
The twin tablets of the Ten Commandments are one of the most recognized symbols of the Hebrew Bible. They adorn many synagogues, including this one in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, due to the commandment forbidding human or animal images that could be mistaken for God and worshipped. Photo credit: Roger Veringmeier, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Ten Commandments are the bedrock of belief in one god for just about half of humanity. They are also a flagrant example of the Hebrew Bible’s internal inconsistencies.
There are actually THREE different versions of the Decalogue in the biblical text: Exodus 20, Exodus 34, and Deuteronomy 5. Startlingly, the two variants in Exodus have almost nothing in common. This is not explained in the story, which says that they were both written by God and that the second version was only meant to replace the first pair of stone tablets destroyed in Moses’s fury over the Golden Calf. (“I will write on them the words that were on the first tablets,” God tells Moses in Ex. 34:1.) But why would God say they were the same commandments, and then swap out all but two?
All of Exodus 20’s ethical precepts, including “Thou shalt not kill” and “Thou shalt not steal,” are dropped from Exodus 34. The substitutions include laws about celebrating the holidays of Passover and Shavuot, and the basis for much of Jewish dietary practice, “Thou shalt not seethe a kid goat in its mother’s milk” (Ex 34:26). Deuteronomy 5 is closer to Exodus 20, retaining the ethical commandments, but it gives an alternate gloss on the importance of keeping the Sabbath that does not mention God’s six-day creation of the heavens and earth. Instead, it explicitly gives empathy for the working poor as the rationale, because “you were a slave in Egypt” (De 5:15).
Ancient rabbis were aware that something was terribly awry, and tried to patch up the contradictions through a process of commentary known as exegesis – a practice that began before the Common Era and went on for many centuries. But exegetical rationales for biblical incongruities, ingenious though they often were, couldn’t make it through the analytical sawmill that was the Enlightenment. That was when scientific reasoning and historical context began to be applied rigorously to religious texts.
Today, college students taking introductory bible courses learn early on in the syllabus about the “Documentary Hypothesis.” Proposed by the 19th Century German theologian Julius Wellhausen, it was the main theory to posit multiple authors for what we think of today as “the” Bible. I found out about the Documentary Hypothesis when I was in my 20s, from a Reconstructionist rabbi’s sermon.

Many Christian depictions of the Ten Commandments anachronistically use Roman numerals to indicate the precepts, such as this stained-glass window from Peterhouse College Chapel in Cambridge, England. Image credit: Steve Day via Flickr.
Wellhausen, considered the founder of a school of thought comparable to Sigmund Freud, characterized two of the biblical authors by how they tended to refer to the deity in the original Hebrew as either Yahveh, spelled “Jehovah” in German, or Elohim. The composition of Deuteronomy was done by someone else entirely, living centuries later, Wellhausen believed. And then there was a master editor who added many of the other commandments in Judaism, known as the Priestly redactor.
The Documentary Hypothesis has come in for a lot of criticism over the past half-century or so, a little like Freud’s theory of the unconscious: Few psychologists practicing today still subscribe to all of its tenets, but everyone sees the original work as foundational. For all the darts aimed at Wellhausen’s theory, most scholars since his work was published have explained the many discrepancies in the Bible by assuming it has multiple sources, several of which were transcriptions of even older oral traditions not far removed from the dawn of written narrative.
Once the strands of biblical authorship began to be teased apart, and archaeologists all over the Middle East started looking to confirm, deny, or approximately date some of the events in the stories, they started finding analogous documents in non-biblical sources. The most famous of these is the Code of Hammurabi, ascribed to the Babylonian king who reigned during the 17th century BCE. But there is a class of Sumerian, and later Hittite and Assyrian writings that share a number of breathtaking similarities with the Ten Commandments. So-called “suzerainty treaties” are covenants between Sumer and the city-states it had conquered, and several of them follow the same format as the Decalogue.
Michael Coogan, the Director of Publications for the Harvard Semitic Museum and a lecturer at Harvard’s Divinity School, explains the relationship between the Decalogue and suzerainty treaties in his book The Ten Commandments: A Short History of an Ancient Text. “Like other legal documents then and now,” he writes, “these treaties share a common template – boilerplate, in legal speak” (p. 14).

