6/10/2023 0 Comments 10 commandments bible verseAnd he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten commandments.’ Nor are they even called ‘commandments’: the word used in most English translations of the original Hebrew text is ‘words’, hence the alternative name for the Ten Commandments: the Decalogue.īut confusingly, although the sections of the Bible which gave us the list now known as the Ten Commandments don’t call them ‘commandments’ or number them as ten, another passage from the Old Testament contains a list of instructions called ‘the ten commandments’, which have nothing to do with the list we now know.Įxodus 34:28 reads: ‘And he was there with the LORD forty days and forty nights he did neither eat bread, nor drink water. As Swenson observes, it is ‘religious tradition’ that is responsible for our talking of ‘the Ten Commandments’. There are many more than ten commandments in the Leviticus chapter, but even the versions in Exodus and Deuteronomy aren’t numbered as a clear list of ten. However, the Leviticus commandments are more numerous, including prohibition against making fun of those who are physically disabled (19:14 reads ‘Thou shalt not curse the deaf, nor put a stumblingblock before the blind’) and the famous rule about not wearing two different fabrics together (19:19 reads ‘thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed: neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woollen come upon thee’). The first two of these are the ones we tend to know, and are clearly where the list now known as the ‘Ten Commandments’ was derived from. Of course, there are instances in the Bible where all of these things are treated with less than respect, but the moral meaning of the Ten Commandments is fairly clear.Īs Kristin Swenson points out in her endlessly informative A Most Peculiar Book: The Inherent Strangeness of the Bible, there are in fact three biblical versions of the Ten Commandments: Exodus 20:2-17, Deuteronomy 5:6-21, and Leviticus chapter 19.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |