Ten Essential Words

TEN ESSENTIAL WORDS

CAN A 3,000-YEAR-OLD DOCUMENT GUIDE A 21ST CENTURY CULTURE?

By David Gwartney

Published by David Gwartney at Smashwords

Copyright 2012 David Gwartney

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, TODAY’S NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. TNIV®. Copyright © 2001, 2005 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide.

Discover other titles by David Gwartney:

A Journey Through Philippi

A Journey Through Ephesus

A Journey Through Colossae

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 – Approach

Chapter 2 – No Other God

Chapter 3 – Idols

Chapter 4 – Swearing

Chapter 5 – Sabbath

Chapter 6 – Family

Chapter 7 – Murder

Chapter 8 – Adultery

Chapter 9 – Stealing

Chapter 10 – Lying

Chapter 11 – Covet

Chapter 12 – The Greatest Commandment

About The Author

Notes

Bibliography

Chapter 1 – Approach The Mountain

Then Moses went up to God, and the Lord called to him from the mountain and said, This is what you are to say to the house of Jacob and what you are to tell the people of Israel…

- Exodus 19:3

Let’s start out with a question: What comes to your mind when you think of the Ten Commandments? A couple of stone tablets with ancient writing on them? An early Hebrew moral code that seems simplistic in today’s complex society? Or maybe a symbol of Judeo-Christian faith that sets a high moral bar? Perhaps images of Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner come to your mind from the 1956 Oscar-winning movie. These may be just some of the thoughts that come to our minds when we hear those words. They have been some of the more enduring and recognizable words for centuries now. Yet statistics reveal that most of us could not name them all, even though there are only ten of them. But is that really important? We get the gist of them anyway. Or so we think.

I had not given much thought to the Ten Commandments myself. I probably could have recited most of them if I were ever given a pop quiz and some time to think. So while reading a book one day I was caught off guard when I ran across this quote:

"So in the new church, in spite of the unsolved dilemmas of abortion, homosexuality, and the like, we may just find ourselves united as never before in trying to help our people toward moral living, in public and in private. We will realize what wonderful assets we had in the Christian tradition all along: the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, the Love Chapter (1 Corinthians 13). And maybe, just maybe, we’ll accept this modest proposal: that for, say, the next twenty-five years we will dedicate 95 percent of our moral effort toward living these basic, unarguable elements of our moral tradition. Then we can reevaluate and see whether the other issues – the trivial questions and the big dilemmas alike – have taken care of themselves." (McLaren, 1998)

Could our faith, and the answers to so many complex questions we face today, be as simple as getting back to some of these basic tenants of the faith? Could something like the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount (that will be for another book) really shed that much light on the grey world we live in? And could you really spend 95 percent of your moral efforts toward something as ancient as the Ten Commandments? Don’t most people of faith have them down pretty well anyway?

I started wondering if this could actually be the case. I wrote in the margin of that particular book the words sermon series. At the very least a sermon series on the Ten Commandments would take up about two to three months of Sunday sermons (unfortunately sometimes pastors think this way). But I wondered if there was enough material out there. After all, you probably do not need to spend 30 to 45 minutes to convince most people that things like stealing and murder are not the paths to a virtuous life. Other questions crossed my mind as well. Would people respond to what seemed like a high moral call? Would I end up turning into one of those fanatics protesting outside a courthouse to keep the Ten Commandments on display?

Apprehensions aside, I decided to take the challenge of spending a considerable amount of time trying to understand what might have been lost to us down through the centuries. After all, my own questions revealed that I could use some brushing up on something that I considered important to my faith. So at the conclusion of a three-month sermon series on the Ten Commandments, I found that there was much more life to an ancient document than I ever could have imagined. The response from the church revealed the hunger people had for gaining a better grasp of those commandments. Visitors wanted to know how they could take the material back to their own small group or spiritual community. Those ten statements would end up becoming the ten values of our church because we believed in the power they still held. And if you are reading this book, I can only assume you have a similar hunger to gain a better understanding of these ten statements.

WHAT THE TEN COMMANDMENTS ARE NOT

Before we begin our exploration of what the Ten Commandments can be to our culture today, let’s strip away some of the pre-conceived notions right up front that can potentially deprive them of their inherent power. Many of our modern-day assessments of these commandments can end up missing the true point of the commandments, or worse, undermine the impact they carry for our modern culture. Many people today are fighting battles defending the legitimacy of the Ten Commandments, but are mistakenly fighting the wrong battles. Consider where we can go wrong.

