Which Ten Commandments?
Faith and Philosophy
| August 28, 2003
| Tim
Some people have argued the whole ten commandments episode has been absurd. I personally think it's an interesting litmus test, but I may write more about that later.
Suffice it to say that a contingent of the media has reacted, and reacted strongly. From certain venues, I've heard lots of discussion of the inside of Judge Moore's brain and secret, inner motives. And, then there's little Don Lattin editorial from San Francisco Chronicle: Just which commandments are the 10 commandments?
In other words: "Gosh, those Christians can't even agree on the ten commandments! How on earth could something that vague be useful as moral law?" I guess I'd just have to ask the same question about the Constitution, eh?
The article is emminently fiskable, nearly every argument seeming to be a poor attempt at some kind of deception:
Let's say the Supreme Court of the United States allows the chief justice of the great state of Alabama to keep his 2-ton monument to the Ten Commandments in his office building in Montgomery.
Next question:
Which Ten Commandments?
Uh, if he would "keep" the monument, then it would be the ten already on it, would it not? Which part of this is too confusing for you, Don?
You've got your Jewish Ten Commandments, your Catholic Ten Commandments, your Lutheran Ten Commandments, your Charlton Heston Ten Commandments, your King James Bible Ten Commandments, your New Revised Standard Version Ten Commandments, and they don't all agree as to which commandment is which -- or what they really mean.
Of course different groups of people can produce their own versions of the ten commandments. They can even (gasp) modify or word them differently. But why stop with these groups? I mean, I Googled for "ten commandments" and the first entry was to the "Ten Commandments of HTML", which were just totally different! I mean, there was nothing at all about God in those! Wow, this ten commandment thing is inconsistent!
... your King James Bible Ten Commandments, your New Revised Standard Version Ten Commandments ...
Oooh, right. Let's compare some, just for kicks, shall we? Picking the most important command:
KJV: Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
RSV: You shall have no other gods before me.
Oh dear! I can see how that would throw an experienced "religion writer" like Don Lattin off. In fact, the main difference between the RSV and the KJV is that the "thou"s are changed to "you"s. (Grabbing head, hysterically) I'm so confused!!
If he wanted to pick a better example, he might point out that "Thou shall not kill" in the KJV was a slight mistranslation, and that the NIV renders it better as "You shall not murder." But I get the feeling our intrepid "religion writer" doesn't dig that deeply into, uh, religion.
I hate it when I have to make someone else's argument for them.
Even the Bible contains two versions, one in Exodus 20:1-17 and a slightly different one in Deuteronomy 5:6-21.
Uh, go read 'em. Same commandments, same order, only slightly different wording. Here's a faith-busting example:
Ex 20:8: Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.
Deut 5:12: Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy, as the LORD your God has commanded you.
Wow, "remember" or "observe", I'm so confused, which is it? I guess I'll just neglect the sabbath entirely because I can't sort it out.
Much of the rest of these passages are identical, word for word.
There are, of course, various English translations of those ancient Hebrew texts.
Did you know this article could be translated into French in different ways? What good is a document if it can be translated differently by different people?!!! Burn every book there is, right now!
Further complicating the commandments are the fact that neither Exodus nor Deuteronomy neatly number the no-nos from one to 10.
Yeah, that's highly confusing. The reader would have to be able to (a) count to ten, and (b) determine such hard questions as whether "For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth..." was part of the commandment for honoring the sabbath, or was the beginning of the next one about honoring your parents. I can see how horribly confusing this could be for the religion writer from a major San Francisco newspaper.
By some counts, there are actually Twenty-Nine Commandments, not Ten Commandments.
"Some counts" being a personal one he just did, of course. But by counting to twenty nine, he answered his own previous objection about how hard it was to count to ten.
Of course, they're the same commandments no matter how you number them. Go ahead and keep all twenty-nine, if that's the way you like to number 'em. In doing so, you'll still be keeping the ten.
For example, the Alabama monument to "the laws of nature and of nature's God," uses the "thou shalt" of the King James Bible rather than the "you shall" of the New Revised Standard Version.
Yes, I can see how terribly confusing that would be for you. And I saw a version of the constitution where they wrote all the lower-case "s" letters as if they were little "f"s!
