Jeremy Rosen
Making Sense of the Bible: Can its Ancient Text be Relevant Today? Deuteronomy 5, How Many Sets of Ten Commandments?

Jeremy Rosen | Making Sense of the Bible: Can its Ancient Text be Relevant Today? Deuteronomy 5 | 07.03.24

Visuals displayed throughout the presentation.

- We now come to more serious subjects, chapter five of Deuteronomy, which to just recap is in fact Moses’s recap of the 40 years of wandering in the desert and reiterating the legal, moral, and spiritual message that they’ve been trying to teach everybody during this 40-year period to give them the sense of identity in order to cope with the transition into Canaan and a new life. So I’m going to start with verse one of chapter five. “Moses calls Israel together, and he says to them, ‘Listen, Israel, to these laws, which I am speaking into your ears, and you should study them, and you should adhere to them, to carry them out.’” So this is something practical, “I’m telling you,” says Moses, “I want you to do.” And the basis of this is verse two, “Our God made a treaty with us, a covenant with us that you agree to in Horeb,” at this place, which may be Mount Sinai, maybe not Mount Sinai, but it is here called Horeb. Horeb also has a root actually, a negative root, is to destroy.

In other words, you can misuse laws to be destructive as well as positive. Verse three, “God didn’t just make this agreement with the people who went before us,” whether it’s Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the first generation, but , “but with us.” “Those of us who are here today 40 years after the Exodus, we’re still alive despite everything we have gone through.” And in verse four, a very important statement, “Face-to-face, God spoke to you, on the mountain from the fire.” Now, this is an important statement, because we have previously said God spoke to Moses face-to-face. And not only that, but when there was a rebellion, if you remember in Numbers, in which Miriam and Aaron objected to certain things that Moses was doing, God’s reply was, “You shouldn’t challenge him, because although I have spoken to others, it’s specifically with him I spoke face-to-face, and the rest of you might not have had that same status.” And yet here in Deuteronomy, we have Moses saying that face-to-face, God spoke to everybody.

Now, you might say this is simply Moses is using his own terminology, but also it underlines the fact that there is constant fluidity, constant fluidity in the narrative, and constant fluidity in the way things are repeated in slightly different ways each time. But now in verse five, Moses suddenly decides, “Oh no, I shouldn’t have said that, I got to clarify.” “The fact is that I was an intervention. I stood between you and God in order to transmit to you, to tell you the words of God. Because you were frightened of the fire and of what was going on on the mountain, and you didn’t go up the mountain. And therefore I am now telling you what I heard up on the mountain,” and what consists of what we now call the 10 Commandments. And it seems that these first of all are not commandments as such, otherwise they’d be , the 10 commands, and they’re not. They’re called the 10 statements, verbal statements or statements, but they are not specifically framed in the form of a command. And perhaps the most important evidence of this is in the opening statement in verse six of chapter five of Deuteronomy, “I am the Lord your God who took you out of the land of Egypt from the house of slavery.”

Notice it does not say, “You must believe that I am the Lord your God.” You can’t command people to believe. And so this is not, if you like, a theological command, but it’s a fundamental statement that says there is a God. We don’t know how to describe the God in any physical way that makes sense, and so in fact, we use metaphors all the time. But there is a God, and that God in a sense engaged with you through the exodus of Egypt, through taking you out of slavery. Now, although history is, if you like, a very modern term, and very often it’s misused, we call it his story sometimes. And as it’s often been said, there is no such thing as history objectively, there are merely historians, people recording events as they see them. And people very often see events very, very differently. So what this is asserting is the idea of tradition, the idea that we have a tradition, and this tradition has as its core the idea of a non-physical spiritual force, and that this should take priority over everything else. The second verse, seven says, “You should not have any other gods before me.”

