The
Ten Commandments: Really?
Republican voters in Alabama have nominated Roy Moore, twice deposed
former Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, as their candidate
to fill the vacancy in the United States Senate created when Jeff
Sessions became US Attorney General. He will face a Democratic
opponent in November; but Alabama hasn’t elected a Democratic US
senator in roughly forever, so it is a virtual certainty that Moore
will become Jeff Sessions’ replacement in the upper chamber of our
federal legislature. Moore first came to notoriety and was first
removed from the state supreme court because he refused to obey an
order from a federal court that he remove an installation featuring
the Ten Commandments from state property. Moore is but the latest
right wing Christian who has insisted that the Ten Commandments
should be displayed in courthouses all over the country. Displaying
them on public property is beyond any shadow of a doubt a violation
of the Anti-Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United
States Constitution. I certainly object to displaying them on public
property on those grounds, and I’ll come back to that objection at
the end of this piece. There is however another question about the
Ten Commandments. When we really understand what they are and what
they say (as opposed to what we may have been told that they are and
what they say or that we may want them to be or to say) it becomes
clear that they are hardly the infallible guide to moral behavior
that their advocates seem to think that they are. I want to share
here an analysis of some of the Ten Commandments (similar to the one
I included in my book Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided
Tour for Seeking Christians).
Perhaps if we better understand what the Ten Commandments are and
what they say we won’t even have to get to the constitutional
arguments before we will strongly oppose posting them in any
courthouse.
The Ten Commandments are found first
at Exodus 20:1-17.1
Exodus says that Moses has
been up on the mountain communing with God. He comes back down with
the law that the people’s god Yahweh has given him. He begins to
share that law with the people. Jewish tradition gives the total
number of laws that Moses got from Yahweh as 613. The Ten
Commandments are the first ten of those laws. To understand them we
must first of all understand them in their historical context. When
we do we see that some of the commandments don’t really say what we
think they say because we don’t read them carefully and others
don’t say what we think they say because words didn’t mean the
same thing in the commandments’ original context as they do today.
So let’s look at some of them and see what we can find.
The first of the Ten Commandments is
one of the most misunderstood. It reads: “I am the Lord
your God, you shall have no other gods before me.” Exodus
20:2-32
The way the word Lord
is
printed here tells us that the Hebrew original is the four letter
name of God that we usually transliterate as Yahweh. In the very
early stages of the Hebrew people’s understanding of God Yahweh was
their tribal war god. We see that understanding of Yahweh a little
bit earlier in Exodus in what we call Miriam’s Song. At Exodus
chapter 15 the people have just successfully escaped the pursuing
Egyptians through God’s trick of parting the Red Sea, then closing
it down on the Egyptian army. At Exodus 15:20-21
we read:
Then
the prophet Miriam, Aaron’s sister, took a tambourine in her hand;
and all the women went out after
her with tambourines and with dancing And Miriam sang to them:
‘Sing
to the Lord,
for he has
triumphed gloriously
horse and rider he has thrown
into the sea.’
In
these lines, which may be the oldest preserved bit of oral tradition
in the Bible, Yahweh, rendered here as “the Lord,”
is clearly a war god. He is the god who has fought the people’s
battle against the Egyptians and won
it.
He is not necessarily more than a war god here. In any event, he is
the god of the Hebrew people who has liberated them from Egypt by
drowning all of pharaoh’s soldiers.
Yahweh
as
the
god who freed the people from Egypt appears at the beginning of the
Ten Commandments too.
The
Ten Commandments
begin: “I am the Lord
your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house
of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.”3Christians
invariably take this commandment as
containing
a statement of strict monotheism. We read “you shall have no other
gods” as “there are no other gods,” and we pretty much overlook
the phrase “before me.” Yet this sentence clearly is not a
statement of monotheism. So far from denying the reality of gods
besides Yahweh it clearly assumes it. It doesn’t say “there are
no other gods.” It says “you,” that is, you Hebrews, shall have
no other gods before Yahweh. The text would hardly bother telling the
people not to have other gods if it assumed there were no other gods.
