The Ten WHAT?!!

The Truth About the “Ten Commandments”

By Gershon Winkler

The Ten Commandments is a sadly misunderstood and misinterpreted body of ancient Jewish rules-to-live-by, twisted out of context by religious cultures unfamiliar with the original Hebraic language and cosmology that inspired it, to begin with. 

Ever since the Hebrew scriptures were translated from Hebrew to Greek to Latin and finally into English, the ancient Decalogue of the Hebrews has been a household word across the western cultural map. More recently, the media has given The Ten Commandments further exposure when Cecil B. DeMille titled his biblical epic “The Ten Commandments,” and, when of late, they aroused controversy surrounding the issue of separation of Church and State in the case of a county judge who refused to remove them from the front lawn of his court house.  Ironically, the Ten Commandments remained the stalwart of a European Christian culture that in all other respects was founded upon an agenda of superseding the very scriptures that contained the Ten Commandments: the Hebrew Scriptures, otherwise derogatorily known as the “Old” Testament.

I would like to discuss here some of the original meaning and intent of this popularly known but sorely misunderstood body of ancient Jewish laws.  For example, nowhere in the Decalogue does it state “Thou shalt not kill.”  Rather, the Hebrew writ reads:

“You will not murder” (Exodus 20:13). The “thou shalt not,” or “you may not,” is an incorrect rendering of what more accurately reads “you will not,” implying that if one observes the instructions of the first five “commandments” one will not be prone to committing murder, sexual abuse, theft, slander, etc. 

After all, the Hebrew ancestors did not need to be commanded not to murder or steal or slander as if they were a nation of idiots oblivious to simple, basic morality.  It would otherwise be akin to an American law prohibiting the wanton slaughter of fellow humans or the random trashing of parked vehicles. The laws in the Ten Commandments were mostly duplicates of laws already in force and articulated earlier in the Torah. They were laws long ago transmitted to Abraham from his teacher Eber who received them from his father Shem (a/k/a Malkitzedek) who in turn receive them from his father Noah, the famed hero of the Great Flood.

They are repeated here in the new context of relationship with the Creator as opposed to their original context of mortal legal injunction. Thus, the first several “commandments” are about the relationship between humans and God while the last five are about the relationship between humans and each other. The intention here is to predicate one upon the other rather than foster a sense of morality shadowed by societal legislation alone.

“Noachian Law had been secured by the external safeguard of severe punishment (Talmud, Baba Kama 38a), which nevertheless proved insufficient (Talmud, Avot 3:5). Now these external safeguards were to be replaced by the internal restraints provided by the chuqim of the Torah, laws which make awareness of God a reality in human life [and a determinant factor in wholesome human behavior].”—Philip Biberfeld: Universal Jewish History [Feldheim, 1980], Vol. 4, p. 79

The first of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:3) is another example of a misreading. It does not read: “Thou shalt have no other gods besides Me [or before Me]”, as it is usually translated; rather it reads: “You shall have no other gods upon My face,” meaning we ought not to appropriate onto God neither definition nor image, presuming to know what God is all about.

As God is described as saying in the Hebraic scriptural book of Isaiah the Prophet: “’My thoughts are not like your thoughts, and My ways are not like your ways,’ declares Infinite One.

‘For as high as heavens are from earth, so high are My ways from your ways, and My thoughts from your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9). 

Even the word God is a mistranslation of the Hebrew term used: elo’heem, which is a plural word meaning literally All Powers (Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chayyim 5:1), and is used also to describe humans who wield powers such as mortal judges (Exodus 21:6) and persons of high spiritual standing, or angels (Psalms 82:6).