They are more than an ancient document. The Ten Commandments undoubtedly served as a moral code and a founding document for the nation of Israel well over three thousand years ago. We will take a look at this aspect shortly. But it would be a mistake for us today to relegate them to a museum or the archaeology department at some university and only regard them as an ancient document. While they have remarkable historical value and may speak volumes about the place and people of ancient Israel, they are certainly not alone in the ancient world. When viewed along side other ancient documents in an academic setting, the Ten Commandments can sometimes lose their distinctiveness.

The Ten Commandments were not the first attempt at a legal code and certainly were not the first things written down, even though oral tradition was still the norm at that time. Numerous Akkadian documents written in cuneiform - a series of wedges impressed into clay tablets - date back to the third millennium B.C., some 1,500 years before God makes his own inscriptions on tablets of stone. I recently spent an afternoon at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, where a large collection of these tablets is on display. One of the earliest known examples is a small, square, clay tablet recording tax payments made to the local king. It should come as no surprise that since the advent of written language, ancient governments began issuing tax bills!

Another ancient document often compared to the Ten Commandments is known as the Code of Hammurabi. Hammurabi became king of Babylon in the year 1792 B.C., and ushered in a time of Babylonian political dominance that would last for the next 1,500 years. Among his many inscriptions is a stele that records about 300 legal cases along with his decisions, such as If a man commits a robbery and is caught, that man will be killed. He even urges future kings to follow his example of administering justice. This stele has been traditionally viewed as a legal code, much like the Ten Commandments, but consensus is growing that this is not the case. One expert on the subject states, It is not a code of law, but a monument presenting Hammurabi as an exemplary king of justice (Van De Mieroop, 2004). Regardless, many similarities exist between Hammurabi’s law code and the Ten Commandments, which would follow some 400 years later.

So the Ten Commandments are not without precedent. Perhaps even parts of Mosaic Law borrow certain language from earlier-known ancient documents, such as the Code of Hammurabi or the Eshnunna Code. What sets the Ten Commandments apart from these other documents is that they are timeless and enduring in nature. They were not so much God’s laws to ancient Israel, as they are God’s moral laws to all people at any given time.¹ Some would argue that they are the basis for many of our own laws today, although laws prohibiting murder, stealing, and lying can be found in almost any legal code. They are a living document, still relevant to our modern way of life (which is one of the main premises I hope this book illustrates). To my knowledge, no one outside of a university setting has memorized – much less lives by - the Code of Hammurabi.

There is more to them than having them on display. It is because of the enduring nature of the Ten Commandments that a more recent controversy has arisen: whether the Ten Commandments should be displayed at public buildings, such as court houses, schools, and the Capital Building and the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. There have been numerous recent cases involving battlegrounds such as Texas and Kentucky, trying to settle the question: Are the Ten Commandments a historical document to be displayed in public or a religious document whose display would violate the separation of church and state? While I personally believe that it is both (how is that for fence-sitting?) - and thus the conundrum we are currently in – it may surprise you that it is not my intention to show, one way or another, that they should or should not be displayed in public places. I am neither lawyer nor activist.

My concern is more spiritual in nature: that in fighting to keep the Ten Commandments on display, we people of faith fool ourselves into thinking we are living out God’s commandments for the world around us to see. The Hebrew Scriptures record that Israel often fell into the trap of thinking they were being God’s people simply because they were going through the religious motions – tithing, going to the Temple, pointing to the presence of religious images all around them. But in reality, the way they actually lived out their lives did not reflect any of these elements of faith. God often sent prophets to the people to remind them that an external display is not enough. As previously mentioned, my desire is that we invest considerable effort and study toward understanding these commands and the implications they have for the way we live – perhaps, even before we point them out as a sacred text to the world around us.

Interestingly enough, the act of writing the Ten Commandments down (and thus displaying them) would be a major shift in the history of the Israelites. Up to this point, every story and every piece of history was passed on orally. One generation would tell the next, preserving every last detail, so as not to corrupt the story. But four generations of Hebrews had just lived out their lives inundated by Egyptian culture. The Egyptian culture was a culture that fell in love with writing things down. A casual stroll through one of Luxor’s many temples demonstrates how every surface – every wall, column, statue, and ceiling – was utilized as a storyboard. Huge stones covered in hieroglyphics – stones that would be in a museum anywhere else in the world – litter the landscape like a giant jigsaw puzzle dumped out of its box, waiting to be assembled. Their story, in written form, seemed to seep from every crack and crevasse.