It doesn’t say there are no other gods, because indeed we all make gods for ourselves. If we understand God as being the most important thing in our lives. Some of us make ambition the most important things in our lives. Some of us make power. And these priorities very often override ethical obligations and spiritual obligations. So first of all, there are gods that other people worship, and they are entitled to worship them. That’s their business if they choose to do so. Verse eight, “You should not make any image.” Is an idol, but it is something that is created. “No pictures of anything in the heavens above, or in the earth down below, or in the water underneath the earth. Don’t make any images.” Nine, “Don’t bow down to them, and don’t serve them, because I am the Lord your God.” Now, what does mean? In some translations, it is “I am a jealous God.” Jealous and zealous are two different words. Jealous is something that I as a human feel towards other people who have something that I don’t have. Zealous means I care passionately about something.

So God cares passionately. But there is another way of understanding the word . Can also mean consequence. There are consequences. And it’s important in understanding that when we come to this next statement, which says, “I visit.” Doesn’t say I pay back, it says, “I visit the sins of the fathers on sons down to the third and fourth generation, if it’s people who hate me or reject me.” In other words, if my value system, if the commands, the ideas that I’m talking about here are betrayed, the impact of that lasts into further generations. Just as very often, if I’m brought up in a criminal family, the chances are that’s going to affect me and even my children, that there are consequences to how we are brought up, what our parents teach us, and what society teaches us. So on the one hand, what God is saying is, “If you reject me, and that will be your right, and many of you will, then you will have consequences both in terms of alienating yourself from the Jewish people, and indeed also for creating,” if you like, “negative vibrations into future generations.”

But conversely, in verse 50, verse 10, rather, “Being kind to thousands, to those who love me and those who keep my commandments.” And notice this third word. We had the word before, and now we have . All these variant terms that reflect the different ways in which laws, commandments, ideas, influences affect us. So here we have what we, if you like, two statements, or necessarily it’s difficult to talk about how many commandments there are, is each one of these a different commandment, not making an image, not bowing down, not serving. All of these could in a sense be a commandment, but they are generally considered to fall under the category of, to positively accepting the idea of God, and to rejecting the idea of another God, some other force.

And then verse 10, verse 11, “Don’t take, carry the word of God in vain.” Once again, this term , God will not accept without consequences taking his name in vain. Now, this seems to us in the modern world in which we live, where language is so fluid and usages are so varied, we all seem to take God’s name in vain all the time. Whether we say and we are wanting something but we’re not certain what it is that we want, or whether in the parlance of our society we swear by God, but we know we’re not going to take it very seriously. In those days, the idea of treating your God with absolute respect and awe was universal whether you were a pagan or not. And this idea of God’s name in vain was for thousands of years regarded as the touchstone of honesty. And our legal system was always based on swearing in the name of God that one was going to tell the truth. And as we know, nowadays, people do that all the time. They swear or they affirm whatever it is that we know jolly well they’re not going to tell the truth.

But in those days, taking God’s name was so serious that it was a primary tool in the judicial system to make sure that people would be honest in the absence of any evidence to the contrary. So this third statement of “don’t take God’s name in vain” is absolutely crucial. Now, these three statements, these three ideas that are mentioned here in chapter five of Deuteronomy were mentioned before in chapter 19 of Exodus, the first time that the 10 Commandments were mentioned. If you want to go back and check the text, sorry, I just clicked the wrong button again with my, if you want to check the actual text, you need to go back to Exodus chapter 20. And you’ll find in Exodus chapter 20 that the part that we’ve just read is repeated there exactly in the same way that is repeated here. So this first section is absolutely the same in both versions. This is not going to happen to the rest of the so-called 10 Commandments. And so this is a fascinating problem.

We’re going to see variations in each one of the other commandments. In other words, the text of Deuteronomy here is different to the text of Exodus. And the big question of course is why. If we’re talking about Moses at the end of 40 years repeating something that was told to him 40 years earlier, it might not be surprising if he gets a word wrong here or there, or doesn’t exactly remember. And the question of course of what was written on stone, where was that stone? If it was identical, the first version, the broken version, then that should have been pretty clear. Unless the stone merely had symbols, in which case the symbols might not have been as clear and might have required interpretation. So we have these, if you like, modern intellectual challenges, and there are answers that we’re going to look at in the course of the comparison of the rest of these so-called 10 Commandments. It’d be very interesting to know how these are going to appear in the states where they have to display the 10 Commandments.