Where the customary rendition of the Ten Commandments describes a “God of Vengeance” (Exodus 20:5) the Hebraic reading describes a God who is master over vengeance, meaning is—on the contrary a God who is not subject to the human emotional reactions such as revenge and grudges:  

It is written: “God is a God of vengeance and anger” [Nachum 1:2].  Said Rabbi Yehudah HaNassi: “A mortal is overcome by vengeance and anger, but the Holy Blessed One overcomes vengeance and anger, for it is read this way - ‘God is lord over vengeance and anger.’”  It is written: “God is a God of jealousy and vengeance” [Nachum 1:2].  Said Rabbi Natan: “Only a mortal succumbs to jealousy and vengeance, but the Holy Blessed One overcomes jealousy and vengeance, for it is read this way - ‘God is lord over jealousy and vengeance.’”—Midrash Tehilim 94:1

The commandment against adultery is another example, for in the Hebraic language the wording is lo’ tin’af—meaning “You will not commit sexual abuse” as mentioned above. The implication extends to any wrong use of one’s sexual impulse. What exactly constitutes “wrong use” is relative to one’s belief system. In Jewish law, for example, a married man having sex with a woman who is not married to anyone else does not constitute adultery.

Conversely, a single woman having sex with a married man does not constitute adultery. Nonmarital sex, or premarital sex is not a prohibition in Judaism whereas it is in Christianity. The prohibition extends beyond adultery and includes incest. What constitutes incest, however, is relative again to one’s belief system. In Jewish law, sex with your child or parent is a severe crime, but is allowed with your uncle or niece or cousin. Sex between siblings, however, while forbidden, is not criminal. Rape in Judaism extends as well to a man forcing his legally married wife, something still not illegal in half the country. The extension also touches upon the issues of other sexual situations such as homosexuality. While Christianity forbade all homosexual activity, Judaism forbade only male homosexual acts, and even then, only sodomy. Lesbianism was never forbidden in Jewish law, nor were male homosexual acts short of sodomy.  While the ancient rabbis considered them lewd acts, nonetheless—as they aptly put it—“Since when did the Torah forbid lewdness?” (Talmud, Sanhedrin 54a-56a; Yevamot, 55b, 76a; Maimonides’ Pirush ahl ha’mish’nayot, on Sanhedrin, Ch. 7).

Each of the commandments of the Decalogue, then, are rich with contextual meanings and implications within and beyond the literal wording, and were never understood by the people with whom they originated more than 3,000 years ago as some kind of curt and dry list of supposedly “golden rules.”  Nor were they understood as some kind of dogma, the fulfillment of which would bring rich rewards, and the violation of which would bring tragic consequences.  As the famed philosopher Martin Buber put it:

“One who rejects God is not struck down by lightning; one who elects God does not find hidden treasures. Everything seems to remain just as it was. Obviously, God does not wish to dispense either medals or prison sentences” [from Literarishce Welt, published in June 7, 1929, and “What Are We to Do About the Ten Commandments?” published in Israel and the World, p. 85]

Finally, and most importantly, nowhere in the “Old” Testament or in the entire Hebrew tradition are they called the “Ten Commandments.”  Rather, in the Hebrew they are always referred to as Asseret Ha’dib’rot, meaning literally: “ten of the resonances,” meaning ten important aphorisms out of all the hundreds of others recorded in the Torah.  They are also referred to as sh’nay lu’cho’t ha’b’rit, meaning literally: “two tablets of the covenant.”  In the classical Jewish mystical writ known as the Zohar, they are called the ten “suggestions” (Sefer Ha’Zohar, Vol. 2, folio 82b). 

The rendering of “commandment” typically originates in a mindset that was and remains unfamiliar with the Jewish vernacular and the ideology that birthed it. It is an interpretation chosen by those unfamiliar with Judaism who presume that the Hebrew Scriptures, or the “Old” Testament, is all about laws, commandments, mandates, burdens of which Paul—the founder of Christianity as we know it—claimed to have freed the followers of his newfound religion. Accordingly, Torah was and continues to be customarily translated as “The Law” when the word torah really translates as “Guide,” no differently than horah translates as Parent and morah as Teacher.  To the Jewish people, then, the Torah was never burdensome and in fact fostered in them a potent sense of freedom, which, in turn, has rendered them most prominent, in proportion to the world population, in struggles for civil liberties.  In fact, the very revelatory experience that birthed the Ten Commandments in the first place was preceded by the people’s expression of personal freedom, of personal choice (Exodus 19:8; see also 11^th-century Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki on Exodus 21:6).