The Gifts of the Jews

by Thomas Cahill

  that is in the heavens above, that is on the earth beneath, that is in the waters beneath the earth;

  you are not to bow down to them,

  you are not to serve them,

  for I, YHWH your God,

  am a jealous God,

  calling-to-account the iniquity of the fathers upon the sons, to the third and fourth (generation)

  of those that hate me,

  but showing loyalty to the thousandth

  of those that love me,

  of those that keep my commandments.

  “You are not to take up

  the name of YHWH your God for emptiness,

  for YHWH will not clear him

  that takes up his name for emptiness.

  “Remember

  the Sabbath day, to hallow it.

  For six days, you are to serve, and are to make all your work,

  but the seventh day

  is Sabbath for YHWH your God:

  you are not to make any kind of work,

  (not) you, nor your son, nor your daughter,

  (not) your servant, nor your maid, nor your beast,

  nor your sojourner that is within your gates.

  For six days YHWH made

  the heavens and the earth,

  the sea and all that is in it,

  and he rested on the seventh day;

  therefore YHWH gave the seventh day his blessing, and he hallowed it.

  “Honor

  your father and your mother,

  in order that your days may be prolonged

  on the soil that YHWH your God is giving you.

  “You are not to murder.

  “You are not to adulter.

  “You are not to steal.

  “You are not to testify

  against your fellow as a false witness.

  “You are not to desire the house of your neighbor;

  You are not to desire the wife of your neighbor,

  or his servant, or his maid, or his ox, or his donkey,

  or anything that is your neighbor’s.”

  Now all the people were seeing

  the thunder-sounds,

  the flashing-torches,

  the shofar sound,2

  and the mountain smoking;

  when the people saw,

  they faltered

  and stood far off.

  The people cry up to Moshe:

  “You speak with us, and we will hearken,

  but let not God speak with us, lest we die.”

  And he cries down to them:

  “Do not be afraid!

  For it is to test you that God has come,

  to have awe of him be upon you,

  so that you do not sin.”

  But the people keep their distance, as Moshe on the heights is swallowed by the storm.

  This is the first presentation of the Ten Commandments in the Bible, but because there is a variant—in Deuteronomy 5:6–22—there is no reason to assume that the words quoted here were intended to constitute an exact record of what God said. By submitting these sentences to careful linguistic and textual analysis and comparing them with the variant presentation (which is not substantially different), most scholars have come to the conclusion that the original sentences were all bluntly brief in the manner of “You are not to murder”—so brief in fact that each one may have been but one word, that is, a verb in the imperative form preceded by a negative prefix of one syllable. In this way, the originals may actually have been Ten Words—utterly primitive, basic injunctions on the order of “No-kill,” “No-steal,” “No-lie.” These Ten Words (which is the term the Bible uses, not “Commandments”) would have been memorizable by even the simplest nomad, his ten fingers a constant reminder of their centrality in his life. So contemporary readers who are repelled by God’s vengefulness—his need to punish not only the perpetrator but children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren—are welcome to take such warnings as the glosses of scribes of a later age.

  The exact numbering of the commandments has been a conundrum for aeons. In Jewish medieval tradition, they tended to be broken into five for God (the commandments that mention God’s Name) and five for men. Augustine of Hippo in the early fifth century of our era divided them into three for God (by combining the first sentence, God’s self-description and not technically a command, with the commandment against idol worship) and seven for men (by breaking the last commandment into two: one for “your neighbor’s wife,” who appears first in the Deuteronomy list, and a second for “your neighbor’s goods”). Augustine’s numbering has been followed by the Latin church and by Lutherans and Anglicans. The Greek and other Eastern churches, however, have generally followed what appears to be the most reasonable numbering: four for God (through the Sabbath commandment) and six for men. Since this numbering has been followed by the Reformed churches as well, it is the numbering one is most likely to encounter in the United States.