Are they going to display them with one, two, three, four, five on one tablet, one , two, three, four, five on the other? Or are they going to display the text? And if they’re going to display the text, which text are they going to display? Are they going to display the version of Exodus? Are they going to display the version of Deuteronomy? Are they going to take the King James V Bible version, or any of the other versions that have proliferated over the last hundred years? So that’s an interesting question. We’re not going to have an easy answer to it. But anyway, in the first part, these are absolutely identical. Then we come to the next statement. And the next statement is verse 12. Verse 12 says , literally, “Keep, observe the Shabbat day to make it holy.” To make it holy means to make it different, to make it a special day devoted to spirituality. And then it goes on to say , “As God commanded you.” But if you go back to Exodus, and you look at Exodus verse eight of chapter 20, you will see it says , “Remember,” not , “to keep it holy, to sanctify it.”

But it doesn’t say anything about the other half of the sentence, which says , “As God has commanded you.” So clearly Moses is referring back to the previous version of the 10 Commandments when they were given on Sinai. Then goes on to say , “For six days, you should serve, and do all the work that needs to be done. And on the seventh day,” verse 14, “is the Shabbat to your God. You should not do any work. You, your son, your daughter, your servant, your maid servant, your ox, your ass, any one of your animals, and the stranger, or the visitor, or the other person, who happens to be staying in your territory.” In your territory, that person shouldn’t be working. In other words, it’s a national day of rest, whether citizens or not. “In order that your servant and your maid servant should rest like you.” The version in Exodus is very different. If we go back to Exodus, it starts off the same way. It says . It doesn’t say as it does here, but in Exodus it says , and so has been taken out.

It says in Exodus, “Do all your work. And on the seventh day, it is Shabbat of Lord your God. You should not do any work.” And here it goes like this, “You, and your son, and your daughter.” So mentioned exactly the same. Then it goes on to say, “Your maid servant,” sorry, “Your male servant and your female servant, and your animals.” But it doesn’t say anything about which animals they’re going to be. It doesn’t say anything about . It doesn’t say that. And it doesn’t say anything about . It goes on to say in Exodus, sorry, I jumped, “Six days, God made, and rested on the seventh day. That’s why God blessed.” I’m sorry, I mis-said that the Exodus version missed out the . No, it didn’t miss it out, it did say it, but it didn’t mention the animals. So it’s this addition of the animals that we have here. And the question again is, is this simply Moses in the second version clarifying what was in the first version because it wasn’t clear? That’s a certain possibility.

And yet nevertheless, it is strange that if he’s saying you have been commanded, you would’ve thought he’d want to identify with the original commandment. But then we have another problem. The other problem is that here in this text, if we go on to verse 15, it says , “And you should remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and God took you out of there with a strong hand, with an outstretched arm. Therefore, God has commanded you to keep the Shabbat.” Now, if you look at Exodus, Exodus gives a totally different reason for keeping the Shabbat. If you look at chapter 11 of Exodus, it says, after having said “you, your maid servant, your animals, your slaves,” says , “Because in six days, God made the heavens and the earth, the sea with everything in it, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore, God blessed the seventh day and made it holy.”

This is totally different. The two versions are completely different. In the first Exodus version, it is coming to focus on as genesis, as , that God so to speak rested on the seventh day. And it puts all the emphasis on God. But when it comes here to Deuteronomy 40 years after the 10 Commandments, we have a reference to slavery in Egypt. Now, it seems to me that in fact, you can say that these both amount to the same thing. That is to say the previous idea of slavery, the idea, sorry, of creation is to say that there is a material world, a physical world, and then there is a spiritual world. And the spiritual world is a very different kind of experience to the physical world. And it’s important for human beings to have these two dimensions, in addition to all other dimensions that they’re supposed to have. Now, that assertion is an assertion of the primacy of making choices and choosing to worship God rather than society, rather than worshipping other people. Similarly, the idea of slavery is that as a slave, you are subject to others. You have no freedom. You have limited choices. When you come out of slavery, you have a degree of freedom.

