Exodus 20:1-17
Exodus 20:1–17 (NASB95)
1Then God spoke all these words, saying, 2“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. 3You shall have no other gods before Me. 4You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth. 5You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me, 6but showing lovingkindness to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments. 7You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not leave him unpunished who takes His name in vain.
8“Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. 9Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 10but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you. 11For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and made it holy.
12“Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be prolonged in the land which the Lord your God gives you.
13“You shall not murder. 14You shall not commit adultery. 15You shall not steal. 16You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. 17You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife or his male servant or his female servant or his ox or his donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”
Before we talk about the meat of this passage, we need to get some misconceptions and poor representations out of the way. First off; you are more than likely used to calling this section the “Ten Commandments”, or if you’re super fancy, “The Decalogue”. That’s a title given to this section by later (but still ancient to us) authors which is never given to the passage inside the text itself. Also, there are more than ten commandments here; conservatively there are 12 of them. And even though all of the disparate traditions of Judaism and Christianity call them something like “the ten commandments”, not all of us agree on which ones should be combined or treated as separate.
The other big misconception is: this is not what was on the tablets Moses brought down from the mountain, only a small portion of it. Moses brought down two, full size writing tablets (which believe it or not did have something approaching a ‘standard size’, though not quite as standard as an 8x11 sheet of paper); and the covenant with YHWH was written on those tablets both front and back. Because of this, way too many depictions of Moses holding the tablets make it look like God accidentally printed His short to do (or not do) list off in 200 pt font because one of the angels was messing with the printer settings. The tablets Moses was carrying were the covenant contract between YHWH and His people written out twice, once on each tablet, not just this abbreviated list of commands. YHWH is signing what’s called a ‘Suzerain Covenant’ with Israel, which is a political/legal agreement native to ancient cultures in the Fertile Crescent (among other places); and is a format He’s clearly using in order to help His people better understand Him, His Character, and His expectations.
‘Suzerain’ more or less refers to the more powerful party in an agreement where one party agrees to protect and seek the welfare of another, while the other party (often referred to as the vassal) makes concessions to submit to their new Suzerain (usually in the form of tribute, submission to the other’s legal codes/cultural norms, sometimes building a temple to the Suzerain’s chief deity in their city, and finally a commitment to the political and military interests of their Suzerain). In these sorts of covenants, the text of the agreement would be written out twice on two separate tablets. One would be held in the hall of records, or throne room of the Suzerain, the other would be held in an equivalent location by the vassal, who would also usually build a monument with either the whole text or an abbreviation of the agreement in a more public place. In that way, if the vassal were ever to fail to uphold their end, the suzerain would have documented evidence of their divine right to punish their vassal, and the vassal would have no excuse for not knowing that they had violated the covenant.
What’s unique about YHWH’s covenant with Israel is that both copies of the agreement are stored in the box beneath His throne, the ‘Mercy Seat’ as it’s sometimes called, which is why that box comes to be known as the ‘Ark (meaning ‘container’ or ‘box’) of the Covenant’. It is what it says on the tin; the box that holds the covenant. YHWH takes on responsibility for both the suzerain’s copy and the vassal’s copy, implicitly accepting the whole weight of the covenant, and the consequences of its failure, upon Himself.
But as I said, the ‘Ten’ Commandments are not the covenant, just a part of it. And by the way, YHWH does have Israel set up that public monument I talked about earlier, you can read about it in Deuteronomy 27, and when He does, most of these ten don’t make the cut. Rather, the Ten Commandments function more like a memory device for young Israelite children to learn the covenant and the story around the covenant. The way the Torah tells the story of the covenant is to intersperse narrative with related commands. The idea is that no list of commands can ever completely form the moral horizons of a people such that they are prepared for every situation. Instead, the Torah teaches us how to think morally given the circumstances of the immoral and broken world we live in.
So both Exodus and Deuteronomy, when they give the Ten, follow them up with a series of related stories which thematically (more or less) follow the progression of these commands. That way, when a young Hebrew is learning and memorizing parts of the Torah, if they lose their place, they can go back to the list, and see where they’re at. That’s what makes these commandments so centrally important, as a means to remember the whole; if you were taught that you can just memorize these ten and forget the rest of the story, you were taught to treat these passages in the exact opposite way to how they are meant to be used.
Now, given that I literally just said you shouldn’t focus on just this passage independent of the rest of the book, I’m going to have to trust you to follow through because my actual task at this moment is to help you focus on this passage without forcing you to read the rest of the book first. So let’s dig in from the top; what is the first commandment here? If your answer is “no other gods”, then you are in the majority; but some traditions prefer to combine “no other gods” and “no idols” into a sort of joint first command. I think the latter of those two is just flat out wrong for reasons I’ll get into in a second, but I also want to push back on the prior because it skips over something very important.
Some important context is to understand that English is uniquely picky about having its ‘being verbs’ present in every possible instance where one can be placed. In linguistics, the name for the concept represented by the English ‘being verbs’ is the ‘copula’; and in many languages, Hebrew included, the copula can be implicit, meaning it doesn’t need to be represented with an actual word. Sentences where the copula is implicit, and which therefore have no stated verb, are called ‘null copula’ sentences. The first sentence in this passage is a null copula, and the being verb in your translation was added by the translator because it’s required in English. Because of that, the translator had to make an educated guess about where that being verb would best serve the meaning of the passage, and most translators choose to add it before the sentence “I am YHWH, your God…”. However, that is by no means the only place it choice; another, and one which I personally find more compelling given the context, would be to place it after the divine name “YHWH is your God, He who brought you out of Egypt…” This, I believe, is actually the first commandment in this list (that brings us to 12+1 for those who are still counting); and it brings the list of commands Israel manages to break all in one go to three, the first three: YHWH is your God, no other gods, no idols.
