The Ten (ish) Commandments

The idea is basically, you’re paying money so that you don’t have to sacrifice this animal or this child.

It’s a nice donkey you got there. I hate for anything to happen to it. You know, if you give us a little bit of money, well, we’ll let it go.

Hey, Everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher, and you are.

Listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we seek to increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation. About the same. How are things today, Dan?

It’s grand. It’s. It’s all Decalogue all the time today. And I. I’m. I’m. I’m having a screaming good time. It’s a beautiful fall day here in Salt Lake City.

Yep. It’s commandments, commandments, commandments you can see, but you’ll only need the edge.

Well, we’ve been hinting at it. We might as well just launch into our first segment. It’s the law.

It’s the law. Dang it. Okay, we are. We’re talking about the Ten Commandments today, that specific segment of the law. Except we got a bit of a problem here.

Which is that. Which Ten Commandments are we talking about?

Yeah, it’s funny because, you know, you get. You know, there have been controversies in the last, you know, 10 years about people wanting to put the 10 Commandments up in a courthouse here in the United States or in, you know, in the. The state capital of whatever, you know, Arkansas or whatever. And then people are like, yeah, no separation of church and state. But then what nobody’s yelling about is like, but which Ten Commandments, though? Which is funny. And you don’t think that there could be any question about that until you look up the. The Wikipedia article on the Ten Commandments, and there’s a table that’s, like, showing you all of who thinks which is, you know, who thinks what is which commandment, and all sorts of stuff. And let me tell you something. They don’t agree.

Yeah, yeah. We’ve got several different verses, in fact, and in order to get 10 out of them, you have to kind of combine some and. And divide some a little bit. And are you including the very first or the second verse of Exodus 20 , if that’s your ten commandments? Or is verse three the first? And is ten about coveting all these things plus someone’s wife, or is that a separate commandment? And then the biggest problem, though, I want to start off pointing out though, is that Exodus 20 . This is traditionally where we get the Ten Commandments from.

Okay, Right.

It’s nowhere referred to as the Ten Commandments, and we get an almost identical list of laws in Deuteronomy 5 . Again, nowhere referred to as the Ten Commandments. So where are we getting this Ten Commandments title from? Well, it actually comes from another set of 10 commandments that is found in Exodus 34 , at the end of Exodus 34 , 28. And this is after the commandments are listed. You had this statement that Moses wrote all these things down. He wrote the tablets, or he wrote upon the tablets the words of the covenant. And then in Hebrew it says aseret ha-devarim, which would be the ten words. And in the ancient Greek translation of this, the Septuagint, it’s tous deka logous, or. Or the Decalogue. So it’s in later translations of this into other languages that we go from 10 words to like 10 principles, 10 concepts, and then ultimately we get the 10 commandments.

Commandments. Not a great translation of devarim, which just means words or issues, concepts. If it were mitzvot, that would be a little easier as. As commandments.

Okay, so We’ve got our 10 words, but I think that if people are looking at Exodus 34 , they’re going to be surprised by what the 10 words.

Yeah, that it’s missing what we generally associate with the Ten Commandments, which is our little. Our little listicle that we are so fond of. Of quoting.

Yeah. I mean, it’s got like, you shall not make cast idols. That sounds familiar. That seems. Yeah, like in there. But then immediately after that is the commandment of. That everyone’s familiar with. You shall keep the festival of unleavened bread.

Which. Which doesn’t feel like one of the ones that. That Roy Moore wanted on the. On the courthouse back in the day.

Yeah. And depending on where you start, the. The commandments in Exodus 34 , which, by the way, are usually referred to by scholars as the ritual decalogue because it’s a lot more focused on ritual and festival than it is on what we might label ethical issues. So a lot of people refer to what we find in Exodus 20 and in Deuteronomy 5 as the ethical decalogue. Whereas here we have the ritual decalogue, but it starts off with. In verse 11. 34. 11. If you’re following along at home, God says, you know, observe what I command you. I will drive out the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. Don’t make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land to where you’re going. It will become a snare among you. You got to tear down their altars, break their pillars, cut down their Asherim. And then parenthetically, we get this statement, for you shall worship no other God, because Adonai, whose name is jealous, is a jealous God.

So we’re just kind of telling a bit of a story. It’s commandments kind of embedded within God, seemingly wagging their finger at the people of Israel. 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. So it’s kind of warning about all these things. Oh, yeah, don’t make cast idols. So suddenly we. It. It’s almost like they’re pulling from the traditional Ten Commandments and just kind of sprinkling them in amidst these comments.

Yeah, the first. The first commandment feel in this particular decalogue feels very xenophobic. It feels. It feel. It’s like everybody else is bad, only we are good. Also, no cast idols.

Yeah, really. And don’t forget the festival of unleavened bread. And you can’t forget that when. And then we get into probably what. What is a secondary version of something that we find in the Covenant Code. And the term Covenant Code is something scholars use, refer to Exodus 20 , verse 22, so immediately following our traditional 10 commandments to Exodus 23 , verse 33. And a lot of scholars consider this to be the oldest layer of legislative material in all the Hebrew Bible. And the language is a little idiosyncratic. It’s kind of technical. It’s. It’s basically an adaptation of some other ancient Southwest Asian law codes, and specifically the laws of Hammurabi from about a thousand years earlier. And a great book that discusses the relationship of the two is a book by David Wright called Inventing God’s Law.