The monument in Montgomery slashes its version of the Tenth Commandment down to a mere four words:
Thou Shalt Not Covet.
Wow! That's horrible! I can't believe the chutzpah of those guys!
What King James really says is a bit more specific:
"Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor's."
Is that six commandments, one commandment, two commandments or the Tenth Commandment?
What a stunning display of intellect.
Of course, the author forgets or is ignorant of a few more: If you can group them together, then we have 6! (6x5x4...) possible commandments right there.
Or, you know, it could be that wife, servant, ox, and ass are just illustrations of things not to covet, given because God presumed the reader, or failing that, a local Rabbi, would be familliar with this common literary device. If the author falls below that threshhold, there's no shame in that: go ahead and give the Rabbi a call.
The Tenth Commandment for Jews and most Protestants is the entire "thou shalt not covet" passage. But Catholics and Lutherans list two "thou shalt not covet" commandments: one against coveting your neighbor's wife and one against coveting your neighbor's property, including his ass.
Yes, and I have friends who swear the first ammendment of the constitution is "separation of church and state", or "freedom of speech", rather than the phrases found in the document itself.
Then there is the question of what the commandments were meant to mean.
Yeah, especially those one-sentence commands.
For example, the First Commandment that "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" indicates that it was OK to have gods other than Yahweh, so long as Yahweh was No. 1.
Uh, sure, that's why it continues, saying: "You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God..." Sure, it meant that.
Context. Read it. Understand it. It's your friend.
Monotheism came later.
Yes. One verse, to be precise.
(How can this guy get around society? I mean, what if he saw a sign that said "KEEP RIGHT" would he start voting Republican?)
"Thou shalt not commit adultery" is either commandment six or seven and originally only forbade sex with a married woman.
Married men were free to have sex with other females. That's because establishing paternity, not maintaining sexual purity, was the reason for that commandment.
Uh, no, bright boy, if we must be hyper-literal, adultery didn't forbid sex with a married woman, or a man couldn't have had sex with his own wife. It forbade a man from having sex with another man's wife. He was free to have sex with an unmarried woman, but in doing so, he would be obligated to support her as his wife.
And a few good reasons for this, among many, would be because of men's natural (though hypocritical) aversion to supporting "impure" women (women who have had other men), and concern for the possible consequences of sex: i.e. to ensure the children would be taken care of.
Then there are the commandments in the next chapter of Exodus, which allow fathers to sell their daughters into slavery (21:7) and say that "whoever curses his father or his mother shall be put to death" (21:17).
Neither of those commandments is included among the Ten Commandments currently residing under the rotunda of the Alabama Supreme Court building.
True enough, on both counts. But neither of these were purported to be inscribed on the original stone tablets, either.
U2 said:
No one, no one is blinder, than he who will not see.
When an individual claims to be confused by examples of covetousness listed next to the simple phrase "You shall not covet", it can either mean that he has a severe problem with reading most standard documents -- in which case, I'd argue he's got no business writing for a newspaper -- of that you're dealing with an individual who simply will not see what's in front of his face.
Why is Don Lattin so confused about the ten commandments? Are they really so darned confusing and inscrutible as he makes them to be? Or is the author just wishing the darned things would go away entirely? If so, why?
I'll leave that to your judgement, dear reader.
Not many people know this but the KJV was translated from Latin manuscripts(Texus Receptus or something like that) from a translation from Antioch, Greece while all the other versions were translated from Greek manuscripts from Alexandria, Greece (the intellectuall capitol of the day). That's why the Jehovah's Witnesses are able to attack most translations.
For what it's worth the NWT calles God God in one of the books of Timothy where Tomothy exclaims, "My Lord and my God."
The entire issue surrounding the monument is the classic separationist view that the state must deal equitably with all religions, and therefore must espouse none. This nation is not exclusively Christian, nor was it ever intended to be. Jews, Muslims, Atheists, and even wierder cults than the Jehovas Witnesses deserve to be treated fairly by the state, and especially the judicial system. This is all fairly obvious, and yet much of the Christian right utterly fails to get it. So why not bring the argument closer to home by pointing out that a specific version of the ten commandments might disenfranchise not just the non-Christian segments of society, but specific groups of Christians as well? In attempting (childishly) to make your mockery, I fear you have completely missed the point.
