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It is essential to have an objective moral code. Our conscience is the best guide; but it is too easy to rationalize. It needs an “education.”
At the same time, the meaning of the Ten Commandments is itself often ambiguous. They are worth looking at more closely.
1. You shall have no other gods before Me
As numbered by Catholics, Jews, and Lutherans, this first commandment includes a prohibition specifically against worshipping “graven images.”
Based on this, many Protestants and Jews consider the statues and paintings in a Catholic or Orthodox Church illicit.
I have dealt elsewhere with why this literal interpretation is not tenable: briefly, the commandments themselves were engraved on tablets, and referred to in Exodus itself as “graven images.”
The prohibition is not against making such images, but bowing down and serving them.
“Graven images” can be broadly understood as all the works of man. All the works of the human mind are graven images in the metaphoric sense. We think with images, mental representations, not with the things themselves. We must not worship the works of man.
We must also not worship anything in the sky, on the earth, or in the waters. In other words, we must not worship nature.
This is not a prohibition against worshipping Zeus, or Thor. That is a trivial issue; the temptation is not present. It prohibits putting too much value on Nature, or Science, or Evolution, or Reason. Which probably most people do.
Breaking this commandment expressly causes harm to the third and fourth generation of your descendants, according to the passage. This is a fundamental misorientation of values. It is a matter of world-view. It is hard for a child to break free from the world-view of their parents. If that world view is fundamentally wrong, it blights their life. As Jesus says elsewhere, it would be better for that parent to be thrown into the ocean with a millstone around their neck. This sort of fundamental misorientation is a social disorder, the kind of thing that, in the Old Testament, leads to direct divine retribution, for the sake of future generations. Sodom and Gomorrah, the Canaanites.
2. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.
People think this is a prohibition against using “bad language.” Even short Anglo-Saxon terms for organs and bodily functions. Which is childish and silly and a dodge to avoid having to follow the real commandment. It is a prohibition against breaking promises. When you say you are going to do something, and do not do it, you do the other party real harm.
3. Remember to keep holy the Sabbath day.
This is commonly understood as a commandment to go to church, but the commandment was given before the first church was built. The implicit significance is that you must regularly stop what you are doing and reflect on matters. Are you on the right path? Do things make sense? If you simply motor along without undertaking your own spiritual quest, you are liable to be going nowhere.
I think of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who spent her life busily—yet her net contribution to the world seems harmful.
Elsewhere, the Bible observes, “the wicked cannot rest”; often misquoted as “no rest for the wicked.” They cannot rest from ceaseless doing, because a moment’s real reflection would allow the still small voice of conscience to convict them.
4. Honour your father and your mother.
This is commonly understood as a command for children to obey their parents. This is obviously wrong: children do not need such advice, because their parents can enforce obedience, and children, below the age of reason, in principle cannot sin. None of the commandments are for them.
The original Hebrew here translated “honour” means something more like “repay.” St. Paul notes that this is the only commandment that comes with a quid pro quo: “that your days be long in the land.”
It means you owe a debt to your parents for taking care of you in childhood, when you could not take care of yourself; and so you must look after them if they need such assistance in their old age.
5. You shall not kill.
This commandment cannot be taken to mean “kill” literally, since the Old Testament requires the death penalty for some crimes. It cannot justify pacifism, for Yahweh also directed Moses himself to go to war. And it obviously does not include animals, which we use for food. It is often rendered as “You shall not murder,” but this is not satisfactory either. Murder is a legal term, defined by the state. Merriam-Webster: “the crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice aforethought.” Oxford: “the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another.” “Unlawful” is part of both definitions.
Trusting morality to the state implies trusting Nazi Germany to always do the right thing.
The original Hebrew word translated here as “murder” literally means “to tear apart, destroy.” That makes more sense. Of course we must not murder people, but that is a fairly remote concern on most days. More pressing is a Satanic urge in all of us, when we see something good or beautiful, especially if it is not ours, just to break it. We see it in the mobs currently pulling down statues. The word “Devil” comes from “dia-bol,” literally, tear apart.