But in. In the. The Covenant Code, we have this commandment to sacrifice your firstborn child. The. The text literally says, you will give them to me, and then immediately says, and you’ll do the same thing with the firstborn of your oxen and your sheep. They’ll be with their mother for eight days, and then you will give them to me. And here.

It’s an awkward one.

It’s an awkward one. And we’ve talked about this one before. On the channel and. Or on the channel. On the podcast. Excuse me. And podcasts have channels. Is it a channel? Okay.

I don’t know, who knows what anything means anymore? Yeah, you know, this channel is. Is. It feels like it’s an old-school TV reference and. And suddenly. And that feels impossibly antiquated at this point.

So in. In Exodus 34 , we have a similar statement. All that first opens the womb is mine. All your male livestock, the firstborn of cow and sheep, firstborn of a donkey, you will redeem with a lamb—so a lamb. So we get into this idea of redemption, and it says, all the firstborn of your sons you shall redeem. And so some scholars think that the Ritual Decalogue is earlier than the Exodus 20 Ethical Decalogue. And this is based on this idea that Israel kind of evolved from being more concerned with ritual and cult to being more concerned with ethics. This is kind of an outdated model that. That sees, like the prophetic literature as. As kind of proto-Protestant faith alone kind of material. And that trajectory is not taken too seriously by many scholars these days. Most would probably say Exodus 20 is earlier.

Yeah, it seems hard to me to. To make the claim that, like, redeeming your firstborn son is less ethical than sacrificing your firstborn son. Not that I know. Help me understand what redeeming means. I don’t understand what redeeming, like redeeming a donkey with a lamb. I’m lost. Is. Does that mean we sacrifice the lamb because a donkey is too valuable to sacrifice or what?

So it’s. Yeah, the word there is padah in Hebrew, which means to buy out. And so the idea is this is owed, but you can exchange rather than giving that, you can give money instead—so you can buy it out. And so the idea is basically you’re paying money so that you don’t have to sacrifice this animal or this child.

It’s a nice donkey you got there. I’d hate for anything to happen to it. You know, if you give us a little bit of money, well, we’ll let it go.

Yeah. There are some parts of this that sound an awful lot like a shakedown. And it seems like just don’t require the child to be sacrificed to begin with, and there would be no need for a redemptive stopgap. You would just not have to sacrifice the child.

Hey, so look, the Lord works in.

Mysterious ways and well, particularly when it comes to these commandments. Because according to the narrative right before Exodus 34 , the Ritual Decalogue, this is the second copy of the Law because Moses broke the original copy. copy of the Law because Moses broke the original copy. And then God is going to reinscribe the exact same thing onto this second copy, but it doesn’t really match up with. With what we.

He forgot some stuff that. That could happen to anybody.

And. And there’s an interesting commandment in here that, that I’ve always found fascinating. This is Exodus 34:23 . Three times in a year all your males shall appear before Adonai, the deity, the. The God of Israel. And this is found in a couple of other places. It’s found in Deuteronomy 16:16 . We have references to it in places like Isaiah 1 . I think it’s verse 12 and elsewhere where it talks about how three times a year the males are going to go up to. And it’s always translated appear before God. But the funny thing is that in Isaiah’s reference to it, we have the word for appear in the infinitive form. And the consonants of the text are not the right consonants for understanding this word to mean appear, which would be the passive form of the verb. To see, the consonants indicate that the verb. There is an active verb, and so do the prepositions.

And just the syntax of the sentence indicates that, at least according to Isaiah, this commandment was not to appear before God, but to see the face of God. If you look in the Hebrew, it says Adonai or ha-Adon or Elohei Yisrael. And this means literally to the face of God. And according to the traditional understanding, reading it as a passive, it would be. be seen to the face of God. But many scholars argue that that is a later alteration of what the text originally said, that it was intended to refer to seeing the face of God. And the idea here would be you go to the temple and you see the divine image, and that is gazing upon the face of God, which is something that in the Psalms and elsewhere, you have authors yearning for, when, I.

mean, considering that you’ve said that they found evidence of cannabis on the altars of the temples, maybe they did see the face of God. You know, you never. Maybe that was a. An interesting way of wording that.

Yeah, it’s that. And also I. I put some Biscoff cookie butter and some Nutella together in a sandwich and I saw the face of God.

That’ll do it, man. That’ll get you there. Yeah, you’ll either see the face of God or have to deal with diabetes for a while, one or the other.

But no lighter required. So, so, so that’s. That’s an interesting commandment that is probably reflective of this tradition that we find in Deuteronomy 16:16 . So there are folks who think that some of Exodus 34 is reflecting a Deuteronomistic perspective, or at least is. Is kind of riffing on a Deuteronomistic perspective. And I think this is one of the passages where we see that Deuteronomy 16:16 probably is the original version of that commandment. But yeah, then we go, and. And so this is a ritual commandment. And then your favorite prohibition in the ritual decalogue is what?

Yeah, look, it’s just common sense. You can’t boil a kid in its mother’s milk. Yeah, everybody knows that.

Which is a. There’s not a lot of detail there.

I assume we’re talking about a goat in this case, not an actual child. That would be correct. You can’t do that either. You can’t boil a human kid in its mother’s milk either. But yeah, we’re talking about goats. Yeah.