  But this attention to minutiae (which of the words are original? how should we divide the text to achieve ten?) can, like so many scholarly considerations, deflect us all too easily from appreciating what is happening here. There is no document in all the literatures of the world that is like the Ten Commandments. Of course, there are ethical guidelines from other cultures. But these are always offered in a legal framework (if you do that, then this will be the consequence) or as worldly-wise advice (if you want to lead a happy life, you will be sure to do such-and-such and avoid so-and-so). Here for the first—and, I think, the last—time, human beings are offered a code without justification. Because this is God’s code, no justification is required and (except for the few poor phrases of scribal commentary) no elaboration. Who but God can speak ten words—“Thoushalt” and “Thou-shalt-not”—with such authority that no further words are needed?

  There is an almost perfect story by G. K. Chesterton about a jewel thief who is pursued by a priest—a very confident jewel thief, Flambeau, and a very humble parish priest, Father Brown, who understands human hearts because he knows the sinfulness of his own. Toward the story’s end, the priest finds himself on Hampstead Heath, looking up admiringly at the heavens as night descends and sitting next to the jewel thief, who is blissfully unaware that this bumbling little parson is his pursuer. Flambeau, who is also dressed as a priest in order to steal a precious object of religious art—the “Blue Cross” that gives the story its name—scorns with what he imagines to be priestly piety the attitudes of “modern infidels,” who “appeal to their reason.” Looking up at the sky, now spangled with stars, he continues: “But who can look at those millions of worlds and not feel that there may well be wonderful universes above us where reason is utterly unreasonable?”

  “Reason and justice,” replies Father Brown, “grip the remotest and the loneliest star. Look at those stars. Don’t they look as if they were single diamonds and sapphires? Well, you can imagine any mad botany or geology you please. Think of forests of adamant with leaves of brilliants. Think, the moon is a blue moon, a single elephantine sapphire. But don’t fancy that all that frantic astronomy would make the smallest difference to the reason and justice of conduct. On plains of opal, under cliffs cut out of pearl, you would still find a notice-board, ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ ”

  Father Brown is alluding, of course, to the famous absoluteness of the Ten Commandments. They require no justification, nor can they be argued away. They are not dependent upon circumstances, nor may they be set aside because of special considerations. They are not propositions for debate. They are not suggestions. They are not even (as a recent book would have us imagine in the jargon of our day) “ten challenges.” They are exactly what they seem to be—and there is no getting around them or (to be more spatially precise) out from under them. But the only thing new about them is their articulation at this moment amid the terrifying fires of Sinai. They have been received by billions as reasonable, necessary, even unalterable because they are written on human hearts and always have been. They were
always there in the inner core of the human person—in the deep silence that each of us carries within. They needed only to be spoken aloud.

  The age to which these Ten Words were first spoken was a brutal one, an age of spiteful goddesses and cruel god-kings (not a bit like our own). The people who first heard these words were unrefined and basic, the Dusty Ones, wandering through Sinai’s lunar landscape, denuded of the ordinary web of life, baked in absolute heat and merciless light. This was no age or people or environment for anything but the plainest, harshest truths. We should not be surprised that these words were never spoken to the powerful, the comfortable, and the subtle. This was the time, this the place, these the people who must receive the unassailable truth of the Ten Words and carry them forward.