6. You shall not commit adultery.
Strictly speaking, adultery is sex when one or another of the partners is married, and not to one another. It does not include fornication--sex when neither party is married.
But that needs to take into account that according to Hebrew tradition, and tradition everywhere in Europe until relatively recently, the act of fornication automatically made you married. This idea endures in the concept of “common-law marriage.”
So it means sex with only one person, for life. We have strayed far from this.
7. You shall not steal.
This too is controversial. It requires assuming that God recognizes property rights. The authors of the Declaration of Independence changed the three prime inalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” replacing John Locke’s original “life, liberty, and property,” to avoid making this assertion. And, of course, the right to own property is not recognized by socialism.
The interesting question is, if property is from God and not from man, government and the law, what determines that a thing is my property and not yours?
Locke makes the comprehensive argument that it is one’s labour. To the extent that one alters an object in nature, that makes it your property. It being your property, you also have the natural right to sell it to another, or give it to them, and so forth.
8. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour.
This is generally interpreted as “you must not lie,” but it allows “white lies.” The commandment is against saying something untrue about someone else, or that will harm someone else. It is against calumny, slander, and malicious gossip.
9. You shall not covet your neighbour’s wife.
10. You shall not covet your neighbour’s goods.
These two commandments are combined in the Protestant numbering. They do seem to be the same: a prohibition against envy.
Why give it as two commandments? Because it corresponds to two other commandments, also given separately: “you shall not steal,” and “you shall not commit adultery.” To combine the two into one would suggest that envy is a lesser sin than theft or adultery. The Catholic or Lutheran numbering prevents that.
Discounting the seriousness of the sin of envy seems to be a common problem. We do tend to think it is far less serious to envy someone his home or marriage than to steal his home or have sex with his wife.
But envy is more dangerous than we think. The great danger of envy is that it always by its nature operates in secret. It plunges its knife in the victim’s back.
And then feigns innocence.
Taken together, this is a powerful life mandate. Looked at carefully, it is striking how far our society is today from following it.
At the same time, the meaning of the Ten Commandments is itself often ambiguous. They are worth looking at more closely.
1. You shall have no other gods before Me
As numbered by Catholics, Jews, and Lutherans, this first commandment includes a prohibition specifically against worshipping “graven images.”
You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me.
Based on this, many Protestants and Jews consider the statues and paintings in a Catholic or Orthodox Church illicit.
I have dealt elsewhere with why this literal interpretation is not tenable: briefly, the commandments themselves were engraved on tablets, and referred to in Exodus itself as “graven images.”
The prohibition is not against making such images, but bowing down and serving them.
“Graven images” can be broadly understood as all the works of man. All the works of the human mind are graven images in the metaphoric sense. We think with images, mental representations, not with the things themselves. We must not worship the works of man.
We must also not worship anything in the sky, on the earth, or in the waters. In other words, we must not worship nature.
This is not a prohibition against worshipping Zeus, or Thor. That is a trivial issue; the temptation is not present. It prohibits putting too much value on Nature, or Science, or Evolution, or Reason. Which probably most people do.
Breaking this commandment expressly causes harm to the third and fourth generation of your descendants, according to the passage. This is a fundamental misorientation of values. It is a matter of world-view. It is hard for a child to break free from the world-view of their parents. If that world view is fundamentally wrong, it blights their life. As Jesus says elsewhere, it would be better for that parent to be thrown into the ocean with a millstone around their neck. This sort of fundamental misorientation is a social disorder, the kind of thing that, in the Old Testament, leads to direct divine retribution, for the sake of future generations. Sodom and Gomorrah, the Canaanites.
2. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.
People think this is a prohibition against using “bad language.” Even short Anglo-Saxon terms for organs and bodily functions. Which is childish and silly and a dodge to avoid having to follow the real commandment. It is a prohibition against breaking promises. When you say you are going to do something, and do not do it, you do the other party real harm.