And that’s covered elsewhere. But. And it. There’s not a lot of detail here. And we’ve had a lot of commentators over the. Over the millennia trying to figure out what on earth is the concern here? Why is this a problem? And then how. Is. How far is the scope. Does the scope of this prohibition extend? And so this is the reason that anybody who offers to take a Jewish friend to Burger King might be surprised by what they do and don’t order. But you will not find on a lot of kosher menus, you will not find cheese being served with meats as a part of. Kind of a. A hermeneutic extension of this issue right here. This is the.

That comes from this. This verse.

Well, trying to. Contemplating what is the concern here? And if whatever we identify as the concern, does that impact anything else that we’re doing?

So, no. No dairy with meat comes from just not boiling a kid in its mother’s milk.

It is. Is. It is an extension of that within a broader kind of hermeneutic context. But. But yeah, that’s where that comes from. The idea being don’t cook meat and cheese or milk together.

And that.

That really cuts out a lot of design of really delicious cuisine. I’m just gonna say it.

And then we get into verse, verses 27 and 28. The Lord said to Moses, write these words in accordance with these words, I’ve made a covenant with you and with Israel. And then we get. At the very end, these are the Aseret HaDevarim, or the ten words. And so if you’re going by what the text says, it seems like the Ten Commandments refer specifically to Exodus 34 . We have no such statement in reference to Exodus 20 or in reference to Deuteronomy 5 . So this should be what we’re referring to. But this has not. But it’s not, it’s not right because, because Christianity took over the Hebrew Bible and decided we’re going to rearrange things. We are going to figure out what we want to keep and what we don’t want keep. And primarily this served their own structuring of, of power and values so that they could do what they wanted to do and not feel bad because there’s some commandment against this in the Hebrew Bible.

I feel like it was a culinary choice. I feel like they wanted cheese and meat and well, and surprisingly they made some, some, some decisions based on that.

There’s an awful lot that has to do with, with culinary conventions. When we get into the book, for instance, we have the, the idea of all foods being clean comes as a metaphor for taking the, the Gospel to the Gentiles in the book of Acts . But we have at the end of the Jerusalem Council when, in Acts 15 , when they’re trying to decide if things like circumcision are still going to be necessary for someone who joins Christianity not from Judaism, but from the Gentile world. And when they get down to the end, they say, okay, great, that settles it. We’re only going to require four things. And this is like the four commandments of Christianity that resulted from the Jerusalem Council. They wrote a letter, they’re sending it out to all the churches. And those four things are abstain from idolatry, from fornication, from eating blood, and from eating things strangled.

So you have, you have idolatry, idolatry and fornication. And then you have two prohibitions on eating certain types of food.

So we’re carrying on some part of this kind of ritual ceremonial ideology. But then you get Paul in Paul’s own writings who is like, none of that matters. Paul says, you know, “an idol, we know that an idol is nothing in this world.” And the only reason you should ever, like, avoid eating meat sacrificed to idols is if it might scandalize one of your weaker brothers or sisters. And so Paul doesn’t care about that. And when we look at how Christians interpret the Bible today, who do you think they side with? The Jerusalem Council, who said Christianity has four commandments—these are they— or Paul who said, meh, let’s just do the—the first two? They side with Paul. And so now there aren’t really any dietary restrictions for most of Christianity, even though if we go by a “the Bible says so, that settles it” ideology. The Bible explicitly and emphatically says Christians should not eat blood or things that have been strangled.

And if you go back to, you know, the Hebrew Bible, which Christians still revere, you’ve got a whole bunch of other things that they’re going to have to deal with too.

Yeah. And those get— those get rationalized away in a variety of different ways. Some people say, well, a law from the Hebrew Bible is only still in effect for Christians if it’s repeated in the New Testament. Well, the whole blood thing is something that is in the Hebrew Bible and is emphatically repeated in the New Testament. And that is— nobody cares about that anymore. Other people say, well, there were ceremonial and moral laws. And so the ceremonial laws are done away with; the moral laws we keep. And then later they added a—oh, they’re also civic laws. Right. And no such divisions are identifiable anywhere in the Hebrew Bible or in the New Testament. That is a second- and third-century Christian innovation. They said, well, we could say the ones we don’t like are this and the ones we do like are this. So these are much later rationalizations of why we should hold on to the things we want to hold on to, which for some reason have an awful lot to do with what other people are doing together in the privacy of their own beds or the back seat of their Chevy Novas or whatever,

and a lot less to do with things like what you’re eating or, you know, who you’re oppressing or who you’re—

Yeah. Or what to do when your ox falls in a hole. Yeah. I mean, picking and choosing seems to be the— like, there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with, like, each group, each person finding what rules, what laws make most sense to their ethics. But you’ve got to acknowledge that that’s what you’re doing, at least.

Yeah, yeah. And it’s inevitable. You have to. The Bible is— is not a consistent, unified, univocal text. And if you want to leverage it as something authoritative, then you are going to have to say, we’re listening to this side and not the other side. But yeah, I think people ought to acknowledge that that’s what they’re doing and have the cards on the table regarding the methodologies that we’re using and be consistent about it. And unfortunately, that’s not what usually happens, usually because people want the authority of the Bible, which is the highest authority ever. Nobody trumps the Bible. And so they’re going to pretend that, well, this is what the Bible says.

Which is problematic.

So we’ve talked a bit about picking and choosing. We’ve talked about the thing that the Bible calls the Ten Commandments. Let’s zoom in on the thing that we all call the Ten Commandments, which is something totally different and has nothing to do with a kid, what, what’s boiled in whose milk.

