The Ten Commandments by Michael Coogan

Author:Michael Coogan [Coogan, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press (Ignition)
Published: 2014-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

6

WHICH LAWS ARE BINDING?

IN THE HEBREW BIBLE, THE DECALOGUE IS THE TEXT of the primary contract between God and the Israelites, the Sinai Covenant. As such, it has a special status. Its occurrence in several different versions indicates widespread importance, as do allusions to it in the prophets and elsewhere in the Bible. Its special status is also implied in Deuteronomy. Following the proclamation of the Decalogue, Moses’s retrospective narrative resumes:

These words Yahweh spoke to your entire assembly on the mountain, from the midst of the fire, the cloud, and the thick darkness, in a loud voice. He added no more, and he wrote them on the two stone tablets and he gave them to me. (Deuteronomy 5:22)

The people went on to ask Moses that henceforth only he would deal directly with God: “You should draw near and listen to everything that Yahweh, our god, says, and then you should speak everything to us” (Deuteronomy 5:27). Deuteronomy thus hints that having been given by God directly to the Israelites and personally written down by him, the Ten Commandments were especially important, perhaps even more so than the many other laws from Sinai, which were first given by God only to Moses, and then by him to the Israelites.

Early postbiblical Jewish literature and practice affirm that special status. Let us begin with the first-century CE Jewish philosopher Philo, known both as Philo Judaeus, because of his religious heritage, and as Philo of Alexandria, because of his hometown in Egypt. He was a thoroughly hellenized Egyptian Jew, who wrote several dozen works in Greek, interpreting the Jewish scriptures, especially the Torah, using Greek philosophical concepts and vocabulary, much like the author of the apocryphal book Wisdom of Solomon. One of his treatises, On the Ten Words, deals with the Decalogue, which he identifies as the principal laws given by God himself directly to the Israelites: “The father of all decreed the ten words or oracles, actually laws or ordinances” (On the Decalogue 9.32).1 These are elaborated upon in the “special laws” that follow in the book of Exodus, which were given by God to the Israelites only indirectly, having been mediated through Moses. Thus, for Philo, the Decalogue was paramount.

This status is also evident in early Jewish worship. Rabbinic tradition (Mishnah Tamid 5.1; Berakot 11b) reports that among the texts recited daily in the Temple in Jerusalem were the Decalogue and three other passages from the Torah that were and continue to be central in Judaism: Deuteronomy 6:4–9; 11:13–21; and Numbers 15:37–41. The first of these is as follows:

Hear, O Israel: Yahweh is our god, Yahweh alone. And you should love Yahweh, your god, with all your heart and all your self and all your might. And let these words which I am commanding you today be on your heart. And you should repeat them to your sons, and speak about them when you are staying in your home and when you are walking on the road, when you lie down and when you get up.

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