The first big failure Israel has after affirming these laws, after Moses goes back up the mountain to get some more, is the matter of the Golden Calf which can be found in Exodus 32 and Deuteronomy 9. Listen carefully to the words of Aaron versus those of the elders:
Exodus 32:1–5 (NASB95)
1Now when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people assembled about Aaron and said to him, “Come, make us a god* who will go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up from the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.” 2Aaron said to them, “Tear off the gold rings which are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.”
3Then all the people tore off the gold rings which were in their ears and brought them to Aaron. 4He took this from their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool and made it into a molten calf; and they said, “This is your god, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt.”
5Now when Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made a proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to the Lord.”
[*this should be ‘make us gods who will go before us…]
Part of me has always wondered if Aaron, in verse 5, is doing the absolute minimum amount of damage control by insisting that they’re still worshiping YHWH (anytime you see ‘lord’ in all caps in your translation it’s the word ‘YHWH’ for reasons we’re not going to get into). The elders don’t seem even a little concerned with what they call the cow, they’re just happy they have a cow to worship again.
Oh yeah… ‘again’. The Hebrew peoples in the desert are a mishmash of Semitic-language refugees leaving northeastern Egypt and its surrounding regions. The Semitic-language peoples of the Levant, Sinai, and those who used to live in Goshen based on archeological records, all worshiped this deity that, rather than going by his name, was most often called ‘lord’ (which is what ‘ba’al’ means), is usually believed to descend on mountains in storm clouds, likes being offered sacrifices on altars of uncut stone, hands out blessings of fertility (think ‘be fruitful and multiply), and has beef with the gods of Egypt. And that god is typically represented either as a golden cow/calf, or as a young shepherd flanked by golden cows/calves. So yeah, no part of Exodus suggests that, during their sojourn in Egypt, the descendants of Jacob had been in any way, shape, or form faithful worshipers of YHWH; rather it seems to suggest that they very much were not.
When Moses asks YHWH the bronze age equivalent of “and whom shall I say is calling?”, YHWH’s answer is “tell ‘em I’m the God of their ancestors”. Moses, apparently knowing that that still wouldn’t clear things up, pushes back and says “Yeah, no, I’m gonna need an actual name,” which seems to suggest that they’ve got a few ‘ancestral gods’.
All that to say, yeah “again”, they’re happy to have their golden cow back, and probably more than ready to call it the same name they used to call it. Aaron, gaining the exact minimum amount of spine possible (which consequently is also the maximum amount of spine we ever see Aaron grow), at the very least insists that they only break commandment number three, ‘no idols’, and try to leave the first two, ‘YHWH is your God’ and ‘no other gods’, intact. It’s not nothing, but not good either. In fact, it’s actually arguably worse, because he’s trading breaking commandments 1-3 for commandments 3-4, adding ‘don’t be flippant with YHWH’s name’ into the mix.
And that might actually be another thing I should have added to the misconceptions at the top; ‘taking God’s name in vain’ is a really, really, really useless, insufficient, and antiquated way of translating that command that grossly obscures the intent of the command. Slightly better would be to say “don’t carry/wield YHWH’s name lightly/flippantly”. First off, ‘God’ is not a name, it’s a classification of beings referring to their spiritual and transcendent nature (as opposed to a physical, earthly nature). Acting like this command is YHWH being hypersensitive about when and how you say ‘god’ is painting Him in a petty and insecure light that’s actually, I would argue, more in danger of violating this command than shouting ‘oh God’ when you stub your toe.
What God’s saying is, ‘We’re making a covenant with one another; by very nature of being my people, you carry my reputation with you. Be careful what things, what behaviors, what teachings, what practices you tie to my reputation, because the world sees me through you. You can either paint them a clear picture, a distorted picture, or an outright lie, and that picture will be the only me someone outside of this covenant might see.” So it’s a bit more involved than just how and when to say ‘God’, and digs a bit deeper into our lives, thoughts and relationships as people in covenant with God; as people whom other people see God through.
Dear friends, we’re not even halfway in, and I’ve far exceeded my space for this devotional. Though perhaps, having done this, I’ve helped you begin to see exactly why it is that memorizing an abridged business-card sized version of this list is nowhere near sufficient if you want to actually engage the 10 Commandments the way they were meant to be engaged. I wish I had a prettier bow to tie on this, but for now I’ll leave you with this: the Bible is not made to be boiled down. It isn’t something that can be distilled into 10 simple steps to the good life.
If you want to hunger for God, you aren’t going to get there by memorizing a small handful of verses taken out of context, read in a dialect of English which you don’t speak, and only half understand because it's been dead for hundreds of years. You get there the same way those young Hebrew children who read these seventeen verses thousands of years ago got there, by not simply reading a small list of commands, but by internalizing the long, complicated, messy, sometimes frustrating, sometime tragic, sometimes embarrassing story of God working in and through His blessed but broken people.