The freedom to make choices, and the challenge to make choices. And therefore, both of them amount to the same thing. That is to say, it is up to us to decide what kind of lives we want to live. Are they only going to be physical material lives, or will they also be spiritual lives as well? And so they’ve been framed in a different way. And in one sense it makes sense that the phrasing is different in this later stage, because this whole speech is now focused on having coming out of Egypt and coming into another country, we have to raise the question of, how are we going to live in this other country? And in this country, we’re going to need to have fair laws for everybody. And fair laws for everybody means recognising all human beings as having equality under the law and in the law. And because of this, when you’re going to move into this land, and you will be in charge, you will have the option of enslaving, but you will also have the option of giving freedom to people who want to join you. And of course the qualification is that those people will want to live according to your lifestyle and accept your lifestyle.

And a similar, if you like, combination of ideas is in the fact that in the first version, it says that “you shall remember.” Whereas in the second one, it says in verse 12, “Keep the Shabbat.” One is theoretical, the other is practical. We need the theory, we need the constitution, but we also need the practise, the activity, the doing something. And the two go together. It’s interesting that I’m sure some of you know that on Friday evening when we sing “Lekha Dodi,” the song that was introduced by the Kabbalists in Tzfat in the 16th century, before we start the evening service, we have this song “Lekha Dodi.” And in “Lekha Dodi,” we have a phrase. And the phrase goes . The word and the word was said simultaneously. God made us hear those two as if one. Now, this is a much later and a poetic expression of how the rabbis dealt with the contradiction between and by saying that in effect, they are saying the same thing in different words, and therefore have to be regarded as a whole. And that was the attitude of the rabbis to these differences in the wording of the Shabbat, and in the wording of the other commandments we’re going to come to, that because language is limited, you can’t always say what you want to say in the words you use.

You need to come back and clarify and add a different dimension. So that, if you like, is the official response of rabbinic Judaism. But of course we can look at it from lots of different ways too. So having dealt now with the Shabbat, we then come on to the next verse, the next one. All the preceding statements are statements to do with our relationship with God. Now we come to a relationship with human beings, with our parents. Very often people like to say that the first five of the 10 are between man and God or human beings and God, and the last five are all to do with humans and humans. But this one, “Honour your father and your mother,” falls under the divine section. And once again, it goes like this, “Honour, respect your father and your mother.” And again, as in English, honour has different, multiple meanings, and therefore respect is an important one, validates all kinds of different ways. So is a generic term, but covers lots of different words and ideas. And laws, in fact. What constitutes honouring your parents? What are your obligations?

So here, again, it’s a general statement rather than an actual law. Says, “Honour your father and your mother, as God has already commanded you,” a reference back to the 10 Commandments. So we’ve got the 10 Commandments. So I’m consciously clarifying something. “In order that you should have long life.” But not everybody has long life. “In order that God will be good to you.” But people respect and honour their parents, and often it isn’t good for them. “On the earth, which God gives you. And again, if you go back to the Exodus version, and you’ll see it says once again, "In all that you should have long life, on the earth that God gives to you,” but says nothing about , about being good. So this was a clarification. But again, the question rises every time God says something, and gives a command and says everything’s going to be good. And yet we know in practise, we can’t often rely on that. Things don’t always work out as being so good. How do we make sense of it? One way of making sense of it is to say that this is and was at the time the norm of style of all leadership, of all authority of all kings.

