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Portrait of The Ten Commandments

General knowledge · Religion & belief

The Ten Commandments

Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5

Scripture — the Decalogue, the core of biblical law

The short list of obligations that, in the biblical account, God gives to Moses on Mount Sinai and writes on two stone tablets. Hebrew calls them the aseret ha-dibrot, the ten words, which is why they are also known as the Decalogue. They appear twice in the Torah, in Exodus 20 and again in Deuteronomy 5 with small but pointed differences, and Jews, Catholics and Reformed Protestants number the same text in three different ways.

How to spot them

  • ▸Two tablets of stone, given on Sinai (called Horeb in Deuteronomy)
  • ▸Decalogue — from the Hebrew aseret ha-dibrot, 'the ten words'
  • ▸Everyone agrees there are ten; nobody agrees where each one ends
  • ▸'Thou shalt not kill' translates a verb, ratzach, that means murder rather than killing in general

Key facts

Two tablets of stone carried down a mountain, and smashed at the sight of a golden calf

Exodus 32; Moses receives a second set to replace them

Hebrew calls them the aseret ha-dibrot, the ten words — hence the Greek-derived name Decalogue

Not 'laws' or 'commands' but dibrot, sayings

Jews, Catholics and Reformed Protestants number the same text differently, disagreeing where the first ends

Jews count 'I am the Lord thy God' as the first; Catholics and Lutherans fold the ban on images into the first and split coveting into two

Kept, according to Exodus, in a gilded acacia chest carried on poles

The Ark of the Covenant

Given on Sinai in one book, and repeated on Horeb in another with a different reason for the Sabbath (—)

Exodus 20 grounds the Sabbath in creation; Deuteronomy 5 in the escape from Egypt

Charlton Heston as Moses, and a parted Red Sea, in Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 epic (1956)

DeMille had already filmed the story as a silent in 1923

The longest of them concerns a day of rest; the shortest is two Hebrew words forbidding theft

The Sabbath commandment runs to four verses in Exodus

Key ideas

  • The traditional division into two tablets is usually read as duties to God on the first and duties to one's neighbour on the second — a split Jesus echoes when he reduces the law to loving God and loving one's neighbour.

Quick-fire facts

  • •The Hebrew name is aseret ha-dibrot, 'the ten words'; Decalogue comes from the Greek deka logoi
  • •They are given in Exodus 20 and repeated in Deuteronomy 5, with the Sabbath justified by creation in the first and by the Exodus from Egypt in the second
  • •Moses breaks the first pair of tablets on finding the Israelites worshipping a golden calf, and is given a second set
  • •The tablets were kept, according to Exodus, inside the Ark of the Covenant
  • •Jewish numbering makes 'I am the Lord thy God' the first; Catholic and Lutheran numbering merges the prohibition of graven images into the first and divides coveting into the ninth and tenth
  • •The sixth commandment uses the Hebrew verb ratzach, closer to 'murder' than to 'kill', which is why modern translations read 'Thou shalt not murder'
  • •The commandment against false witness is specifically about testimony, not lying in general
  • •Cecil B. DeMille filmed the story twice, as a silent in 1923 and with Charlton Heston in 1956
  • •US Supreme Court rulings — Stone v. Graham (1980) and the 2005 pair Van Orden v. Perry and McCreary County v. ACLU — have repeatedly tested public displays of them

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