What Are the Ten Commandments?
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The ten commandments are a short set of laws given to Moses according to the Hebrew Bible, foundational to both Judaism and Christianity. Most people can name a few, fewer realise that different traditions divide the same text into ten in different ways.
Where they appear
They appear twice in the Hebrew Bible, in Exodus chapter twenty and again in Deuteronomy chapter five, with small differences between the two versions. In Jewish tradition they are known as the ten words or ten sayings.
The narrative context places them at Mount Sinai, given to Moses after the escape from Egypt as part of a covenant between God and the people of Israel. They are not the whole of biblical law, which contains hundreds of further commandments, but they function as a summary and a foundation.
What they cover
The commandments divide roughly into duties towards God and duties towards other people:
- •Worship one God alone and make no idols
- •Do not misuse the divine name
- •Keep the sabbath day
- •Honour your father and mother
- •Do not murder, commit adultery or steal
- •Do not give false testimony
- •Do not covet what belongs to your neighbour
Why the numbering differs
The text does not number itself, so traditions divide it differently while using the same words. Jewish tradition treats the opening statement of identity as the first saying. Catholic and Lutheran traditions combine the prohibitions on other gods and on idols, then split the final commandment on coveting into two.
Most Protestant and Orthodox traditions keep the idol prohibition separate and treat coveting as one. This is why an argument about the fourth commandment can involve people talking about entirely different lines.
How they are read
Within Judaism the ten commandments sit inside the wider body of Torah law rather than standing above it, and Jewish tradition counts a total of six hundred and thirteen commandments in the Torah.
Christian traditions have generally treated them as a summary of moral law with continuing force, while regarding much of the surrounding ritual legislation differently. That distinction has been debated within Christianity for centuries and is not settled.
Their wider influence
The commandments have had a significant influence on Western legal and moral vocabulary, though the relationship is often overstated. Prohibitions on murder, theft and false testimony appear in essentially every legal system, including ones with no contact with this tradition.
What is distinctive is not the content of those rules but the framing: a short, memorable list presented as a covenant. That format has proved unusually durable, and the phrase has become shorthand in general use for any short set of foundational rules.
Where the tablets went
According to the biblical account the commandments were inscribed on stone tablets, broken by Moses in anger, then recut and placed inside the Ark of the Covenant.
The Ark is described in detail and then largely disappears from the record after the destruction of the first temple in the sixth century BCE. There is no archaeological evidence for its fate, and the various traditions claiming to know its location, including one maintained in Ethiopia, cannot be independently verified. It is one of the more genuinely open questions in biblical archaeology, whatever adventure films suggest.
The takeaway
The ten commandments are a short covenant law code appearing twice in the Hebrew Bible, covering duties to God and to other people, and different traditions divide the identical text into ten in genuinely different ways.