They always came to power as politicians nowadays saying, “We promise you we’re going to give you this, that, and the other. The economy’s going to be good, social welfare’s going to be good, everything’s going to be good, and we’re going to take care of you. Just give us our vote.” That’s what everybody says and has always said over time. So in a way, it’s a kind of a generic term that we know isn’t actually going to work out in theory, but it’s a nice idea of what ideally should happen. That would be one way of dealing with it. Another way of dealing with it is to say this. All these statements are statements about not the individual, not what you personally, but what the nation or the people are going to experience. And so you might say that these statements indicate that for the people, for the nation to survive and do well, it needs to have a decent constitution. But you could also go further, and you could also say that for humanity to thrive, the idea of family is crucial. And many people, many societies either downgrade the value of family, or alternatively don’t see how significant it is, because very often families fail and families do more harm than they do good. But in general, the idea of family is a great idea.

So these are general terms of the importance of family. The fact that this is mentioned within the context of the God section also makes a point. It makes a point that in a sense, parents are the agents of God and have responsibility. Parents could say, you know, “I didn’t want to have a child, it came by accident. I don’t care about, it’s not my responsibility. Let somebody else take care of it.” And yet this idea of saying no, parents have a responsibility of, in a sense, representing God on earth, of carrying out God’s requirement to protect their children and to look after them. So this is another way of understanding specifically what this commandment means and the different aspects of it. And now we come to 17 and the famous ones, “Don’t murder, don’t,” it’s translated as adultery, but it means sexual impropriety, betrayal, “don’t steal, and don’t bear false witness against your neighbour.” And this is not exactly the same as the 10 Commandments in Exodus, because although the 10 Commandments in Exodus says , “Do not murder,” the next one is , “do not betray sexually, and do not steal.”

But in this version, there’s a little which says, “And do not commit adultery.” Which is interesting, ‘cause in the English translation, in the Sefaria, it doesn’t have and. And once again, “And do not steal,” which once again describes the difference between the two versions. And the betrayal of the translation here, which is not true to the Hebrew text. Now, they mean the same thing. But when you add and, it implies there are other aspects to this. It’s not just face value. Because anyway, at face value, do not kill is not necessarily the same thing as don’t kill. Actually means murder. So therefore going to warfare, in which you are going to kill somebody does not come under the category of , which is a very important issue from the point of view of warfare of self-defense and other reasons. And , and not committing, as it says, adultery, which is not the right translation, it applies to lots of other sexual things like, if you like, what’s the term for, I’m having one of my nice blanks today, for when you have sexual intercourse with a member of your own family. This has a separate term in English that we apply to it, but we don’t have it in Hebrew.

In Hebrew, this term applies to every kind of sexuality, including incest. But we don’t have a technical term for incest. And to steal, there are lots of ways of stealing, directly, indirectly, and they’re going to be clarified. And then once again, there is another strange addition in which it says in the original, in the Exodus . Is to lie, very clearly. But here it says , a pointless, and false is a term that’s used, false witness. But the Exodus version is lying witness. And again, these are all clarifications. And once again, it goes on to say in Exodus, “Don’t desire the wife of your neighbour.” And here it says the, again, the wife. And not only that, it goes on then to say, “And don’t desire,” another word similar to , but a different word. Is to take steps to remove something. “The house of your neighbour, his field, his servant, his maid servant, his ass and his donkey, and everything that belongs to your neighbour.” And the question is, what does this word mean, and how is it different from ? And the rabbis explain that is not just an abstract idea of envying somebody, it’s rather taking steps to remove somebody. Taking steps to alienate a wife in order to have her, or to destroy the relationship for some other reason.

So you’ve added a different term here, because in Exodus it says , and then it says . Whereas it originally says . It puts the house first. So here he has switched the house and the wife, and put the wife first, because one might have thought that the priority was slightly skewed in the earlier version. And therefore we conclude with a clear indication that the version of the 10 Commandments in Exodus and the version of the 10 Commandments in Deuteronomy are in effect slightly different texts, even though in principle, they are saying exactly the same thing but in a different way. And as I said at the beginning, one way of understanding this is that over 40 years, Moses is, if you like, not remembering exactly or using different words. But is he using different words accidentally? Or is he using words intentionally in order to clarify precisely more those things that the first version might not have stated? Because you can’t state two things simultaneously, although you can certainly add, and this is an example of addition.

