The Hebrew Scripture reading from the lectionary today has had recent appearances on late-night comedy shows. Representative Lynn Westmoreland from Georgia’s Third District appeared on the Colbert Report “Better Know a District” segment after co-sponsoring a bill that would require the display of the Ten Commandments in the House of Representatives and Senate. “I think if we were totally without them, we may lose our sense of direction,” Westmoreland said. When Colbert asked him to name the commandments, Westmoreland could only name three: “Don’t murder, don’t lie, don’t steal.”:
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/70730/june-14-2006/better-know-a-district---georgia-s-8th---lynn-westmoreland
If he did not know the answer, like Sir Lancelot in Monty Python in the Holy Grail asking whether the old man guarding the bridge meant an African or a European swallow, Westmoreland could have asked Colbert whether he meant the Jewish, Eastern Orthodox, or Catholic version: these three religious communities have different versions of the ten commandments, or as they are literally called in biblical Hebrew, “the ten words.” In the Jewish tradition, Exodus 20.2 is considered the first of the ten words: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” In the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Lutheran traditions, the commandments begin with Exodus 20:3-5, with the last two commandments concerning coveting a neighbor’s wife and his property separated. In the Eastern Orthodox and other Protestant traditions, the first commandment is 20.3, the second is 20.4-6, and coveting a neighbor’s wife and property are considered a single commandment.
Since I am focusing on Exodus 20:1-17 in this entry, for ease of reference I will post the reading into the text, from the New International Version:
And God spoke all these words:
2 "I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.
3 "You shall have no other gods before [a] me.
4 "You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing love to a thousand {generations} of those who love me and keep my commandments.
7 "You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.
8 "Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates. 11 For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
12 "Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you.
13 "You shall not murder.
14 "You shall not commit adultery.
15 "You shall not steal.
16 "You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.
17 "You shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to neighbor."
While not everyone might be able to list off the ten commandments at the drop of a hat, they play a controversial role in modern culture: several court cases recently have addressed whether they can be displayed in public buildings. In 2005, the Supreme Court issued two 5-4 decisions on this topic, ruling that the Ten Commandments could be displayed outside the Texas Capital but not inside Kentucky court houses—or, as Jon Stewart put it, “Outside a building, okay, inside a building, not so much.”
An Alabama Supreme Court chief justice was fired recently for refusing to remove a two-ton display of the Ten Commandments from the lobby of the court house. “Three times I was asked by a prosecutor of this state, an attorney general, if I would deny God. Three times I said I would not,” he said at a press conference. Defenders of the right to display the Ten Commandments argue that they reflect the role religion has played in the development of the US. The opposing argument is that such displays are tantamount to an official endorsement of religion, violate the Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment, and, in court houses in particular, imply that cases are judged according to religious laws.
In this entry, I would like to examine what can be inferred about the social setting of the people who received Exodus 20:1-17, using The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction and The New Oxford Annotated Bible as resources. Although the text describes God as giving Moses the Ten Commandments shortly after the Israelites' escape from slavery, “On the third new moon after the Israelites had gone out of the land of Egypt” (Ex.19:1), they are addressed to an agrarian community, where there are houses, oxen, donkeys, and slaves, or, as many translations tend to call them, “servants.” However, unlike in the Deuteronomic Code, there is no mention of a monarch, and the text is dated to the late second millennium BCE.
Interestingly, the text does not express a vision of what we would call today monotheism. The language of the passage, “you shall have no other gods before me” does not imply that there is only one God, but presumes the existence of other gods who are not to be ranked with Yahweh. This “messy monotheism,” as Paula Fredriksen calls it, is consistent with the presumed reference to the Ten Commandments in the book of Jeremiah, from the late seventh century BCE: “You steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known” (Jer. 7:9). Often in the prophet writings, language of marital fidelity is used to describe the people’s commitment to God, or lack thereof.
Like the Noaheide laws, in the Hebrew Scripture reading from the first week of Lent, the Ten Commandments are written in language that implies a treaty structure. The passage begins with God, the stronger power, describing what He has done for Israel, and then describing how He should be honored. The first four commandments concern the people’s relationship to the divine: the second commandment prohibits the making of “idols,” which can be understood as images of God. The prohibition against making idols would have differentiated the Israelites from neighboring groups, who made animal and human images to depict deities. I remember my Hebrew Scripture professor talking about traditions in the Jewish and Muslim faiths of not visually portraying the divine, describing the complex, intensely colorful flowers that characterize Islamic art. He remarked dryly, “Christianity is a stunning exception.” From Michelangelo to South Park, prohibitions against rendering the divine in a visual image have apparently not been enforced for some time in Christian communities. The prohibition against “making wrongful use of the name of the LORD your God” may have implied invoking the name of God in an efforts to use magic or sorcery, attempts to gain control over the divine.
The other six commandments involve human relations with each other. Michael Coogan writes, “A man’s life, his marriage, his person . . . his reputation, and his property were to be inviolable by another Israelite (his “neighbor.”) Two other major areas in which the culture of contemporary religious communities do not reflect the moral norms expressed in the Ten Commandments concern the status of women and slaves. Exodus 20.17 often gets translated with the word “servants,” as in, “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or manservant or maidservant, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.” I once heard a sermon in which the pastor said, “they were more like modern-day employees.” However as seen in the next chapter of Exodus, the laws governing this relationship bear closer relation to what we would call slavery than, say, a Jane Austen-era cordial servant-employer relationship. Exodus 21:7 reads, “When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do. In Exodus 21 we read,
When you buy a male Hebrew slave” (note the adjective “male”), he shall serve six years, but in the seventh he shall go out a free person . . . If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her master’s and he shall go out alone.
The much-quoted line “you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife” falls before the prohibition of coveting donkeys or oxen, but after that of coveting a neighbor’s house. No mention is made of a neighbor’s husband, because the language of the Ten Commandments in Hebrew uses the second person masculine singular. Like other groups from this time period, the Israelite society structure was patriarchal, and the commandments are specifically addressed to men.
Fun Fact: in Exodus 34, after the golden calf debacle, Moses breaks the tablets containing the text of the commandments, and God tells him to go back to Mount Sinai for another copy. But the text in Exodus 34 is slightly different from Exodus 20—the new commandments focus less on human treatment of each other and more on worship, and for that reason are called the “Ritual Decalogue.” It can be inferred from the presence of differences in the texts that there was more than one tradition of the Ten Words, and that the writer(s) of Exodus placed more weight on including them than in making them match.
One last observation on this week’s lectionary reading: the last verse of Psalm 19 is incorporated into Sweet Honey in the Rock’s hauntingly beautiful a capella version of “By the Waters of Babylon”: “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable unto you, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer.”
--Elizabeth Fels
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