Yeah, so we, we find the, the traditional 10 commandments in Exodus 20 , and then it’s also repeated in Deuteronomy 5 . It’s mostly the same, but there are some small differences. And this is one of the reasons Deuteronomy 5 is generally ignored in favor of Exodus 20 .

So now we have what we understand today as the Ten Commandments, depending on what tradition you like and what text you like, because the different traditions in the different texts number them differently. And even if we go back to the Samaritan Pentateuch, which has a verse at the end that represents their tenth commandment, which is, you shall set up these stones which I command you today on Mount Gerizim.

So, yeah, I was surprised to see that one. I was, I was like, whoa, whoa, we got a whole. The Samaritans are coming in hot with their, with their own thing. Okay.

Yeah. Which means they have to kind of move everything down a commandment so that the 10th can be this, this verse that is, that is coming in. So their, their first commandment covers the first six verses of Exodus 20 . And there are other traditions that, that agree with that as well. So when we line up what we have in the Septuagint, what we see quoted by early Jewish writers like Philo, what we have in the Targumim, what we have in the, the Syriac.

Version, Talmud, that’s another.

Yeah, we have traditional Christian versions. The difference, different denominations within Christianity will divide it up a little differently as well. For instance, within Catholicism, you have verse two which says, I am Adonai, your God. That’s a commandment or part of the first commandment according to Catholicism and the Talmud. But most don’t consider that a commandment. They consider that kind of an introduction too.

It’s just a, that’s just a, an opening statement. Yeah, the preamble, if you will.

Yeah, if you will. Yes. According to the, the Talmud, the second commandment is thou shalt have no other gods before me.

So, right.

I am Adonai, your deity is a self-contained single commandment. And then we move right on to commandment number two, which includes, you shall have no other gods before me, and you shall not make any graven image. So these two are lumped together, whereas other traditions will divide them. No other gods before me is one commandment. You shall not make any graven image is a second commandment. And all these are efforts to make sure the number we arrive at is 10. So that tradition that we have yanked from Exodus 34 and brought over to Exodus 20 is governing how we divide up these sense units, which I think is interesting. It’s not letting the text operate on its own terms.

Right.

It is imposing this interpretive lens upon the text and it’s not really changing a ton of things, but it is indicating that the tradition is what is most authoritative rather than the text itself.

Yeah, because when I read this, when I first read this, you know, you’ve got Moses goes up on the mountain and God says all of this stuff to Moses. It. There’s nothing that indicates like, this is one commandment and this is the next. As a matter of fact, you know, the way that I’m used to seeing these is presented is as succinct little nuggets, but there’s like a whole bunch of like, stuff. It’s not just, you shall not make for yourself an idol, it’s you shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in form of anything that is in heaven above or that is on earth beneath, or that is in the water underneath the earth. Like, it goes on and on. And I had no idea that that was the case.

Yeah, and this is because we’re used to seeing them in kind of a condensed, abbreviated form. In fact, a lot of times you’ll see people try to represent how this would have looked like on, on the tablets, and they just have this abbreviated Hebrew that isn’t even complete sentences. But yeah, the don’t make your. A carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, on earth beneath, or that is in the water below. And this has been interpreted, interpreted historically as a prohibition on just any representation of animals and humans and buildings and, and things like this. Which is why you have kind of an aniconic tradition within Judaism.

Yeah, I was going to ask you about that, but let’s save that for the, for the second segment because I do want to get into that a little bit. It. Because that when I first read, reads very differently in like the, the King James Version versus the, you know, the NSRV and I, I, I and RSV. I get those letters mixed up. But yeah, I mean, and then as I was reading it, not only does it not specify the number 10 or, or like easily delineate out these different things. Like if you move on to the next chapter, a whole bunch more commandments appear. So it’s just, it just feels like, it feels almost arbitrary that we’ve set aside this group and we’ve chopped it up to 10. When, you know, thinking, looking at how these various traditions have, have cut it up and stuff, you could easily have 12 and they would, and, and that would be, you know, that, that would be defensible.

Yeah. And you could have 12A, and then you could have Exodus 34 would be your, your 10B or, or whatever, your JV squad of commandments. But within Judaism, I think the traditional number is 613 total commandments, but they get reduced down to 10 because they, these, the 10 here tend to have this kind of generic ethical tone to them. And so it’s. As we get into the Greco-Roman period and early Rabbinic period, you have a desire to kind of systematize, distill things down to underlying principles. And so the Ten Commandments kind of encapsulate everything else that we find and then we go even further. And in the New Testament, and this is something you see within Greco-Roman period Judaism as well, it gets distilled down to the two greatest commandments. Love God and love your neighbor. And if you look at the first few commandments, this is about your relationship with God.

If you look at the last 5, 6, however you number them, those are about your relationship with your neighbor. And so we further distilled it down to just two commandments. All the law and all the prophets. Hang on. These two commandments is a way to say we’ve got our 613, and then we can whittle that down and down and down to 10, and we can even whittle it down further to 2. So it’s, it’s a way of consolidating what we find in there. And they function as, as kind of marquees or they function as, as proxies for the more detailed commandments that we find elsewhere. But yeah, I find it interesting when you look at these, these Ten Commandments, you find both ceremonial and moral commandments. So this later idea that, oh, everything that’s moral is still in force, everything that’s ceremonial is, has gone away, would kind of tear apart the Ten Commandments.

But folks don’t like to do.

Yeah, that’s true. Don’t, don’t chop it up like that. The six commandments, we’ll just, we’ll just whittle it down to the six commandments.