It would say there are no other gods, but it doesn’t. The first of
the Ten Commandments is a statement not of monotheism but of
henotheism. Henotheism is a belief about the gods that says there are
lots of gods. In fact, it accepts that every people has their own
gods and goddesses. Henotheism says not that there are no other gods
but that a particular people shall have only one god. Let the others
have their gods, it says; we have only one. In the case of the
Hebrews that one was Yahweh. Does Roy Moore or any other Christian
today want to put a statement of henotheism in their courthouses? I
assume not. They want to put the Ten Commandments in courthouses in
part because they erroneously assume that the first commandment is a
statement of monotheism. It isn’t.
We
run into another big problem with the Ten Commandments in the next
commandment, the prohibition of idolatry. At Exodus 20:4 we read that
the people shall not make for themselves an idol that looks like
anything on earth. The next verses,
Exodus 20:5-6,
read:
You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord
your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of
parents to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject
me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those
who love me and keep my commandments.
Does Roy Moore or anyone else believe that God punishes the children
of wrongdoers through three and four generations though the people of
those generations may have done nothing at all to offend God? I doubt
it. Even if an extremist like Moore does, surely most American
Christians and other Americans don’t. Does Roy Moore or anyone else
believe that God is unaffected by the sin of persons of subsequent
generations descended from a person who was faithful to God? I doubt
it. Even if an extremist like Moore does, surely most American
Christians don’t. The text of Exodus 20:5-6 expresses an ancient
understanding of generational responsibility for wrongdoing, an
understanding that the Bible itself reverses later on. See for
example Ezekiel 18:1-4. Does Moore or anyone else really want that
understanding on display in the local courthouse? I doubt it, for it
simply isn’t our contemporary understanding of how God works.
Now
let’s turn to Exodus 20:14: “You shall not commit adultery.”
Now, I think, or at least I like to think, that all Christians and
most other people believe that adultery is a bad thing (although of
course it is no longer illegal under our secular law). Yet there is a
hidden problem with the Ten Commandments’ prohibition of adultery.
The problem is that in the ancient Hebrew world
in
and for which the Ten Commandments were written adultery
didn’t mean what it means to most of us today. Today to commit
adultery is usually
understood as being having
sexual intercourse with anyone to whom one is not married. At the
very least it is a married person having sexual intercourse with a
person other than the person’s spouse. Both women and men can
commit adultery in our understanding of the term. In the ancient
Hebrew world adultery was understood much more narrowly. Adultery was
only the act of a man having sexual intercourse with a woman who was
married to another man. A sexual act was adultery only if the woman
were married to a man other than the one with whom she had sexual
intercourse. The reason for this understanding of adultery was clear
enough. It had nothing to do with sexual morality per se. It didn’t
even have to do with marital fidelity in anything like our sense of
that virtue. It had to do with property rights. A man could be sure
that a child born to his wife was really his child
only
if his wife never had intercourse with anyone but him. If she had sex
with another man a child born to her might not be her
husband’s
at all. If the child were not his, his family estate would pass to
someone not of his family, something
the ancient Hebrew world considered to be a great evil.
That’s what the Ten Commandments’ prohibition of adultery was
trying to prevent. That
certainly is not why we consider adultery to be immoral today, but it
is why the Ten Commandments consider adultery to be immoral.
The
last of the Ten Commandments also bears some consideration. It reads:
“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet
your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or
anything that belongs to your neighbor.” Certainly coveting things
that belong to your neighbor is a negative
thing. This commandment against
such coveting could
work to reduce tensions and hostility within a community. But look at
one thing that this commandment takes for granted. It says you shall
not covet your neighbor’s “male or female slave.” The Ten
Commandments take the existence and acceptability of slavery for
granted. Indeed, nowhere does the Bible condemn slavery other than
the slavery of the Hebrew people in Egypt. In this day and age we all
(or nearly all) see slavery as an abomination, as profoundly unjust
and immoral. Today we see the earlier existence of slavery in our
country as something of which to be ashamed. Some of us think it is
something for which we should still make reparations to the
descendants of the slaves. In today’s America, where we generally
reject slavery but in which racism and white supremacy are still very
much with us, do we want to put an ancient document that takes
slavery for granted up in our courthouses? I trust not. I sure don’t.