  Readers who do not believe in God may well have reached the end of their rope by now. For surely the first commandments—the ones about God—will strike them not as unassailable but as meaningless. But let the unbeliever focus on the commandments about man and ask himself which he would drop and what he would add. Here, I think, both believer and unbeliever are brought to heel. There is nothing to add, really, nothing to subtract. Oh, I could add something about ecology perhaps or about racism or sexism or, if I were of such a mind, about the sacredness of free markets or the solidarity of the human race—all concerns born of recent times. But if I can peer through the mists of history and see the begrimed, straightforward faces straining upward toward the terrors of Mount Sinai and if I can imagine this immense throng of simple souls trudging through the whole of history—all the ordinary people down the ages in need of moral guidance in all the incredibly various situations and cultures that this planet has known—it must be admitted that it would be fairly impossible to improve on the Decalogue as we have it. The sins it catalogues are the great sins, and those it does not mention explicitly—such as withholding sustenance from those who have nothing—can be deduced from it, which is what the Israelites did almost immediately by, for instance, categorizing society’s abandonment of widows and orphans as “murder.” Even as far away from Sinai in time and civilization as Hampstead Heath at the turn of the century or Central Park at the turn of the millennium, there are few who do not know that if we were to keep these commandments our world would be an entirely different place. This is such a simple, incontestable thing to say that it sounds banal. But for all our resourcefulness we have never yet managed to do it.

  Besides the innovation of speaking the unspoken moral law aloud, one should note the lesser—but hardly unimportant—innovation of the weekend, which got its start in the Jewish Sabbath (or “Ceasing”). No ancient society before the Jews had a day of rest. The God who made the universe and rested bids us do the same, calling us to a weekly restoration of prayer, study, and recreation (or re-creation). In this study (or talmud), we have the beginnings of what Nahum Sarna has called “the universal duty of continuous self-education,” Israel being the first human society to so value education and the first to envision it as a universal pursuit—and a democratic obligation that those in power must safeguard on behalf of those in their employ. The connections to both freedom and creativity lie just beneath the surface of this commandment: leisure is appropriate to a free people, and this people so recently free find themselves quickly establishing this quiet weekly celebration of their freedom; leisure is the necessary ground of creativity, and a free people are free to imitate the creativity of God. The Sabbath is surely one of the simplest and sanest recommendations any god has ever made; and those who live without such septimanal punctuation are emptier and less resourceful.

  The patriarchs are present here at Sinai, for we now have in these commandments a codification of the Abrahamic covenant of blood. Circumcision was the outward sign of this covenant; the Commandments are the invisible sign, circumcision of the heart. God will be their God, and they will be his people, his kingdom of priests, his holy nation, if only they will keep his Commandments. This is an exclusive relationship, which specifically excludes bedding down with strange gods. As the medieval rabbis noted, it is very like a marriage. As modern commentators have noted, it is very like a typical suzerainty treaty between contracting parties in the ancient Near East—like the pact Avraham made with the Canaanite kings—but the big difference is that in this case the king is God.

  Of the many innovations that Sinai represents—the codification of Abrahamic henotheism (that one God is to be worshiped, even though others are presumed to exist), the articulation of “ought-ness” (or what Kant will one day call the “categorical imperative”), the invention of the Sabbath—nothing is as provocative as the way in which this tremendous theophany brings to completion the new Israelite understanding of time. The journey of Avraham and the liberation wrought by Moshe transformed human understanding of past and future: the past is all the steps of my forebears and myself that have brought me to this place and moment; the future is what is yet to be. But the past is irretrievable and the future is a blank. The one is fixed, the other unknown. For the past I can have only regret, for the future only anxiety. To live in real time, to live in history, can be a horrible experience—and no wonder that the ancients contrived to escape such torments by inventing cyclical time and the recurrent Wheel, leading only to the peace of death.

  But this gift of the Commandments allows us to live in the present, in the here and now. What I have done in the past is past mending; what I will do in the future is a worry not worth the candle, for there is no way I can know what will happen next. But in this moment—and only in this moment—I am in control. This is the moment of choice, the moment when I decide whether I will plunge in the knife or not, take the treasure or not, begin to spin the liar’s web or not. This is the moment when the past can be transformed and the future lit with radiance. And such a realization need bring neither regret nor anxiety but, if I keep the Commandments, true peace. But not the peace of death, not the peace of coming to terms with the Wheel. For in choosing what is right I am never more alive.

