PRESCRIPTIONS
What I love the most about the Ten Commandments is that those stone tablets, we are told, were the only time God (G-d, Elohim, Yahweh, El-Shaddai, Abba, Adonai, HaShem, The Light, G-dog – or whatever you prefer) Himself chose to communicate in writing. (It is so very unfortunate that He doesn’t paint, compose music, or code software and has been inflicted by writer’s block for the past few millennia.) Other than Creation itself, this is the only instance in which you, as a believer, can be confident that what you’re seeing is His direct word and handiwork.
Interestingly, those divinely inscribed Laws, those Tablets of Moses, appear in your Bible no less than four times, and in different form each time. The most famous and most curious of all tablet appearances is in Exodus. There the Lord of all things gives them – the most sacred document to have ever been produced, before or since – to Moses. In response, Moses, reasonable as ever, immediately takes them and smashes them into a million pieces. Later in Exodus, after Heaven’s management gets involved and has their crack team of engineers construct a whole new set, the tablets reappear, with edits. (Tablets 2.0) Edition three appears much later, at the end of the Pentateuch, in Deuteronomy, with Mount Sinai as the setting. There Moses presents the tablets to his posse, the Israelites. (This time the stone code contains curiously revised rules for the Sabbath; and with this upgrade, we now have Tablets 2.1, or something.) Then as Moses and crew approach the Jordan river the fourth and final version of the Commandments emerges. (See, this whole writing thing isn’t so easy. It’s nice to learn that even the all-powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing Divinity also needs to work through multiple drafts. But in His case, of course, He’s only working on something the size of a small shopping list...) And, as you know, since the Jordan river revisions the Holy Decalogue has undergone a great deal of additional editing, more or less depending on which version of which text from which sect you find yourself reading: King James, Greek Septuagint, Middle English, New World, etc… (All this inconsistency and confusion and we still haven’t even looked yet at the confounding content of the commandments themselves – the whole reason I started writing. These highest of ordinances could not be more strange if, instead of being written by the Creator, they’d been chiseled by a child. If nothing else, you’d think clarity would be of some priority for laws that are meant to hold fast for all time and across all cultures, creeds, and contexts. To get a sense of what I mean, and be specific let’s go for a very elementary stroll through the Ten Commandments, shall we? Yes, let’s.
To start with, commandments one and two appear, to my simple mind at least, to be essentially the same idea. “I am the LORD thy God.… Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” How do you read this? This suggest to me that, according to the author (God Himself), we don’t live in a monotheistic universe but instead in one full of other gods; and more than that, that these other gods may in fact be greater in power, influence, or ambition than He. (If this isn’t the wackiest possible way to initiate a monotheism I don’t know what is.) Further, His own wording here suggests, among other things, that He’s somewhat insecure – perhaps a touch jealous of these other “lesser” gods – and more than a little greedy too. No? How else could this possibly be interpreted? Just try to formulate a different reading of this text (the Lord’s own words, carved in stone no less.)
Commandment three is interesting, and even more redundant than the first two. It reads: “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.” I think we can all agree that this rather poorly written (and the construction appears pretty similar in Greek and Hebrew, as far as I can tell.) As a result this is one law that nobody can hope to understand. Go ahead, try. For example, as others must have pointed out over the eons, if you said something like “God only knows”, and you did so with the fullest and most honest intention to mean “who knows?” or “nobody knows”, did you just break one of God’s sacred laws? No mere mortal can say for sure. (It’s for this reason one needs a Pope or other scriptural interpreter with the cojones to roll the dice for you and ordain a clear definition you can safely align your life to.)
Commandment four reads: “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.” This seems simple but the whole rule is several lines long, and asserts that no child, slave, or mule should commit any act of work – or else! This is another curious law, one that appears to speak directly to a certain class and gender. It’s also one that Christians, almost universally, fail to observe while simultaneously managing to inconvenience everyone else with the stricture. (But it is not just lowly Christians who can’t stick to the sabbath: the Son of God even had trouble with this one and was forced to come up with a work-around in which the sabbath was said to be only for “acts of goodness.”) Adding to the randomness there are different reasons given for this day of rest. In Deuteronomy it’s stated that the sabbath is to be observed because God ended the enslavement of the Israelites, while Exodus tells us it’s because God got busy and finished his homework early so that he could take a day to just sit back and chill, and that the faithful should follow His holy lead. (This begs the question why Christians can’t have a day to relax for the sake of relaxation? I mean, they aren’t machines.)