It
is clear then
I think that one problem with the Ten Commandments is that we often
misunderstand them because they were written in and for a culture so
different from ours. Yet even if we assume that most of the people
who saw the Ten Commandments displayed in a courthouse wouldn’t
understand that reality about them, putting them up in public,
governmental structures is still quite obviously illegal. Roy Moore
refused to recognize that truth when a federal court told him to take
them down from the Alabama Supreme Court building. Yet the federal
court that ordered him to so was clearly legally correct. Putting the
Ten Commandments up in a courthouse is illegal first of all because a
courthouse is a governmental structure. The courts are part of our
system of government. They are operated for the benefit of all
Americans by institutions that belong to all Americans. Because
courthouses are governmental installations, the First Amendment of
the United States Constitution applies to them. The First Amendment
has within it what we call the “Anti-Establishment
Clause.” It reads: “Congress shall make no law regarding the
establishment of religion.” That provision of the First Amendment
applies to the states through the operation of the Fourteenth
Amendment. Now admittedly, the Anti-Establishment Clause doesn’t
seem to say much. Yet all Constitutional provisions become effective
and gain their meaning from the ways the federal courts interpret and
apply
them. The federal courts have long held that the Anti-Establishment
Clause means that no governmental agency may do anything that
privileges one religion over another or that privileges religion over
non-religion. So the only way that the First Amendment would not
prohibit displaying the Ten Commandments in a courthouse would be if
the Ten Commandments were not a religious document.
Yet
of course the Ten Commandments are
a religious document. They come from two of the books of Hebrew
scripture that are part of the Torah, the most sacred texts of
Judaism. Because long ago Christianity adopted Hebrew scripture as
Christian scripture, they are also part of the sacred texts of the
Christian religion. They appear nowhere except in the parts of the
Bible that are sacred to both Christians and Jews. For many of us
that means that we must treat them with great respect and
deference,
and I trust that I do even
though I don’t accept all of them as still valid.
It also means, however, that the Ten Commandments are undeniably a
religious text. That the notions they express are shared by many of
the world’s other religious traditions besides Judaism and
Christianity is beside the point. Similar passages that might be
found, say, in the Koran would also be religious texts. It would be
illegal to post them in a courthouse too. Even putting up similar
texts from several different faith traditions would not solve the
problem, for those text too would be religious texts. The Ten
Commandments are religious in their very nature. They come from
sacred scripture. They talk about God. There simply is no way that
putting them up in a courthouse could comply with the First Amendment
of the US Constitution or with similar provisions in many state
constitutions.
I
could object to the idea that morality consists only of obeying the
Ten Commandments on other grounds as well, but I trust the point is
made. The
Ten Commandments are not the pure statement of good morals that
people like Roy Moore take them to be. Putting them up in any public
facility violates the First Amendment of the US Constitution. So
let’s be done with this nonsense about putting them in courthouses,
shall we? And let’s be done with people like Roy Moore who refuse
to recognize the obvious truth that putting them up there is illegal.
Let’s be done with people like Roy Moore who claim to be state
court judges, who take an oath of office as a state court judge, then
refuse to obey directives from a federal court on a matter of federal
law. Moore didn’t deserve to serve on the Alabama State Supreme
Court. He doesn’t deserve to serve in the US Senate either.
1They
appear in virtually the same form again at Deuteronomy 5:1-22. The
differences between the two versions of the Ten Commandments are not
significant for our purposes.
2The
scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised
Standard Version bible, copyright (c) 1989 by the Division of
Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in
the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
3Exodus
20:2-3
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