3. Remember to keep holy the Sabbath day.
This is commonly understood as a commandment to go to church, but the commandment was given before the first church was built. The implicit significance is that you must regularly stop what you are doing and reflect on matters. Are you on the right path? Do things make sense? If you simply motor along without undertaking your own spiritual quest, you are liable to be going nowhere.
I think of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who spent her life busily—yet her net contribution to the world seems harmful.
Elsewhere, the Bible observes, “the wicked cannot rest”; often misquoted as “no rest for the wicked.” They cannot rest from ceaseless doing, because a moment’s real reflection would allow the still small voice of conscience to convict them.
4. Honour your father and your mother.
This is commonly understood as a command for children to obey their parents. This is obviously wrong: children do not need such advice, because their parents can enforce obedience, and children, below the age of reason, in principle cannot sin. None of the commandments are for them.
The original Hebrew here translated “honour” means something more like “repay.” St. Paul notes that this is the only commandment that comes with a quid pro quo: “that your days be long in the land.”
It means you owe a debt to your parents for taking care of you in childhood, when you could not take care of yourself; and so you must look after them if they need such assistance in their old age.
5. You shall not kill.
This commandment cannot be taken to mean “kill” literally, since the Old Testament requires the death penalty for some crimes. It cannot justify pacifism, for Yahweh also directed Moses himself to go to war. And it obviously does not include animals, which we use for food. It is often rendered as “You shall not murder,” but this is not satisfactory either. Murder is a legal term, defined by the state. Merriam-Webster: “the crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice aforethought.” Oxford: “the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another.” “Unlawful” is part of both definitions.
Trusting morality to the state implies trusting Nazi Germany to always do the right thing.
The original Hebrew word translated here as “murder” literally means “to tear apart, destroy.” That makes more sense. Of course we must not murder people, but that is a fairly remote concern on most days. More pressing is a Satanic urge in all of us, when we see something good or beautiful, especially if it is not ours, just to break it. We see it in the mobs currently pulling down statues. The word “Devil” comes from “dia-bol,” literally, tear apart.
6. You shall not commit adultery.
Strictly speaking, adultery is sex when one or another of the partners is married, and not to one another. It does not include fornication--sex when neither party is married.
But that needs to take into account that according to Hebrew tradition, and tradition everywhere in Europe until relatively recently, the act of fornication automatically made you married. This idea endures in the concept of “common-law marriage.”
So it means sex with only one person, for life. We have strayed far from this.
7. You shall not steal.
This too is controversial. It requires assuming that God recognizes property rights. The authors of the Declaration of Independence changed the three prime inalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” replacing John Locke’s original “life, liberty, and property,” to avoid making this assertion. And, of course, the right to own property is not recognized by socialism.
The interesting question is, if property is from God and not from man, government and the law, what determines that a thing is my property and not yours?
Locke makes the comprehensive argument that it is one’s labour. To the extent that one alters an object in nature, that makes it your property. It being your property, you also have the natural right to sell it to another, or give it to them, and so forth.
8. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour.
This is generally interpreted as “you must not lie,” but it allows “white lies.” The commandment is against saying something untrue about someone else, or that will harm someone else. It is against calumny, slander, and malicious gossip.
9. You shall not covet your neighbour’s wife.
10. You shall not covet your neighbour’s goods.
These two commandments are combined in the Protestant numbering. They do seem to be the same: a prohibition against envy.
You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his manservant, or his maidservant, or his ox, or his ass, or anything that is your neighbor's.
Why give it as two commandments? Because it corresponds to two other commandments, also given separately: “you shall not steal,” and “you shall not commit adultery.” To combine the two into one would suggest that envy is a lesser sin than theft or adultery. The Catholic or Lutheran numbering prevents that.
Discounting the seriousness of the sin of envy seems to be a common problem. We do tend to think it is far less serious to envy someone his home or marriage than to steal his home or have sex with his wife.
But envy is more dangerous than we think. The great danger of envy is that it always by its nature operates in secret. It plunges its knife in the victim’s back.
And then feigns innocence.
Taken together, this is a powerful life mandate. Looked at carefully, it is striking how far our society is today from following it.
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