Dear TJ,
Had Don actually made the argument you make, I would have responded to that. But go read his article carefully, to see what it does say, not just what you think it should.
At no point does Don make the argument that Catholics, Lutherans, etc. would be "disenfranchised" if their exact version of the decalogue were to fail to appear.
You might think he means to make that argument, but I would argue it's simply not there: at no point does he talk about how one of those groups would feel if they were exposed to wording which differed from some official version their church or synagogue once published.
(Futher, perhaps its just me, but I can't see any of them feeling "disenfranchised" over varieties of spelling or numbering. But that's quite beside the point.)
Instead, he lumps differences in sects in amongst differences in translations, threating the differences between "Lutheran" and "Catholic" as being of no more importance than the differences between "Revised Standard Version" and "King James Version". He writes not one word about alienation or disenfranchisement among theists.
Instead, he just says of believers, collectively, that they don't know which commandment is which, or even what they mean. We are collectively fools -- he's not arguing for unity, as you suppose.
You think I'm missing his real point. I humbly ask you to consider the possibility the converse is true.
Of course, he must really be smarter than he comes off. Perhaps he actually meant to make a point about which he penned not one word.
Nonetheless, we can't know what's in his mind: Thus I stick to responding to what he actually said.
Further, you seem to have a lot to say about constitutionality. Very interesting, but again, you're having a vehement response to arguments nobody in the room is making. While the "larger issue" might have to do with that, I'm not debating the larger issue.
Don Lattin raised a tangential point: His thesis is there is no such thing as the ten commandments, per se, and that is the argument to which I respond. To support his argument, he quotes the bible: and point, by point, I respond to him.
No, no, no, you dolt, he's really making a higher point, and you're missing it!
My friend, even if he's making a higher point, one he hasfailed to elucidate clearly by actually, uh, saying, it is relevant to discuss his actual argument. If his argument makes no sense, you can't use it as a basis for the "larger point".
It is so amazing to me that we have "judges" in this country that don't seem to know/remember what value observing the Ten Commandments means to people/a country.
There are really more than "ten" commandments mentioned in the Bible. But, the "Ten Commandments" are the ones that God Himself gave to a great leader, Moses.
It seems to me that these Ten Commandments should be posted in every law institute to serve as a reminder for people down through the generations of time. I honestly believe that it would help avoid crimes, etc. in our Country. These are for our good. We have law enforcers. Why not help them do their job by using an ounce of prevention?
Whether we want to acknowledge it or not, God does demand that we do according to thus saith the Lord. Our forefathers risked their lives to sign the Declaration of Independence and today I am ashamed as I watch our morals and rebellion go through a drastic revolution. We need to repent and ask God to forgive us.
We need to please God so He will "rebuke" the devourer for our sakes. People need to be thankful that we live in a day of grace, or the earth might open up and swallow some like in Bible days. I fear for anybody who defies God.
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coopr2000@yahoo.com
http://www.1stbooks.com/bookview/8857
I dont understand why it is such a big deal that some choose to display the 10 commandment. This is america we have right as others who come here do. Here in my state we have uniform code in the school system but due to religon some wear something other than code uniforms,because their religon so it seems they are the exception to the rule. which is it seperation of state and religion or if your a forigner you have the right to over rule state because of your religion? As an american i believe its great we open our doors to give others a chance at a better life but damn it what about my rights. Americans come last in american any more. wouldnt want to upset someone who dont believe in what generations have been handed down for generations because a forigner dislikes our 10 commandment and our god.
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Not many people know this but the KJV was translated from Latin manuscripts(Texus Receptus or something like that) from a translation from Antioch, Greece while all the other versions were translated from Greek manuscripts from Alexandria, Greece (the intellectuall capitol of the day). That's why the Jehovah's Witnesses are able to attack most translations.
For what it's worth the NWT calles God God in one of the books of Timothy where Tomothy exclaims, "My Lord and my God."
Posted by: Angelo on September 23, 2003 12:15 AM