A Ten Commandments reminder.

With the Supreme Court having just heard oral arguments on the matter of the posting of the Ten Commandments in public buildings, it occurs to me how very little that most people know about the Ten Commandments. Here’s a little crash course.

There are four versions of the Ten Commandments. You might remember that Moses went up on the mountain, where he received the tablets of stone from God. He came down the mountain to find that the Jews had started to worship Baal, another god in competition with the big man himself. (Judaism was polytheistic at this point. God was trying to persuade the Jews to pick him over the other gods. Hence the first commandment.) Moses was pissed off, what with the golden calf, and he broke the two tablets. Feeling stupid, he had to go back up the mountain, kvetch to God, who gave him another set of tablets with ten different commandments on them.

For reasons that I don’t understand, Christians today use the first set of the Ten Commandments, not the second. The second set was a bit more specific (“thou shalt make thee no molten gods, [jackasses]”), and contained some things that modern Christians would just as well ignore (“the fat of my feast shall not remain all night until the morning,” “thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk,” “all the first-born are mine,” etc.)

Now, there are a few different major versions of that first set of commandments, which are now known as the Ten Commandments, despite that they were replaced by Ten Commandments 2.0. The Bible has, of course, gone through shloads of editing over the centuries, with three primary versions of commandments emerging: Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant. Most people in the U.S. think of the Protestant version when they think of the Ten Commandments.

Every so often, Gallup takes a poll on the Ten Commandments. Every time that they do this, a little less than half of those polled are able to name at least five of the ten commandments. For rules that are said to be so central to the lives of Americans, they’re strangely removed.

As a refresher, here they are:

1. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
2. Thou 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: Thou 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; And showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.
3. Thou 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.
4. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work: But 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: For 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.
5. Honor thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.
6. Thou shalt not kill.
7. Thou shalt not commit adultery.
8. Thou shalt not steal.
9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s.

There are many who say that these are the premise for the laws of the United States, and that they outline what should and should not be legal. Which is pretty amazing. That means that we are to legislate belief in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim god, ban speaking the word god “in vain,” ban any sculptures of any living creature, ban work on Sundays, mandate “honoring” one’s parents, and ban jealousy. Murder, stealing, lying under oath — these are all bad things that should be illegal. But sculpting? I can’t see how this should (or could) be the premise of our court system.

For more information on the topic, I highly recommend Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.