The Ten Commandments #3
The core moral and covenantal law God gave Israel at Mount Sinai through Moses — the foundation of biblical law and one of the most reproduced texts in Western legal and ethical tradition.
1And God spake all these words, saying,
2I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
3Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
4Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth:
5Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;
6And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.
7Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.
8Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.
9Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work:
10But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates:
11For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.
12Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.
13Thou shalt not kill.
14Thou shalt not commit adultery.
15Thou shalt not steal.
16Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
17Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.
Exodus 20:1-17, King James Version. Repeated with minor variation in Deuteronomy 5:6-21.
Delivered to Moses at Mount Sinai roughly seven weeks after the Exodus from Egypt, the Ten Commandments open the larger body of law given at Sinai and are set apart from it in the text itself: where the rest of the Sinai law comes through Moses, these ten are said to be spoken by God directly to the assembled people (Exodus 20:1, 19) and later written “with the finger of God” on two stone tablets (Exodus 31:18).
Structure
The commandments divide into two groups. The first four govern Israel’s relationship to God: exclusive worship, the prohibition of idols, right use of God’s name, and Sabbath observance. The remaining six govern relationships between people: honoring parents, and prohibitions on murder, adultery, theft, false witness, and covetousness. Jewish and Christian tradition have long read this division as a compressed form of the same summary Jesus later gives — love God, love your neighbor (Matthew 22:37-40) — with the first table covering the former and the second the latter.
Numbering Traditions
Because the text itself doesn’t number the individual commandments, Jewish, Catholic/Lutheran, and Reformed/Orthodox traditions divide the same material into ten differently — chiefly whether the prohibition on idols is its own commandment or folded into the first, and whether the closing prohibition on coveting is one commandment or two. The underlying text referenced above is identical across all three; only the numbering differs.
Why They Endure
Beyond their place in Judaism and Christianity, the Ten Commandments have shaped Western legal and ethical tradition more directly than any other biblical passage — cited in legal codes, displayed in courtrooms, and referenced across cultures with no other connection to the biblical text, making them arguably the most widely reproduced list of ethical principles in history.
Key References
- Exodus 20:1-17
- Deuteronomy 5:6-21