So here we will conclude for the day the text that we’re struggling with.

Q&A and Comments

Q: And Susan asks, first question, Deuteronomy 5:1, faithfully in the English, is it in the Hebrew? A: So what we said faithfully in the first verse, in the Hebrew simply says . And he said, you should listen to these things. And he says, in addition to teaching them, “You should adhere to them in order to do them,” but it doesn’t say the word faithfully. Faithfully is . That would be faithfully. So you are quite right, Susan, to point out that the English, again, is not an accurate translation of the Hebrew.

Q: Romaine says, loving the versus, the loving versus the punitive seems in operation. Is there a pattern? A: There is a pattern. There is a pattern all the time of an alliance of two terms. There’s an alliance of the word love, which occurs throughout the Torah all the time, and it’s one of the myths that says that the Bible is a Torah of commandment and fear and anger. Love is the important emotion, and it’s behind the relationship with God and the relationship with our laws and our commandments. But at the same time, there is , and is a matter of, if you like, but it’s respect, but it can be translated as fear, but it rather means taking a much more responsible and legislative approach to things. So the emotional, the love, and the legislative, the , are running parallel through. In other words, just as with parents, they want to love us and discipline us, and we struggle against it. Marty says, doesn’t say anything about the wife. Well, it comes to the wife later, but there is a change in order of whether the wife is mentioned, or whether the house is mentioned first, or with regard to the work on Shabbat. So there are text here in which those words juxtapose to indicate the interchangeability.

Q: Israel, is it possible that the two versions represent a maturation and growth of the Jewish people as they move from being moved and impressed by God’s miracles and having everything done for them, to the beginning of the realisation that the Bani Israel have to assume responsibility for their own spiritual growth? Is it possible that the 40 years following the mistake of the spies that there was a spiritual movement to their working to create their own meaningful spiritual reality? A: I think that is extremely well put, Israel, and I agree with you that there is, the whole point of the 40 years was to, if you like, achieve maturity from the initial statements of the 10 Commandments. We follow almost immediately onto the golden calf, so that we see that the relationship with the giving of the law and its seeping down to the masses takes time. And it’s got to take time for anybody to achieve anything in growth, personal growth. So I think this is indeed very much a matter of national development, and so that the changes that Moses adds to the text reflect that process of development.

Rita, incest is the word I was looking for. It was, Rita, thank you. I had one of these 80-year-old blackouts, and I just couldn’t get the word out even though I knew what it was. In Hebrew, Mira points out, we have the word . That is correct. Comes from the word . Means in a sense, to uncover something or to, sorry, is to uncover, and is an interesting term. Essentially means any kind of behaviour that is inappropriate, that it is wrong. That has taken us off the right path. And so these words are often used interchangeably. And similarly, the words that are used in the text of Vayikra, Leviticus, and in Numbers, and in Devarim to describe sexual immorality, interchange a whole lot of different words of negativity, which we apply to doing something that we don’t approve of. Interestingly, there’s the word , an abomination. There’s the word , a word which is something horrible, horrific that are used. But also ironically, there’s the word , which normally means kindness, but it is used in Leviticus to describe sexual misbehaviour. And it’s very strange, because meaning kindness might indicate that sometimes sexual behaviour may come out of trying to be kind to somebody, or trying to do something that you think will make them feel better. But you’re quite right to point out that the general term that is used both in the Torah and in rabbinic literature for general sexual behaviour is to uncover something. You should cover, there should be standards, not in private, but certainly in public.

Thank you, Clara, and you, Rita, and Romaine. And thank you everybody for listening. And I look forward to continuing with you next week.