Seven chipmunks sitting on a branch eating lots of. What is it? Peanuts. That’s. Listeners will get that reference, I’m sure.

I’m sure somebody knows what you’re talking about.

One thing I find interesting is that Philo is a Greco-Roman period Jewish philosopher and writer, and Philo changes the order of the thou shalt nots once we get to you shall not kill, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal. Philo puts committing adultery the first and says, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not kill, and comments that this is. The idea of adultery for him is kind of foundational to the rest of the law, that everything else is kind of encapsulated in this because he’s. He’s kind of analogizing and metaphorizing what’s going on here. So switches up the order a little bit to serve his own rhetorical interests.

Interesting. It seems like a sneaky move to just. To just flop things around, but okay.

Well, yeah, and. And that’s not the only time that Philo fiddles with. With the text a little bit and says, hey, let’s move this over here. Let’s say this thing over here.

He’s such a fiddler, that guy.

Tradition. And then Josephus is. Josephus kind of retells a lot of the. The biblical narrative as well and does similar things, moving things around. And in the Targumim, the Aramaic paraphrases of the Bible, they do the same thing in order to try to make it a little more relevant, in order to gloss over inconsistencies, in order to harmonize things. So this is not something that was unheard of at the time. And, and for folks like Philo, the. The text was not the locus of the authority. And so the text was not inviolable. It was the ideas. And the text was just an iteration, a materialization of the ideals. But the authority was located in those concepts, not in their textual manifestation.

Well, that just sounds crazy. You’re saying that the ideas are the most important thing instead of just sort of whatever the words say that seems.

Yeah, imagine that. But today we think of. Of the text as. As like our guarantor that this is how the idea was articulated. But anciently, that was. The authority was opposite. The idea was most important because these are primarily oral cultures. These are cultures where most of the information was being exchanged orally rather than through text. And so that was just what was considered to be most authoritative.

Interesting.

Yeah. And. And the, you see kind of the transition toward the text within early Christianity in the first and second centuries, that’s where you see a lot of this kind of switching, where it’s no longer the words of Jesus, but the writings about Jesus because the graphai were considered subordinate to the, the Scriptures were considered subordinate to the words of Jesus because they were living words. The scriptures were dead letters.

Right.

And then as you get a few generations away from Jesus and there’s not really a plausible case to make that you have heard the words of Jesus directly from Jesus or from one of his followers, suddenly we need to write these things down. Yeah.

This needs to be less living. Less living.

Yeah. And so then, then we get the Gospels, then we get things being written down, although the agrapha, the unwritten things still have authority for a couple generations, but eventually they go away as well and the text becomes the locus of authority within Christianity.

Well, I, I think this is all great. I’m loving it. Let’s move on to our next segment so that we could actually zoom in and talk some about at least the first few of these commandments with a chapter and verse.

All right, so I assume the chapter we’re going to be doing is Exodus 20 , since, I mean, those are the.

Real Ten Commandments, since you already rejected the other one. You already told us they were wrong. Poor Deuteronomy.

Poor Deuteronomy.

So, so, yeah, I mean, here’s. So one of the reasons why I thought that it would be a good idea to talk about what most people consider the first four commandments in the 10 in our top 10.

Is because it’s the part that is kind of non transferable, non translatable. So when somebody like this is the part that most people, secular people like me, when someone like Roy Moore wants to put the ten Commandments on, you know, on the courthouse wall, these are the parts that don’t apply to me. Like, I can, I’m down with Thou shalt not kill. That’s fine. Some of the other things, you know, I, I, I, you’d have to convince me why coveting is so bad. But. Okay, but then there are these. And I, you know, they’re very, very specific to the audience for which they were written. And they’re also very, there’s a couple of them that I find that I think aren’t as cut and dry as people want them to be, as Roy Moore would make, would make them out to be. Yeah. So I’m excited to get into these.

Talk to us about what we got here.

So I remember in the movie. Oh, gosh, I Watched it with my kids, like, a year ago, and they were like, this is awful. The Zorro with Antonio Banderas.

Even your kids rejected it. Oh, man.

They like the second one better, which I don’t get. But there’s a part where he’s. He’s hiding out in the. In the church. And she comes in to do confession, and it’s Antonio Banderas on the other side of the screen. And she says, I’ve broken the fourth commandment. And he goes, you kill somebody. And she goes, no, Father. That is not the fourth commandment. And I remember she says she dishonored her mother and father or something like that. And I went and looked it up, and I was like, 1, 2, 3.

Right.

1, 2. I was like, this doesn’t seem to me to be the fourth commandment. For some traditions, it’s the fifth. For others, it’s the fourth.

Okay, so.

Well, we’ll throw it in just because I think. I think it is interesting What’s. What’s going on in this particular commandment.

Well, and. And. And if Banderas says it’s so, then it must be so. So if. If.

Yeah, who am I?

Less than authority than the Zorro movie. Yeah. Is claiming this and.

And the. He’s Puss in Boots, too. So.

Although I don’t know that there’s a reference to the Ten Commandments in. and Shrek and Puss in Boots. So in order to. To get the fourth commandment to be honor thy father and thy mother, the first commandment has to be two things. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make any graven images for yourselves. And the. The have no other gods before me is an interesting one. A lot of folks will point out right off the bat, this seems to suggest that there are other gods out there.