Perhaps this why, after leaving Egypt, the Hebrews begin writing things down as well. The Ten Commandments are the first collection of teachings that God instructs the people to write down. This act of writing things down would soon become an important exercise for Israel.

Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates, so that your days and the days of your children may be many in the land that the LORD swore to give your ancestors, as many as the days that the heavens are above the earth. (Deuteronomy 11:18-21)

Writing words on doorframes and gates sounds exactly like what you would see in Egypt. Israel would soon become a culture of writing as well. Perhaps not so coincidentally, this time period of the second millennium is when the Semitic alphabet first comes into existence (Feiler, 2001). No more wedges, no more pictures, but instead letters forming an alphabet. So writing and displaying the commands of God are not bad things. But when giving an account of our lives before God, will we say that we kept the Ten Commandments on display or will be able to say that we lived the commandments out through our actions and that we were a blessing to those around us?

We must do more than simply commit them to memory. A friend of mine had recently forwarded me a YouTube video clip of popular television host Stephen Colbert interviewing a congressman regarding this very issue of displaying the Ten Commandments. The congressman was reportedly the one who sponsored a bill that would require the Ten Commandments to be displayed in Congress. In the video clip, the congressman explains the importance of protecting this document and states that without it, we would lose our sense of direction. Colbert then asks the congressman to name the Ten Commandments. He begins with a couple easy ones, but then pauses, realizing the awkwardness of the moment. He finally admits that he cannot name them all.

To be fair, numerous surveys conclude that most of us could not name them all either. Quick – list all ten (and don’t flip to the table of contents). I have been studying them for a couple years now, and I am not sure I could list all ten if I was stopped on the sidewalk and a microphone shoved in my face.

It has come to represent the quandary that many well-meaning, religious people find themselves in: trying to uphold the value of something they consider to be sacred, while being unable to recite the very thing considered sacred. You can almost understand why the secular world scratches their collective heads, asking Is this important to you or not? For people of faith it should be both a valid point, and at the same time, only scratching the surface of a bigger issue. Are we expected to live these commandments out in our lives today? Again, is it more important that we display the Ten Commandments, have them committed to memory, or that they are actually an embodiment of the way we live?

It is to this very issue that God speaks when he begins urging the Israelites to not simply write them down. Instead he instructs them, These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts (Deuteronomy 6:6). Yes, chisel them in stone, but more importantly impress them upon your hearts. God makes this even more explicit when he expands on these commandments and forms a new covenant, which we will look at shortly, I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people (Jeremiah 31:33). In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul picks up on this same distinction: You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts (2 Corinthians 3:3). The human heart seems to be the writing surface that God is most concerned about.

Stone tablets can break, ink smears and paper crumbles, hard drives can crash, and public displays can be outlawed. But something written on the human heart has staying power. That is because when it is written on your heart, it becomes a part of who you are. The evidence is not so much in your words but in your actions - in the way you live. I may not be able to recite from memory my wedding vows, but my actions towards my wife and others, should leave no question that I understood those vows on our wedding day. They were written on my heart. This is what God is getting at when he uses that phrase: that these commands penetrate all the way to the heart level.

WHAT THE TEN COMMANDMENTS ARE

So if we are not to get sidetracked by ancient documents, public displays, and memorization quizzes, then what are the Ten Commandments? Do they hold any timeless wisdom for a culture fully 3,500 years after they were written? To answer those questions, let us start from the most basic of levels and build from there.

Oddly enough, the Bible never explicitly gives these statements the title we have given them – the Ten Commandments. In the Hebrew Scriptures, the phrase that is used is aseret devarim, which literally means ten words. The root Hebrew word davar, however, has a wide range of meaning from the simple idea of a word to the more encompassing ideas of statements, speeches, and commands. So our English version of the Bible interprets ten words as the phrase ten commandments.

The Bible also refers to them as simply commands or commandments, while not specifically specifying ten of them. It either uses that same concept of davar, or the more explicit Hebrew word for commandment, mitzvah. Mitzvah connotes more of the idea of an order or law or an authoritative word from God. You may recognize that word from the Jewish celebrations of Bar Mitzvahs or Bat Mitzvahs. Bar Mitzvah literally means son of the commandment (Bat Mitzvah refers to the daughter) and celebrates the time when a child reaches the age of maturity (twelve years for girls, thirteen for boys) and is responsible for him or herself under Jewish law (Telushkin, 1997).

