witness, and coveting.

How those clauses are numbered is where the traditions part, and the divisions are real rather than cosmetic. Jewish tradition treats the opening declaration “I am the LORD your God” as the first word and folds the prohibitions of other gods and of images together. The Reformed and Orthodox churches, following an older reckoning, make the ban on images a separate command and join the coveting clauses into one. Catholic and Lutheran tradition, following Augustine, combines the first commands and splits coveting in two to keep the total at ten. Each scheme arrives at ten; each draws the lines elsewhere.

Within Judaism the giving of the Decalogue at Sinai is held to be the founding event of the covenant, and later mystical writing treated the moment as charged far beyond its plain words — the rabbis spoke of the whole Torah, even the whole of creation, as somehow contained in that revelation. Christianity received the commandments as enduring moral law, taught to converts and catechized for centuries; the two tablets became a fixture of church furnishing and Western art. Modern scholarship reads the Decalogue against the treaty and law forms of the ancient Near East, and debates which clauses are original and which were added, without settled agreement on the list’s earliest shape.

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.

→ Related: Torah · Old Testament · Deuteronomy · Jewish Mysticism