There are hundreds of shalts and shalt-nots in the Hebrew Scriptures, a list that includes when to throw out leftovers and how to atone for sins. There are rules for housekeeping and peacekeeping, diet and dogma, incest and brotherly love. But it is the Ten Commandments that have become the Western world's most famous list of do's and don'ts.
More than 3,000 years after Moses walked down from Mount Sinai with a pair of stone tablets, the Ten Commandments continue to be extolled, displayed, removed, agonized over, sued over and, of course, broken.
And they continue to make headlines. For some people, they've become the symbol of everything that could be right about America but isn't — and their removal from schools, parks and courthouses a symbol of America's decline into depravity and godlessness. For others, displaying the Ten Commandments on government property is trumped by the First Amendment of another famous list, with its prohibition against laws "respecting an establishment of religion." So it's a battle that continues to be fought in Utah and elsewhere, despite two recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions attempting to make things clearer.
Our anguish about the Ten Commandments is not just about church and state but about the origins of morality itself.
Beginning next Saturday, the Deseret Morning News will explore the Ten Commandments, examining each one in the context of both a dusty desert of wandering nomads circa 1400 BCE, and a continent of multicultural, multitasking Americans in 2007.
The Ten Commandments were not the first set of laws instructing people how to behave with each other, nor the first rules about worship. Other, pagan cultures in the Middle East had similar sets of moral imperatives about how to live in community with other people (don't kill or steal from each other, honor your parents), as well as rules about how to please their gods.
But the Ten Commandments were revolutionary in two respects: The laws they prescribed applied to everyone, even the mighty; and the worshipping was to be done not to a collection of gods but to one God with a capital "G." And, unlike the other 600 commandments in the Hebrew Scriptures, the Ten Commandments were literally spoken by God to the entire people of Israel at one time, as they stood at the foot of Mount Sinai, explains Rabbi Joshua Aaronson of Temple Har Shalom in Park City.
According to the Bible, the Ten Commandments were a covenant between God and the Israelites: You promise to follow my rules, God said, and I'll promise to show mercy on you. By then, the Israelites had endured four centuries of servitude, followed by several decades of walking south through an inhospitable desert. "I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage," God reminded them.
The Ten Commandments, also known as the Decalogue, first appear in the Bible in Exodus 20, and then again in Deuteronomy 5. In neither Exodus nor Deuteronomy are the commandments numbered, nor are they clearly delineated, so not all religions number them the same way. Jews, Roman Catholics and most Protestants, for example, disagree on which verses to include in the first commandment.
The Decalogue is two sets of laws: The first four require a relationship with God; the second six dictate behavior between people. Those six rules are standard moral prescriptions, even for what we might consider fairly barbaric times. "They were a very normal, very early, primitive first step toward the development of a legal system and a moral system," notes Prof. John Witte, director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University in Atlanta.
In short, they're a start.
"To have left rape and child abuse and genocide and slavery out of the account is to have been negligent in some degree, even by the lax standards of the time," as writer Christopher Hitchens observed in a 2003 article in the online magazine "Slate."
By the time Jesus was offering his own commandments and Beatitudes a millennium later, the to-do list had evolved to include a commandment about love and a list of virtues that highlighted mercy and humility. It's the difference between the "morality of duty" and the "morality of aspiration," Witte explains.
For early Roman Catholics, the Ten Commandments were important as moral signposts, but so were the Seven Sacraments — baptism, Eucharist, reconciliation, confirmation, marriage, holy orders and anointing of the sick.
Later, Protestant reformers looked for something else, besides the sacraments, on which to base their legal and moral systems, Witte says. "In rejecting that (Catholic) sacramental theology, they were looking for an alternative, biblically grounded foundation, and the foundation on which they seized was the Decalogue."
So, for Protestants, the Ten Commandments were "the road map for what the law should be," says Professor W. Cole Durham, director of the International Center for Law and Religious Studies at Brigham Young University. "Melancthon, the great Protestant scholar at the time of the Reformation, founded criminal law on the commandment 'thou shall not kill,' and property law on the commandment 'thou shall not steal,"' and so on, Durham says.
But that doesn't mean the Ten Commandments were the only foundation of what eventually became the American legal system, says Professor Benjamin Crowe, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Utah. Roman law and the legal traditions of Germanic tribes, for example, were also important. "The Ten Commandments are central, but they're not the whole shebang."
"Word choice is really important," adds Richard Aaron, professor of law at the U. "There's absolutely no doubt that the Ten Commandments affected much of our laws, and no doubt that the Ten Commandments influenced our law — and absolutely no doubt that the Ten Commandments were not at all the foundation of our legal system."
Assertions to the contrary continue to surface. Consider, for example, the notation at the bottom of postings of the Ten Commandments once required in every public school classroom in Kentucky: "Secular application of the Ten Commandments is clearly seen in its adoption as the fundamental legal code of Western civilization and the Common Law of the United States."
The battle over displays of the Ten Commandments on government property has been waging for two centuries. On the one side are those who view the monuments as unconstitutional. On the other are those who view removal of the displays as one more proof of America's decline. "With secular humanists waging their attacks at home and the looming threat from the international radical Islam — people of faith become the line of defense," argues the Ten Commandments Commission based in Boca Raton, Fla., "and we are the watchman God has placed there. ... The Ten Commandments and what they represent are the heart of all moral code and must be defended before they are removed from society altogether." The commission is sponsoring its second annual Ten Commandments Day on Sunday, May 6.
Why not just reduce and rewrite the Ten Commandments, argues writer Gregg Easterbrook, reprising them as six imperatives about murder, adultery, stealing, bearing false witness, honoring parents and loving your neighbor as yourself. "In these words are everything we need to ground a revival of public character, without the slightest worry of constitutional challenge," he says, so it would be OK to post this revision in schools and other government buildings.
But for many Ten Commandments proponents, and indeed for many people of faith, the first four of the original 10 are crucial. For these people, says the U.'s Crowe, "the foundation for the other commandments is God, so God has to be acknowledged or the other commandments have no support."
The difference comes down to a question of where morality originates: from God or from people.
It's the difference between historical and ahistorical religions, explains U. philosophy associate professor Deen Chatterjee. Historical religions — Judaism, Christianity, Islam — believe history is imbued with meaning and that morality comes from the top down. Ahistorical religions — Buddhism for example — are more open-ended and experiential, basing morality in part on what is learned from human failure. "They let people decide their own spiritual and moral paths."
The roots of morality in the West come from the ideas of the ancient Greeks, who based their morality on reason alone, not on dogma, says Chatterjee.
But for God-believers, morality comes from God, says the Rev. Bill Heersink, acting president of the Salt Lake Theological Seminary.
"There's something inherently self-centered" about humans, he says. "If we can take advantage, we do." What enforces and enables morality to happen? "There has to be some power above everything, that we're accountable to," he argues, "some source to change our hearts, that really enables us to live like we were created to live."
For Jews and Christians, at least, the Ten Commandments are a place to start.
This is the first in a series of stories on the Ten Commandments. Stories examining each commandment will appear on the next 10 Saturday Religion and Ethics pages.
E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com