So we get the idea when we put all these references together, that these are important, authoritative words from God, and there are ten of them given explicitly to Moses on Mount Sinai. But we do not find the exact phrase Ten Commandments really used in scripture.

But enough of the language lesson. When we go to the story, as told in the book of Exodus, we begin to understand the weight these Ten Commandments would carry coming directly from the mouth of God:

On [the first day of] the third month after the Israelites left Egypt - on that very day - they came to the Desert of Sinai. After they set out from Rephidim, they entered the Desert of Sinai, and Israel camped there in the desert in front of the mountain. (Exodus 19:1-2)

It had been three months to the day, we are told, that the Israelites escaped slavery in Egypt. They have been wandering; they have been hungry, though God has provided; they have even been in a military skirmish. They have been led by God through the Sinai Peninsula to the base of this mountain – this same mountain where Moses had encountered God years before in the form of flaming shrubbery. Now it was time to catch their breath and rest. The people had to have been wondering, Now what? They were out of danger from Egypt, but wandering in a desert without a destination – out of the proverbial frying pan and into the fire! In many ways the desert, with its daytime heat, nighttime cold, and lack of food and water, would prove to be a bigger danger than the Egyptians, except that God was the one leading them through all this. Where was this land God had promised them? What would it look like? Who would be in charge?

Knowing that the people were growing restless with these questions, even threatening to return to Egypt, God understood that it was time to give them some answers. So God summoned Moses up to the mountain and gave him these instructions:

Then Moses went up to God, and the LORD called to him from the mountain and said, This is what you are to say to the house of Jacob and what you are to tell the people of Israel: ‘You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’ These are the words you are to speak to the Israelites. (Exodus 19:3-6)

God, in effect, reminded them, You have seen the lengths I have gone to draw you to myself. So here is the deal I am putting on the table. Now if you obey me fully…. What follows gives us a pretty clear indication as to what is being formed by these Ten Commandments. They tell us what the Ten Commandments are.

A set of expectations for God’s people. Several hundred years previously, God began promising Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that their descendants would become his people and he would be their God. But there was not a specific set of expectations made known as to what was involved in being his people. But now God was beginning to describe these expectations, and they were to be fully obeyed.

Setting expectations is an important step in any relationship. A young couple gleefully anticipating a wedding starts the engagement out on solid ground when the expectations of marriage are made clear. There should be no claiming, "Wait! For better and for worse?" A new job can be a disaster if responsibilities and objectives are not clearly defined. Clear expectations can be the difference between a sports team working together toward a goal and one that falls apart under the weight of their individual agendas.

These expectations would begin to set the Israelites apart from other nations around them. The people of Edom, Moab, and the Canaanites were often described as wicked people without a sense of morality. In urging them to keep these laws, God said to the people, You must not do as they do in Egypt, where you used to live, and you must not do as they do in the land of Canaan, where I am bringing you. Do not follow their practices (Leviticus 18:3). They were to value human life, respect their neighbor, and continually honor the God they served. God wanted his people to live a different way – and a better way. And I believe God is doing the same thing today – calling us to a better way to live, if we will engage these commandments with a new energy. With the Ten Commandments, God is saying, These are my expectations of my people, and I mean for them to be followed.

A covenant between God and His people. These Ten Commandments also form the basis of a larger contractual agreement between God and his people – what the Bible continually refers to as a covenant. A covenant is similar to a treaty or a formal agreement. However, it seems today’s treaties do not carry the same weight that they did back then. Peace treaties nowadays are forged, only to be disregarded at the firing of a weapon. Agreements brokered by the United Nations are seemingly rarely upheld. How many peace treaties have been forged and broken in the Middle East alone? In our world today, it might even be difficult to wrap our minds around the idea of a covenant, because we live in a world where our word, a promise made, or a guarantee, holds very little value.

In the Ancient Near East however, a covenant was a sacred act. It was better than any written guarantee and stood up to any legal challenge. Here is typically how a covenant would work: upon entering an agreement, the covenant would be stated verbally, which in oral tradition was as official as any written agreement. However, with the advent of written language, the agreement would eventually be recorded. It was common, both within scripture and in other ancient documents, to sacrifice an animal as a sign of the covenant being made. These animals would be cut into halves and the halves arranged opposite each other, demonstrating that if the covenant were broken, blood would be shed (Wilson, 1989).