But this is making kind of ambiguous use of this word for God, Elohim, because anciently, you use the word to refer to the deity itself, wherever it may be located and whatever form it may take. But you also use the word to refer to any material indices or material manifestations of that deity. So an idol, a divine image, could be referred to as a God. And so you see this kind of pejoratively. You see, mockingly, idols referred to as gods. Ooh, he’s got his gods with him. And. And that’s kind of rejecting the fact that they’re gods. But then within the biblical text there, the narrative also refers to idols and divine images, teraphim and things like that as gods in kind of an unironic, totally straightforward way. So the Bible itself seems to refer to divine images as gods. And so we could interpret this to mean you will not have any gods in the sense of divine images.

And then the before me actually in Hebrew is al panai, which means over or against my face. And so one way to interpret this is to mean in our holy of holies, where you have my divine image set up, you won’t have any other gods on the other side of the room. You won’t have any other divine images in front of me, across from me, by me. That’s one way.

I just don’t. I just don’t like looking at them. It’s fine for you to have them. I just don’t want to see them.

Yeah, get them away from me, kid. They bother me. Yeah. This is. This. If we understand this to be primarily a commandment about worship, and I mean, it obviously is, then this has to do with the cultic centers and the sacred precincts. And in the sacred precincts, you had benches and rooms where you set up divine images. And this is true of the Israelites as well. We have uncovered Judahite temples that contain bench rooms and places where we have found different kinds of divine images. We have found at Arad, the holy of holies, that had a standing stone set up in the holy of holies and had two incense altars in front of it. And so the earlier we go in time, the more and more sense to me it makes to understand this to mean don’t put any other divine images in my holy of holies.

So it’s.

Sorry, would that mean that it would be okay to have other divine images, Asherah poles, for example, outside of the holy of holies?

So this is. This is an interesting question if it depends on what you think the scope of the commandment is, because we could say, you know, not in this room, but you could also understand that to mean you’re not supposed to do this at all. But it might not. We don’t get any vilification of the Asherah poles until the 7th century BCE, when with Josiah, and Josiah’s campaign of cult centralization, where it’s not just Baal who’s being demonized, and Baal is being demonized because Baal is the direct competitor to Adonai as the Northwest Semitic storm deity with home court advantage. And so prior to Josiah, it seems like they were worshiping Asherah as the consort, the partner of Adonai, of the God of Israel. So it depends on when you date this. This does not go back to Moses. This is 8th, 7th, maybe 9th century BCE. And so if this predates Josiah, they might have been like, nah, not worried about Asherah.

So it may. I mean, it. So it’s a plausible interpretation of this commandment that it just means, yeah, go ahead and worship other gods, but, like, not in my room.

Yeah, that is a. That is a plausible interpretation. However, when we get to the next commandment, or actually Commandment 1B, you shall not make any graven images.

Oh, right.

That seems like that is kind of cutting that off.

It does. Never mind that.

You’re right.

That’s a. That seems like a very big. A very big no on that one. Although it says make for yourself in this one. It says, thou shalt you shall not make for at least in mine. And mine. The wording is so different between, like the KJV and the NRSV. It is, yeah.

And. And let’s see, we got Lo taaseh leka pesel. So do not make for yourself or to yourself pesel, which is an idol, a graven image, or any temunah, which would be a form, image, likeness, which is in the heavens above and which is in the earth beneath, and which is in the seas beneath the earth, or. Yeah, the waters beneath the earth. And so the question then becomes, is Commandment 1B, does that originate at the same time as Commandment 1A, or does it come afterwards? Is it expanding the scope of Commandment 1A, or was. Or is it clarifying the way it was always understood? Was it always there? We don’t have enough data to. To answer that question.

I want to stop on the. The graven image thing because I don’t know. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know what a graven image is really. You know, the NRSV has you shall not make for yourself an idol. It doesn’t use the term graven image. But the other thing is that it seems like it says no pictures. Like, if that’s what it feels like, it says to me is, is. Is you. You’re not allowed to make pictures. And we know that that’s. You know, I know you know, the, the. The Muslims have. Have prohibitions against, or used to have prohibitions against any imagery. Now it’s sort of been interpreted to mean at least you can’t make images of Allah. But, you know, if you go into the Alhambra or something in Spain, you won’t see. You’ll see very pretty writing because they want it to be decorative, but no portraiture of any kind? No, no paintings of any kind. So could this be a prohibition against, you know, paintings, against imagery?

Well, it seems. It seems unlikely in light of the fact that we have a commandment, as they’re building the tabernacle and later the temple, to create images of cherubim. Oh, to adorn the. The walls of the temple, which ostensibly are things that occupy the heavens. So it’s. This is a point of contention. It’s all about what the scope of this commandment is, because if it means in that holy of holies, then, you know, the cherubim would not be a violation of that. Well, shoot, I don’t remember if the cherubim are inside the holy of holies, at least.

It’s very confusing.

Yeah. So graven means engraved, right? So something that is carved, chiseled, cast. So it has to do with a divine image that has been produced. That’s the whole idea there. Whether it is something that is cast or carved or however you are going to do it, cut, you know, you just. You don’t want any such images being produced. And whether or not this means don’t make anything that is conventionally used in worship, like, you know, an image from the. Don’t make a deity, whether it’s in the skies, whether it’s in the seas, beneath the earth, whether it’s on the earth, don’t make that thing, or whether it’s. Don’t make anything at all, is not clear from the text itself and is not clarified by the context, given that we’re making images of other things later on. And then within Greco Roman period Judaism and late antique Judaism, you have a tradition of including a lot of imagery in mosaics.