Commandment five states: “Honor thy father and thy mother.” This seems simple and benign enough but is elaborated out in different versions to something like, “that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.” This makes the whole thing rather morally suspect, doesn’t it? It suggests you behave reasonably not because you wish to be a good person and have a sense of humanity and solidarity but on the grounds that you will personally benefit now and in the afterlife, and you do this because He is always watching. (This is one of those places, among many, where religion insists upon bad, complex, metaphysical reasons for doing good when even better earthly reasons are endemic and should be obvious.) Relatedly, as a moral creature yourself you may ask why, given this protection for adults, there’s not also a sacred sanction forbidding, or at least limiting or even frowning upon, the worst forms of child abuse? But you’re questions are answered when you learn where Heaven sits with respect to children as you read on in the Bible and come to gloomy ol’ Leviticus. There God actually insists we kill children who are merely rude to adults. (Dear God: see Commandment six.) And then, as a good Christian, you might be inclined to ignore the Pope and his vast army of vicious nuns and priests (child abusers and sex offenders), and their centuries-old program of doling our seemingly limitless volumes of physical and psychological trauma to the children of the world. You may even wish to congratulate them for disobeying God and showing such temperance.
Commandment six is that one everyone knows (except, perhaps, its author): “Thou shalt not kill.” Of course this is not, and cannot, be taken literally by anyone. In this English translation there gives no indication of what we’re talking about. Surely we must eat something, and even our friendly neighbourhood vegans will exterminate whole fields of carrots and kale in an afternoon. So again we’re left to interpret. But if we’re going to apply our lowly human intelligence to this phrase we still can’t take it very seriously at all, literally or otherwise. In the original Hebrew I’m told number six reads “Thou shalt do no murder.” So let me get this straight: God’s Law, as read out by Moses, says that it’s a violation to kill another person. Yet, immediately after smashing the first set of tablets in Exodus, Moses gathers his hommies and says:
Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor.
And then we’re told that, “the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.” (Did Moses read the tablets? At the very least it must appear to any reader of the Bible that Moses was a complete psychopath.) For another example, God clearly explains to the Israelites that:
When thou comest nigh unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it … And if it will make no peace with thee, but will make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege it: And when the LORD thy God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword: But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself; and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies, which the LORD thy God hath given thee.
Of course throughout every other part of the Bible – by way of His faithful actors Moses, Joshua, and Samuel – God personally promises the Israelites the land of the Midianites and Amalekites if only they will rape, enslave, and/or exterminate them first. And, throughout, God makes it clear that the Israelites are acting righteously, on his behalf, and that this is their destiny. (P.S. Murder is wrong. Cheers, God) Still within Deuteronomy, explicit directives from God exist, insisting we “shalt not suffer a witch to live.” Here is a direct order from God used for centuries as sole justification for countless acts of brutality and murder directed at women. (P.P.S. Murder = bad.) These are specific one-off examples but, if you look for them, there are many broad commandments for violence and murder throughout the “Good Book”.
Commandments seven and eight (“Thou shalt not commit adultery” and “Thou shalt not steal”) seem pretty straightforward and fair. (We may ask why, if it can be so simple, are the others so darned confusing?)Commandment nine on the other hand is another example of curious phraseology. What do you understand when you read “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour”? The word that stands out here for me is “against”. Use of this word prevents an otherwise clear interpretation. And as a result generations of Christians have been able to get away with thinking that belief in your neighbour’s innocence is permissive of some amount of lying, so long as it’s in their favour. Curious. No? Of course “thy neighbour” is confusing and problematic too. Lying is fine so long as it’s not against your own tribe? What? Why not simply “Thou shalt not lie?”
Commandment ten is about coveting– well, just about anything belonging to thy neighbour: his wife, manservant, ass, etc… Like the sabbath order, this commandment seems to be directed toward a certain class and sex. It appears that women are not only among the master’s property but ladies themselves are also incapable of coveting anything or, if they are, it is of so little consequence that it is not of concern to anyone. Perhaps even more worrying here is the rather terrifying suggestion that one is capable of thought crimes. Only the most ambitiously evil totalitarian regime goes so far as thought crime, and this commandment goes one further by ensuring that, simply by being human, you can’t help but fail in your duty. As noted by many before me, it’s only a very strange and wicked God that would create us broken and impure and then demand, by threat of violent eternal torment, that we right ourselves. Isn’t this something like a child catching a mosquito, pulling off its wings, and then demanding it fly, lest it be incinerated by his magnifying glass? Why yes, now that you mention it, yes it is.
How our grandparents or even their grandparents read these same Ten Commandments and concluded that it’s from here that we do, or should, or even could form the basis of our morality – and by extension our laws – I will never understand.
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