This can be demonstrated in the initial covenant between God and Abraham: When the sun had set and darkness had fallen, a smoking firepot with a blazing torch appeared and passed between the pieces. On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram (Genesis 15:17-18). The rest of the sacrifice was typically prepared for a meal, at which parties would dine together. Finally, the covenant would normally contain blessings for the parties if it were upheld, as well as curses for the party that broke the covenant. In one such treaty drawn up by the Assyrian king Esarhaddon, in the seventh century B.C., a couple of the curses for breaking the treaty read, Just as the honeycomb is pierced with holes, so may they pierce your flesh, the flesh of your women, your brothers, your sons and daughters with holes while you are alive, Just as the inside of a hole is empty, may your inside be empty, and my personal favorite, Just as this bedbug stinks, so may your breath stink before god, king, and men (Parpola & Watanabe, 1988). It was serious business!

So it was with this same weight that the Ten Commandments become part of God’s covenant with the fledgling nation: Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant…. The Hebrew Scriptures record several formal covenants between God and people. Among them are the covenant with Noah (sometimes referred to as the Noahic Covenant), Abraham (the Abrahamic Covenant), and David (the Davidic Covenant). The Ten Commandments would serve as an explication of the covenant with Abraham and become part of what is called the Sinaitic Covenant. It has all of the typical characteristics of an Ancient Near East covenant: the gathering of both parties (Moses ascending the mountain to hear from God), the stipulations of the covenant (the Ten Commandments), the recording of the covenant (God writes them on tablets of stone), and blessings and curses (for an example, see the Second Commandment). These blessings and curses can be clearly seen in the covenant with Abraham: I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you (Genesis 12:3). This same theme of blessings and curses is repeated several times in the text following the Ten Commandments.

So after following all the standard rituals of a covenant, this covenant at Sinai is formally accepted: When Moses went and told the people all the Lord’s words and laws, they responded with one voice, ‘Everything the Lord has said we will do.’ Moses then wrote down everything the LORD had said (Exodus 24:3-4). The covenant was affirmed with a blood sacrifice:

He got up early the next morning and built an altar at the foot of the mountain and set up twelve stone pillars representing the twelve tribes of Israel. Then he sent young Israelite men, and they offered burnt offerings and sacrificed young bulls as fellowship offerings to the LORD. Moses took half of the blood and put it in bowls, and the other half he sprinkled on the altar. Then he took the Book of the Covenant and read it to the people. They responded, We will do everything the LORD has said; we will obey. (Exodus 24:5-7)

Taking some of the blood from the sacrifices, Moses concludes with the words, This is the blood of the covenant.

This covenant that began with Abraham and was expounded upon at Mount Sinai echoes throughout the rest of the Hebrew Scripture with the words, I will be your God and you will be my people. The Ten Commandments help define what that relationship looks like and what we, as God’s people, are to do to uphold our end of the bargain. These four statements that define the Ten Commandments also express God’s end of the bargain. Unfortunately, history reveals that we have a difficult time keeping up our end of that bargain. Because we continually break the terms of the covenant, the deal should be off. But God is a God of second chances (and third chances, and fourth…).

The story of the Israelites is one where they repeatedly break with the covenant, fall under the curse of being separated from God’s protection, and then are offered another chance to return and be under God’s protection once again. Finally, God, through the prophet Jeremiah, announced that a new covenant is on its way. Because the people were unable to keep the old covenant, God chose to be graciously extravagant and extended a Covenant of Grace:

"The days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them, declares the LORD. This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time, declares the LORD. I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will they teach their neighbors, or say to one another, ‘Know the LORD,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more." (Jeremiah 31:31-34)

It defied all the conventional stipulations of a covenant, because it assumed that it would be broken. So it offered forgiveness up front! Imagine buying a car or a home and signing the loan papers. As you go to read the terms, the loan officer explains, You can read through all the terms, but here is the deal: as much as we would like you to make all your payments and pay on time, we also understand that sometimes these things don’t happen. So any breaking of the terms is forgiven up front – no penalties, no repercussions. Now that is a deal you could not refuse! And the coming of Jesus would fulfill the words of Jeremiah: For this reason Christ is the mediator of a new covenant, that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance (Hebrews 9:15).

A moral code guiding spiritual practices. So why do we need to review the terms – the Ten Commandments – if a new covenant is in place that covers any breaking of the old one? Because both the old covenant and the New Covenant call