Ten Commandments

Modern biblical scholarship differs as to whether Exodus 19–20 describes the people of Israel as having directly heard all or some of the decalogue, or whether the laws are only passed to them through Moses.

[17] And the LORD said unto Moses, Come up to me into the mount, and be there: and I will give thee tablets of stone, and a law, and commandments which I have written; that thou mayest teach them.

[31][59][60][61] They are not as explicit[59] or as detailed as rules[62] or as many other biblical laws and commandments, because they provide guiding principles that apply universally, across changing circumstances.

[66] Similarly, in The Decalogue he stated that "under [the "commandment… against adulterers"] many other commands are conveyed by implication, such as that against seducers, that against practisers of unnatural crimes, that against all who live in debauchery, that against all men who indulge in illicit and incontinent connections.

In Anglicanism, the Articles of the Church of England, revised and altered by the Assembly of Divines, at Westminster, in the year 1643 state that "no Christian man whatsoever is free from the obedience of the commandments which are called moral.

[92] In Catholicism it is believed that Jesus freed Christians from the rest of Jewish religious law, but not from their obligation to keep the Ten Commandments.

The Lord's Sermon on the Mount, far from abolishing or devaluing the moral prescriptions of the Old Law, releases their hidden potential and has new demands arise from them: it reveals their entire divine and human truth.

It does not add new external precepts, but proceeds to reform the heart, the root of human acts, where man chooses between the pure and the impure, where faith, hope, and charity are formed and with them the other virtues."

[58] The moral law contained in the Ten Commandments, according to the founder of the Methodist movement John Wesley, was instituted from the beginning of the world and is written on the hearts of all people.

[101] As with the Reformed view,[102] Wesley held that the moral law, which is contained in the Ten Commandments, stands today:[103] Every part of this law must remain in force upon all mankind in all ages, as not depending either on time or place, nor on any other circumstances liable to change; but on the nature of God and the nature of man, and their unchangeable relation to each other" (Wesley's Sermons, Vol.

[108] The Westminster Confession, held by Presbyterian Churches, holds that the moral law contained in the Ten Commandments "does forever bind all, as well justified persons as others, to the obedience thereof".

[109] With the emergence of dispensationalism (held to by Churches such as the Plymouth Brethren and certain Independent Baptists), certain communities believe and teach their adherents that all of the Law of Moses was fulfilled by Jesus Christ by His Crucifixion, death and resurrection and the Law of Moses including the Ten Commandments no longer apply to them[110] while others believe in following only the commandments that appear in the New testament[111] and hence do not follow or observe them as part of their faith and worship.

[113] According to the Book of Mosiah, a prophet named Abinadi taught the Ten Commandments in the court of King Noah and was martyred for his righteousness.

[125]Three verses of Surah An'am (6:151–153) are widely taken to be a reinstatement (or revised version) of the Ten Commandments[126][127][128] either as revealed to Moses originally or as they are to be taken by Muslims now:[129] 151.

In the non-canonical Gospel of Barnabas, it is claimed that Jesus stated that idolatry is the greatest sin as it divests a man fully of faith, and hence of God.

Julius Wellhausen's documentary hypothesis (1883) suggests that Exodus 20–23 and 34 "might be regarded as the document which formed the starting point of the religious history of Israel.

In a 2002 analysis of the history of this position, Bernard M. Levinson argued that this reconstruction assumes a Christian perspective, and dates back to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's polemic against Judaism, which asserted that religions evolve from the more ritualistic to the more ethical.

Goethe thus argued that the Ten Commandments revealed to Moses at Mount Sinai would have emphasized rituals, and that the "ethical" Decalogue Christians recite in their own churches was composed at a later date, when Israelite prophets had begun to prophesy the coming of the messiah.

He concludes that its vogue among later critical historians represents the persistence of the idea that the supersession of Judaism by Christianity is part of a longer history of progress from the ritualistic to the ethical.

[148] By the 1930s, historians who accepted the basic premises of multiple authorship had come to reject the idea of an orderly evolution of Israelite religion.

[149] "The prologue of the Hittite treaty reminds his vassals of his benevolent acts.. (compare with Exodus 20:2 "I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery").

The Hittite treaty also stipulated the obligations imposed by the ruler on his vassals, which included a prohibition of relations with peoples outside the empire, or enmity between those within.

[156] An even later date (after 586 BC) is suggested by David H. Aaron; his book argues for “the probability that these documents were written very late in the history of biblical literature - indeed, so late as to constitute a literary afterthought in the development of Israelite ethnic self-definition.”[157] Biblical scholar Timothy S. Hogue argues that the Decalogue in the book of Exodus originated in the northern kingdom of Israel around the 9th-8th centuries BC, based on parallels with Luwian texts from that time as well as the references in the Decalogue to the masseboth which were destroyed during the religious reforms of Hezekiah and Josiah.

In the J narrative in Exodus 34 the editor of the combined story known as the Redactor (or RJE), adds in an explanation that these are a replacement for the earlier tablets which were shattered.

[170] According to some scholars, certain interpretations of the Commandments were allegedly problematic for people living in those respective societies during their time,[171] like capital punishment for blasphemy, idolatry, apostasy, adultery, cursing one own's parents, and Sabbath-breaking.

[172][173][174][175][176][177] During an 1846 uprising, now known as the Galician slaughter, by impoverished and famished Galician Eastern European peasants (serfs) directed against szlachta (Polish nobles) because of their oppression (for example, manorial prisons), a popular rumor had it that the Austrian Emperor had abolished the Ten Commandants, which the peasants took as permission and religious justification to massacre the szlachta[178] – the prime representatives and beneficiaries of the crown in Austrian Galicia.

[185] Placing the plaques and monuments to the Ten Commandments in and around government buildings was another expression of mid-twentieth-century U.S. civil religion, along with adding the phrase "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance.

[183] By the beginning of the twenty-first century in the U.S., however, Decalogue monuments and plaques in government spaces had become a legal battleground between religious as well as political liberals and conservatives.

[191] On June 19, 2024, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry signed House Bill 71[192] mandating display of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom.

"[193] The bill mandates a text that includes the phrase "Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven images" indicating that it comes not from a traditional Bible but instead from the Eagles-DeMille promotion campaign.