The altar that was found in Magdala in the synagogue there depicts like the temple and depicts other things like that. It’s not depicting a bunch of deities or anything like that, at least not in this part of town. The Dura Europos synagogue is doing those kinds of things. And so it’s. The history of interpretation is mixed, but I don’t think we can delineate a clear scope based just on the text alone.

All right, that’s. That’s very confusing, but I guess we’ll just keep going.

And then in verse five says, you will not bow down to them or serve them—two different ways. Verbal roots that are conventionally translated worship—for I, Adonai, your God. I’m a jealous God. And here we have the accurate use of the word. Well, I’m not. I’m not going to be a prescriptivist.

But I was gonna say. Are you defining things, Dan?

No, no, that’s. So the word jealous. A lot of people use jealous to mean envy, which is fine. I do it all the time. But I used to get harassed a lot by people who’d be like, doesn’t mean envy. Jealous means you. You have something and you don’t want anybody else to have it either, or to take it from you or something like that. But that’s exactly what this means. God has your worship and does not want you worshiping anyone else. So God is a. Is a jealous God. Therefore, don’t worship other deities.

Which is interesting because it does seem like the, the implication here is that there are other gods who are less jealous. But, yeah, I’m particularly jealous. You gotta, you get. And since I’m your guy, you gotta go with, with. With my rules here.

And, and I think there are a lot of scholars who would argue this. This idea of a jealous deity kind of begins with Josiah, where Josiah is trying to centralize worship and consolidate power and say, you can now only worship in the one temple. You can only worship the one God. You can only use the one priesthood, all of which happen to be under my control. So it, it makes an awful lot of sense for the idea of the jealous God to arise within a Deuteronomistic context.

Authoritarianism is, at very least, simple.

It’s a hell of a drug, to quote the great poet.

Yeah. And then let’s see how we’re. We’re numbering them. And then we have. You shall not take the name of Adonai, your God, in vain. Which is something that gets quoted an awful lot that a lot of people think means you can’t use naughty words.

Okay. KJV says take the. Don’t take the name of the Lord in vain. That is not what the NRSV says. The NRSV says, let’s see. You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God. Which makes a lot more sense to me as a. As a translation.

I don’t know. Talk to me about what scholars believe this is actually saying because. Yeah, you mentioned earlier that, like, it’s probably not about. Don’t say swears.

Yeah, yeah, it’s definitely not about that. But the, the Hebrew here is interesting. Lo tisa shem Adonai Elohekha lashav, and tisa is from the verbal root nasa, which means to lift, to bear, or to carry. And so it’s literally don’t lift up, don’t bear, don’t carry the name of Adonai, your deity. And then lashav means falsely, empty, vain, so with, with to no effect in a way that’s worthless, something like that. And so a lot of scholars have, have commented that this seems to be coming in a time when the. Again, going back to the ritual context, in what ritual context could the name of God be lifted up or born or carried? And a lot of scholars would point to the use of the name in oath where frequently there was some kind of gesture, some kind of lifting up that took place alongside the pronunciation of the divine name.

And so this may be, I would argue, if we place this very early in time. The idea here is probably don’t use God’s name in an oath that you don’t intend to keep or don’t do it flippantly. And there are a couple of reasons that, additional reasons that this makes sense. One is based on something that I argued in my book from last year. The divine Name carried power and efficacy, and to speak it was to materialize it, and that is to evoke the divine presence. And so to do so flippantly, repeatedly, over and over again is to kind of waste what is supposed to be holy, what is supposed to be special. And in, in that sense, you’re not supposed to be engaging in these oaths flippantly or with no intention of keeping them.

So what we’re talking about is the difference. We’re not talking about someone saying, oh my God, look at that. But we are talking about someone saying, I swear to God, I will have this, you know, returned to you by Sunday. And then not actually doing, like, if you, if you actually swear an oath using the Lord’s name, you’re, that’s supposed to be, you’re on the hook.

Yeah, yeah, you’re on the hook for that. So, and, and you know, depending on, on how we interpret the scope that could be extended to things like the, the word God here. The. It’s specifically the Divine Name, it’s specifically the Tetragrammaton that is being referenced. And so no, you cannot say that piece of halibut was good enough for Jehovah according to this passage. Now, a couple of things happened. Historically, it became inappropriate to use the Divine Name ever. And I think this is particularly happening in late Second Temple period. So second-first century BCE it becomes kind of a taboo and particularly after the temple is destroyed because it, for a time you could only. It was only appropriate to pronounce the name in the temple. And then it was only one person who was allowed to do it, and then they were only allowed to do it on one day of the year.

So this ideology developed that it’s so sacred, it can’t occur outside of our sacred space. And then when that sacred space no longer exists, it’s not appropriate anywhere. And so now we’re not supposed to use the Name at all. And even when it’s being written, it’s being there is care being taken with the, the Divine Name. Sometimes it’s written in older letters. There are. In later Judaism, you get this idea that you can’t just throw away a text that has the Divine Name on it. It has to be disposed of according to a certain process. And that’s where we get the development of what’s referred to as a geniza, which is basically a storage room for texts that have the Divine Name on them.

And I know that you’ve mentioned that that name in English translations is frequently switched to the word Lord or to the word, to a different word. How often would we see that name in the text if that switch wasn’t made? And is there a, is there a moment in, like, you know, in, in the, the, the Hebrew Bible where it stops being used as much?

