What Are the Ten Commandments?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Law collections existed in the ancient Near East long before the biblical texts were written down. The best known is the Code of Hammurabi, a Babylonian collection from the eighteenth century BCE carved on a stone stele now in the Louvre. Most of its laws are written as cases: if a man does a certain thing, then a certain penalty follows. The ten commandments mostly take a different form, direct and unconditional orders such as you shall not steal, with no penalty attached. Scholars often call these two styles casuistic and apodictic law.

Physical evidence for the text itself is also interesting. Before the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, one of the oldest known Hebrew biblical manuscripts was the Nash Papyrus, a small fragment bought in Egypt and generally dated to around the second or first century BCE. It contains a version of the commandments followed by the Shema, a central Jewish prayer. The Dead Sea Scrolls later added several more copies, including some written on tiny scrolls once placed in tefillin, the small leather boxes worn during prayer.

The differences between Exodus and Deuteronomy are small in wording but interesting in meaning. The clearest is the sabbath commandment. In Exodus the reason given for resting on the seventh day is creation: God made the world in six days and rested on the seventh. In Deuteronomy the reason is history: the Israelites are told to remember that they were once slaves in Egypt, and the text stresses that servants must be allowed to rest as well as their masters. Exodus also opens the commandment with the word remember, while Deuteronomy opens it with observe.

Jewish tradition did not treat this as a contradiction. A rabbinic saying holds that remember and observe were spoken in a single utterance, and the line is sung each Friday evening in Lecha Dodi, the hymn that welcomes the sabbath. The final commandment differs too. Exodus forbids coveting a neighbour's house before a neighbour's wife, while Deuteronomy puts the wife first, uses a different verb for the house and adds a field to the list. That separate placing of the wife is one reason the Catholic and Lutheran numbering, which follows a division associated with Augustine, splits coveting into two commandments.

When Moses comes down from Mount Sinai with the second set of tablets, Exodus says the skin of his face shone, so brightly that the people were afraid to come near him. The Hebrew verb used, karan, is related to the noun keren, which usually means horn but can also suggest a ray of light. When Jerome translated the Bible into Latin around the turn of the fifth century, his version described Moses's face as horned. Jerome knew Hebrew well, and scholars still discuss whether he meant the word as a figure of glory rather than a literal description.

Whatever Jerome intended, the Latin wording shaped centuries of Western art. Medieval artists began showing Moses with two small horns or horn-like rays on his head, often while he holds the tablets of the commandments. The best known example is Michelangelo's marble Moses, carved for the tomb of Pope Julius II and now in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome, which has two short horns rising from his hair. The image is a useful reminder that the way a text is translated can affect how it is pictured long after the original wording has been forgotten.

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.