Here’s what you may not know about the Ten Commandments
Mosaic list has long been key part of Jewish and Christian teaching
![Signs showing the 10 commandments in front of a church. Signs showing the 10 commandments in front of a church.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff6d79372-8cd2-4eed-a18a-4a7be76b50ed_1280x853.jpeg)
There is no list of rules more well known in the Bible than the Ten Commandments, which have been central to both Jewish and Christian moral thought for centuries. The commandments, or shorter versions of them, have been memorized by children as part of their religious instruction, and they have sometimes influenced the writing of secular laws. Even nonreligious people recognize the phrase “thou shalt not,” which begins many of the commandments in the King James Version of the Bible.
The Ten Commandments come from the Old Testament books of Exodus and Deuteronomy, which describe them as coming from God when Moses ascended Mount Sinai. As important as they are, there are many facts about them that aren’t well known. Here are some of them:
Jews have a different first commandment than do Christians
For Jews, the First Commandment is “I am the Lᴏʀᴅ your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.”
Christians, however, have viewed that sentence as an introduction to the commandment that follows: “You shall have no other gods before me.”
The commandments total more than 10
If you understand a commandment as referring to a sentence that says something like “do this” or “don’t do that,” there are about 16 in the list, the exact number depending on how they’re counted and whether the version in Exodus or Deuteronomy is used. Several of the commandments, when put in a list 10 items, include more than one sentence.
The number 10 comes from references in Exodus 34:28 and Deuteronomy 10:4. It is possible that the number was used because commandments with similar thoughts were combined from the earliest days, or maybe 10 was used simply because it’s a round number.
The Hebrew Bible calls them the ‘10 words’
The most literal understanding of the Hebrew phrase translated as “Ten Commandments” is “10 words.” This is the reason the Ten Commandments are sometimes called the Decalogue, from the Greek words for "10" and "word." The Hebrew word translated as “commandments” can also have meanings such as “sayings” or “matters.”
Catholics and Protestants divide the commandments differently
In the Hebrew language, the commandments aren’t numbered. Because there are more than 10 commands, different groups of Christians have combined them differently to arrive at 10 as a total number. To simplify, Catholics and Lutherans have tended to follow the counting system used by Augustine, an early Christian theologian. Meanwhile, Protestants and the Eastern or Orthodox churches have generally followed the numbering system used by another theologian, Origen.
Both groups have the same first commandment, which refers to worship of one God. They start differing with the second commandment: no carved images for Protestants, and no misusing the name of the Lᴏʀᴅ for Catholics. Neither group leaves out text; they merely combine the sentences differently.
There are two full versions of the commandments
The two main versions of the Ten Commandments can be found in Exodus 20:1-17 and Deuteronomy 5:6-10. (There are also abridged versions elsewhere.) Both books are part of the Torah or Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, which were, according to tradition, written by Moses.
The two versions are very similar — but they aren’t identical. None of the differences have much significance in terms of the expected behavior. The most significant difference involves the command to honor the seventh day as a holy day of rest; the version in Exodus says to do this because God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, while the Deuteronomy version says to set the day aside as a way of remembering that the Israelites were slaves in Egypt.
Also, the Exodus version puts the neighbor’s wife in the list of creatures that should not be coveted, while the Deuteronomy version mentions the neighbor’s wife in a separate sentence and uses a different word in Hebrew for “covet” in the second sentence.
One common explanation for the differences relates to the centuries of copying and editing that led to the final form of the books’ manuscripts. Another is that the Exodus version of the commandments is in the form of a direct quote from God, while the Deuteronomy version is in the form of a report from Moses about what God said.
The order of the commandments isn’t random
It has long been observed that the beginning commandments focused on the relationship that people should have with God, while the others focus how on people should relate to each other. These can be seen as vertical and horizontal commands, respectively. Sometimes the last (Protestant) or last two (Catholic) commandments are put in a third category of relating to a person’s thought life, since it is possible to covet without a corresponding action.
‘Kill’ is an inadequate translation
The sixth (for Protestants) or seventh (for Catholic) commandment traditionally has been rendered in English as “Thou shalt not kill.”
But most modern English translations render the verse as “You shalt not murder.”
Neither translation is perfect. Biblical Hebrew had four verbs that could be translated as “kill,” but the verb used here is the only one that applied to the taking of a human life. Clearly, then, the verb did not refer to the taking of animal life.
But it also didn’t mean the same as what “murder” means in English, which distinguishes between certain intentional killing (murder) and types of killing that are accidental and/or justifiable. The Hebrew word can refer to all of those.
Scholars have debated exactly how the commandment would have been understood. Elsewhere in the Old Testament, there seems to be no moral opposition to certain types of killing of humans, such as in war. Perhaps the most straightforward way of interpreting the commandment is to see it as prohibiting the unauthorized killing of another human.
Christians have disagreed on whether the commandments are binding
Christian theologians have debated for centuries whether Christians are required to obey the Ten Commandments. There are at least three schools of thought:
Because Jesus approvingly quoted some of the Ten Commandments, his followers today are still required to follow them, and they remain central to New Testament moral thought.
While the Ten Commandments are very important and summarize essential principles, Paul taught (e.g., in Romans 7) that Christians have been released from following Old Testament law because it was fulfilled by Christ.
Only the commandments Jesus quoted remain in effect for Christians..
Despite these profound differences, nearly all Christians are in accord with the moral principles behind the commandments and see their violation as sinful.
This commentary on Exodus and Deuteronomy is part of our Bible for Modern-day Saints series. Biblical quotations are adapted from the World English Bible, which is in the public domain.