It’s not so much avoided in text. Oh, okay. It’s avoided in speaking. Now, there are examples of this in Qumran literature and elsewhere. You do see other words kind of more commonly used in place of where the Divine Name should be. And then in contemporary Judaism, and this is a practice that goes back quite some ways, you would use abbreviations for the Divine Name in order to avoid writing the Divine Name, because any, and particularly like writing something on a computer or on the Internet, you don’t want it to be destroyed. And so some people will write G-dash-D or something like that as a way to avoid writing out the Divine Name. So depending on the, the strictness of the tradition, it might be something that, you know, people pronounce with no problems. It might be something you don’t pronounce, but that you would write. It might be something that you would not even write. And, and this goes back pretty far.

But once you get to the point where there’s no appropriate place to pronounce the Divine Name, then this commandment takes on a different meaning. Oh, yeah, because you’re, you’re not supposed to bear it or lift it up anywhere.

Does verse seven of chapter 20 does, in the Hebrew, does it actually have the name, the Tetragrammaton?

So it doesn’t say the wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God. It’s the name of Tetragrammaton, your God.

That actually changes things a lot to me.

Well, yeah, in English translation, we’ve kind of deferred to this tradition of using Lord as a substitution. So in the. In the King James version, you’ll see Lord in small caps, and when you see small caps, that’s usually an indication. This is a substitution for some. Some version of the divine name.

That’s. That. That means. That means something very different to me. That’s interesting.

Because I think of the phrase the Lord your God as its own phrase. But, yeah, if it’s actually naming the name in that, that’s. That. Yeah, that feels very different. That’s interesting.

Yeah. And. And the. That phrase, the Lord your God is almost always Adonai, or it’s almost always the Tetragrammaton.

Elohecha or Elohei or something like that.

Interesting. All right, we got to get through the rest of the. So. So after verse seven, we got verse eight, which gets us to remembering the Sabbath day and keeping it holy.

To keep it holy to. And we have an infinitive of this verbal root, qadash, which means to consecrate, which probably derives from this notion that people and instruments and vessels that were being used within sacred spaces needed to be clean, needed to be pure, needed to be from certain materials so that they could be used within these sacred spaces without bringing in any kind of contamination or anything like that. And so the idea is it needs to be clean, pure, consecrated for a specific use. Some people will say set apart for that specific use. And so the idea here is that the Sabbath day needs to be set apart. And there are some folks who suggest that this is. This became important during the exile when they did not have the temple because they did not have the sacred space where they could worship.

And so the Sabbath perhaps is a way of demarcating sacred time. So we worship using sacred time rather than the sacred space that is no longer available to us. But that is. I. I think the Sabbath day one is probably one of the later passages from the. The Ten Commandments.

That’s really. That’s really interesting. It. And not only does it say that you’re not allowed to work on the Sabbath day, but your son, your daughter, your. Your slaves, your livestock, nothing is allowed. Nobody’s allowed to work on that day. That’s one that. That I think modern believers have kind of. Especially the Christians have kind of like glide over that a little bit, yeah.

The ger, which is, which could be translated as the migrant, the refugee, the immigrant. Those, those are all concepts that align with this, this idea of the, the ger. The resident foreigner also not supposed to work. So.

Right.

You know, there are, are. Yeah. A lot of ways that this prescribes a standard that is just rejected by the overwhelming majority of Christians today.

Right.

And then, and then we finally get to the Zorro commandment, which. That’s how it’s going to be referred to in my mind forever. And that is honor your father and your mother.

That your days may be stretched out or may be long upon the land which Adonai, your God is giving to you.

And there is an argument to make here that the honoring has to do primarily with land inheritance. Your days in the land being long doesn’t necessarily mean you have a lot of time hanging out on your property. It means that your property is. Continues down your line. And so your family, their possession of the land is lengthened, is long. Because property rights in Israel have always been one of the central issues, one of the sites of contention. And, and so I think this probably originally is a promise about the fact that your, your property will stay in the family line for a long time provided you maintain those relationships and don’t, you know, go off and marry too many foreign wives or, or anything like that.

And it’s a bit of an ironic commandment to give to a group of people who have been wandering propertyless in the desert for however long they have been.

Well, and that’s, and that’s if you place the composition of the commandments in such a time period. And there the data don’t really support the notion that any such time period existed, but it is kind of serving that narrative. But it is, it is something that there are a number of places where, when you look through the, the text that are talking about the wandering period, it frequently reflects the perspective of a sedentary group, not a group that is, that is wandering. Right. But yeah, so the idea is be nice to your dad so he doesn’t kick you out or kill you, and that way you will inherit the land and that way you will have land to, to pass on. And my, my dissertation supervisor, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, wrote a wonderful book called Land of My Fathers, which is about the property inheritance and how establishing possession of land was so central to the development of the notion of Israel.

And so I think in light of how important that was, I think this commandment is, is best interpreted as having to do with possession of the land and a long stay in it.

Well, you ain’t no kind of man if you don’t have land. All right, well, this was fascinating. I love it. Maybe we’ll get to the rest of the of the Decalogue at a later date, but for now, I think that’s a great place to cut it off. If you would like to write into us about anything, please feel free to do so. contact@dataoverdogma.com is the way to do that. If you’d like an ad free version of all of our shows and also some extra content and stuff, you can become a patron of the show over at patreon.com/dataoverdogma. Other than that, thanks so much for joining us today and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye everybody.

The Ten (ish) Commandments

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology