"The Ten Commandments"

A Cranky Rant about the New Louisiana Law

When I was five or six years old, I liked to go to Sunday School at the big brick Southern Baptist church across the street from our house. My family wasn’t really part of the churchgoing crowd, but I was always powerfully drawn to it (go figure), so I would show up on Sunday mornings for Sunday School and Wednesday nights for Mission Friends and Monday afternoons for children’s choir rehearsals. I remember one Sunday morning we were in the middle of a lesson in Sunday School, and I was dutifully reading along in the Bible they provided me. As a precocious reader with a thing for religion, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing: a whole book full of religious stuff. The teacher, who I loved, taught us how to get to different books of the Bible and look up particular verses. As an example, she sent us to Exodus 20, the Ten Commandments. I started reading. When I got to Exodus 20:14, my hand shot up.

Yes, do you have a question, the teacher asked me.

With all the seriousness of a kid who really wants to know something, I asked, What’s adultery?

Reader, the teacher would not tell me. She fumbled for her words, said something about getting into that when I was in an older Sunday School class, and changed the subject. But I really wanted to know what adultery was, since I was very clearly not supposed to commit it. So I went home and looked it up in my Webster’s Dictionary anyway.

That is all the argument you need to know that the recent law signed into effect in Louisiana is a bad idea. The law requires every public school classroom in the state to display a copy of the Ten Commandments, and that means that tens of thousands of first graders are going to be asking their teachers to please explain exactly what adultery means, or why someone might covet their neighbor’s wife. It’s such a baldly stupid idea that it’s hard to believe that this new Louisiana law is not the first time it has been tried. In fact, we have been living through a bit of a recession in Ten Commandments idiocy these past few years, after a spate of efforts to get them posted all kinds of places in the early 2000s—schools and courthouses and jails and so forth. It seems like all it would take is five seconds of thinking about what exactly you would like a kindergarten teacher to say to a kid who asks the same question I asked at that age, and you would conclude that posting the Ten Commandments in schools is a terrible idea.

But this isn’t a Substack dedicated to early childhood education pedagogy, so I thought I would chime in about something Bible-related. Here it is: there is no such thing as “the Ten Commandments.”

The thing we call “the Ten Commandments,” the thing they presumably want to post in Louisiana classrooms on laminated paper that’s cut out to look like stone tablets or something, is a modern invention. It’s a biblical-literalist fantasy. You won’t find it in your Bible.

The version those legislators have in mind is abbreviated, for one thing; check out this chintzy Amazon version you can buy for eight dollars to see what I mean. (It’s a refrigerator magnet, not a poster, but you get the idea). That Amazon version has 70 words; the text of Exodus 20:2-17 in the NRSV has 310. This isn’t just pedantry on my part (although it might be partly pedantry); the missing material provides rationale, history, context, specifics, and not a small amount of elegance. In Exodus 20, the thing we call “the Ten Commandments” fills an absolutely pivotal moment in the life of ancient Israel. It is a singular instance of divine and human connection and understanding, when the God of Israel set the terms of an enduring covenant. The words of that covenant matter. If we take only the first commandment, which is shortened to “thou shalt have no other gods before me” on the Amazon version, and compare it to the NRSV translation of Exodus 20:2, you’ll see that it omits arguably some of the most critical words of the whole thing: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” This is the warrant for the whole thing, a salvation history wrapped up neatly, a succinct expression of both audience and purpose. And this Amazon version—and I assume the version posted in every Louisiana classroom—just deletes it. “The Ten Commandments” were never meant to be ten commandments; they were meant to be the heart of an understanding of history and salvation for a persecuted people.

We could do a similar exercise for every other part of Exodus 20:2-17, showing how the editing has obliterated the meaning. But that’s not even the most egregious thing. The most egregious thing about “the Ten Commandments” is how it flattens what is a multi-sided tradition into one ahistorical caricature. There isn’t a “Ten Commandments” in your Bible; there are three “Ten Commandments.” Exodus 20:2-17 is one of them, but there’s also Deuteronomy 5:4-21, which presents much the same material, but with different emphases. And then there’s Exodus 34:11-26, which is a markedly different version, often described as a liturgical or ritual decalogue. (“Decalogue” means “ten words,” and it’s the way scholars refer to the material that’s popularly called “the Ten Commandments”).

Sometimes the repetition of “the Ten Commandments” in three different places in the Hebrew Bible has drawn mockery, as if the Bible’s authors and editors couldn’t get it right, or couldn’t decide which version was the right one. But that’s a criticism of people like the Louisiana legislators who dreamed up this law, not a criticism of the Bible. It’s a criticism thought up by people who get their Bible from laminated posters. It shouldn’t be surprising or scandalous that the Bible covers the same material a few times. The Bible does this all the time; it preserves multiple versions of the same thing constantly, and it’s a feature, not a bug. Multiple versions of the same thing is only a problem if you think that the point of the Bible is to be an internally consistent index for all truth, reducible to poster format, giving unimpeachable answers to every question once and only ever once. Of course, that is nonsense. The Bible is not that kind of a book, and it doesn’t even want to be that kind of a book, and it definitely doesn’t want to be a poster. The only people who think of the Bible that way are wannabe biblical literalists and their secular opponents, who are very much alike in missing the point. The Hebrew Bible preserves three decalogues (and hundreds of other laws) because it is a collection of diverse traditions from many different times, places, and authors. It’s not a compendium of knowledge, edited into sterility. It’s a scrapbook.

The people who wrote this Louisiana law don’t understand that, and in my opinion they don’t really understand the Bible. (Neither do I, for what it’s worth; I don’t think it’s something that’s especially understandable in its whole). They have this notion that by taking a few sections of a rich and varied thousands-of-pages book, and then editing those few sections together so that they say far less than they used to say, and then printing those seventy words and laminating them and stapling them to a bulletin board, they will somehow create ethical children. That’s not how the Bible works, and I don’t think that’s how children work either, though that’s not my area of specialization. And all that is simply leaving aside the egregious violation of the separation of church and state that this law represents. Don’t forget—the mixture of church and state is always at least as bad for the church as it is for the state.

Anyway, there’s a part of me that can’t believe that we’re still talking about this, in 2024. Once upon a time I would have been excited to see this case land at the Supreme Court and get defeated in a lopsided decision as an obvious violation of basic principles of American law. But these days, who knows. The law might very well stand, and if it does, it will be adopted elsewhere. If and when that happens, our understanding of the Bible will be the worse for it, and I don’t think a bunch of kids will suddenly be more holy because their classroom has “the Ten Commandments” in it. But they will, for sure, be finding out from their kindergarten teacher what adultery is.