  The standard of the Ten Words gradually gives to subsequent Israelite history a reliability and consistency of texture that we search for in vain in other ancient cultures. In all the ancient epics left to us, the dwelling places of the gods—the heavenly realms of ultimate reality—prove to be shifting and insubstantial. Zeus is driven by his insatiable lusts, Ishtar by her fathomless ill humor; and we earthlings are at the mercy of their incomprehensible heavenly mood swings. Even these hapless earthbound wanderers, the Israelites, were people of the ancient world; and they tended to give their God YHWH a human personality—a jealousy that makes him seem at times not unlike the difficult gods of alien pantheons. But the gulf that has opened between the worldview of Israel and that of all other ancient societies will only widen as time goes on.

  It is important at this juncture to take full account not only of the primitive quality of the Ten—their almost caveman awkwardness—but also of their wonderful flexibility. This is because, like any effective declaration or constitution, they do not say too much, which enables them to be elaborated and interpreted by later ages in contexts that would have been unimaginable at the foot of Mount Sinai. We have already noted Israel’s interpretation of the murder prohibition as including an obligation in justice to have-nots. Throughout history no commandment will receive more attention or be more hotly debated than this one, used even in our own day by left-wingers and right-wingers, by pacifists and pro-lifers, by anti-death-penalty activists and death-penalty advocates, as their ultimate justification. But whether you are president of the Joint Chiefs or of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a supporter of Right to Life or of NARAL, Jesse Helms or Helen Prejean, you would hardly urge the scrapping or suppression of this commandment.

  Another aspect of this bare-knuckled theophany that should give pause to those who believe in an afterlife is its paucity of rewards. Long life is promised to those who take care of their parents, but eternal life is promised to no one. No one had even thought of such a th
ing, except as a fanciful and impossible goal, as in the Epic of Gilgamesh, for

  When the gods created mankind

  They appointed death for mankind,

  Kept eternal life in their own hands.

  Even the promise of long life is almost certainly a later accretion. As had never been the case before—and as would never be so starkly the case again—virtue is its own reward. I must obey these commands because they must be obeyed.

  Something in human beings resists all this, leaving one wanting to respond truculently, “Oh, yeah? That’s what you think, YHWH!” “It is religion itself which we all by nature dislike, not the excess merely,” said John Henry Newman. “Nature tends toward the earth, and God is in heaven.” And surely nothing is less appealing than a religion of unappealable commands. Nothing so quickly provokes the urge to sin as an extended meditation on virtue. And, this being so, we can hardly raise an eyebrow at what happens next.

  The Children of Israel waste no time in breaking as many Commandments as possible. Exasperated by Moshe’s long absence on the Mountain, they regress. They pressure Aharon to do something—and his knee-jerk solution is to return to the easy comforts of the ancient worldview: he collects the gold jewelry that the Israelites absconded with, melts it down, and fashions an idol, a visible sign for the anxious people to worship. Exodus calls it “a molten calf,” though this is by way of denigrating the idol. It was actually a bull, probably rampant and in rut, the aboriginal symbol of potency. This, cries Aharon,

  “This is your God, O Israel,

  who brought you up from the land of Egypt!”

  What follows is an orgy of prostrations, animal slaughter, feasting, drinking, and, as the Book of Exodus puts it discreetly, “reveling”—that is, sexual indulgence in the manner of a pagan liturgy. The bull, as we have seen, was a common image of divinity in Mesopotamia, as it was in Egypt; and though we cannot be certain that the people thought they were worshiping a bull-god (they may only have meant to worship YHWH as the invisible God who stands on the bull as his footstool), they have surely made “a carved image” of a visible figure. They have mistaken YHWH for his creation. They have broken the first two Commandments. They have also dishonored their forebears—their ancient fathers and mothers—who had so long refrained from idol worship; and, in the course of their reveling, it is most unlikely that they managed to refrain from adultery and sexual covetousness. With a little ingenuity, we might even conclude that they succeeded in breaking all Ten Commandments—but even five out of ten is a pretty good average for so short a time.