The Ten Commandments

Jews and Christians affirm the Ten Commandments (the Decalogue) as a foundational summary of divine moral law, given to Moses at Sinai and recorded in two versions (Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5). They open with the claims of God (worship of one God, no idols, reverence for the divine name, the Sabbath), and turn to duties among people: honouring parents, and prohibitions of murder, adultery, theft, false witness, and covetousness. Both traditions receive them as words spoken by God and inscribed on tablets of stone.

Modern historical-critical scholarship has drawn attention to a third, less familiar version of commandments at Exodus 34:14-26, a list of primarily ritual and cultic instructions that the nineteenth-century biblical critic Julius Wellhausen argued was an older core sometimes called the Ritual Decalogue, distinct from and possibly earlier than the more ethically weighted Decalogue of Exodus 20; this theory, still discussed though not universally accepted among biblical scholars, points to a more complex textual history behind the commandments than the traditional account of a single unified giving at Sinai, a critical question the traditions themselves generally set aside in favor of their received account of the text.

Judaism and Christianity share the Decalogue but number and frame it differently: Jewish tradition counts the declaration "I am the Lord your God" as the first word, while Christian traditions divide the commandments in more than one way, and communities differ over the Sabbath's day. For Jews the Ten stand within the larger body of 613 commandments; for most Christians they express an enduring moral law distinct from the ceremonial law held to be fulfilled in Christ. Seventh-day Adventists place particular weight on keeping all ten, including the Sabbath, as permanently binding.

The numbering difference is more concrete than a matter of emphasis: Catholic and Lutheran tradition, following a division associated with Augustine, combine the prohibitions of other gods and of graven images into a single commandment while splitting the final prohibition of coveting into two separate ones, whereas Jewish, Eastern Orthodox, and most Reformed Protestant traditions count the prohibition of idols as its own separate commandment and keep coveting as one. The result is that the same biblical text yields, depending on tradition, a genuinely different list of what counts as the third, fourth, or ninth commandment, a discrepancy catechisms in each tradition address directly since it affects how the commandments are taught and memorized.