The late actor Charlton Heston solidified his stardom with the role of Moses in the 1956 Cecil B. DeMille epic, “The Ten Commandments.” As part of his promotion duties for the film, he participated in the unveiling of public displays of the tablets. One such display later became the subject of a Supreme Court case on the First Amendment filed by an atheist in the state of Texas. The above image is not a still from the film; it is a display at Mme. Tussaud’s wax museum in Hollywood. Image credit: Thank You (21Millions+) views on Flickr.
Dr. Yitzhaq Feder summed up the template succinctly in a piece for TheTorah.com:
- Historical prologue
- Presentation of the parties to the treaty
- Conditions of the treaty
- Witnesses
- Blessings and curses
To see how closely the Ten Commandments hew to the boilerplate, let’s look at the Deuteronomy 5 version, which Coogan dates to about the 7th-6th century BCE (p. 37). At the opening of the chapter, Moses reminds the Israelites of what happened on Mount Sinai. Then he quotes God, collapsing the “historical prologue” and “presentation of parties” into a single verse: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (De 5:6).
The “conditions of the treaty” are the commandments themselves. Mostly they are rules imposed by God on the Israelites, as would be appropriate for a conqueror, but they also involve obligations on the part of the suzerain to his vassals: “Honor your father and your mother, as the LORD your God has commanded you, so that your days may be long and that it may go well with you in the land that the LORD your God is giving you” (De 5:16). In return for honoring one’s parents, the sovereign will extend his subjects’ lives and enrich the yields of their farmland.
Normally the “witnesses” to a suzerain/vassal treaty would be the gods of the conquering and conquered parties. But for the Ten Commandments, the witnesses are the “whole assembly” of Israel as well as “the fire, the cloud, and the deep darkness on the mountain” (De 5:22).
As for the final section, “blessings and curses,” the curse of “visiting the iniquity of the fathers on their children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me” (De 5:9) is embedded within the conditions. But as a final blessing, God repeats the promise of a long and comfortable life in a home of one’s own in exchange for adhering to the conditions of the treaty: “You must walk in all the ways that the LORD your God has commanded you, so that you may live and prosper and prolong your days in the land that you will possess” (De 5:33).

An abstract depiction of the tablets in stained glass from 1857, designed by Heinrich Jan Van der Berg and J. & R. Lamb Studios. Image credit: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
The Ten Commandments follow the suzerain/vassal treaty template so closely, I ended up calling them “the Ten Conditions” in my novel Midbar. One of my twin protagonists, a young Israelite scribe named Aram, witnesses a debate among Moses’s Council of Elders about what the conditions of a treaty among the tribes should be. The general situation in Midbar, after the escape from Pharaoh’s forces, is one of political polarization among the followers of Moses and Aaron on the one hand and the followers of Korah on the other. So Moses comes up with the idea of the tribes themselves signing a treaty binding them together in vassalship to God. Aaron is in favor of ritual-based treaty conditions, like avoiding graven images, but others argue for the ethical commandments. And Korah declares that the root of all evil is envy, so he wants to forbid covetousness of one’s neighbor’s wife and property.
It was fun to imagine my character in the tent where it happens when a version of the Ten Commandments was drafted, but it’s not very likely that a scene like this ever took place. In fact, it’s extremely improbable. Coogan, who wrote the short history of the Ten Commandments, sees the Exodus 34 variant that emphasizes ritual over ethics as the oldest form of the Decalogue (p. 33). “We may even conclude that the idea of a Decalogue, of Ten Commandments, was ancient, but its form was variable – just as the Bill of Rights to the United States Constitution and the bills of rights in many state constitutions overlap but are not identical” (p. 34), he writes.
To those of us who share deep concerns over political polarization today, the idea of an assortment of historical Decalogues might bring up a question: Which is the version that has been the subject of so many Supreme Court decisions over public displays of the commandments (like the one in 1980, two in 2005, and the latest in 2009)?
The answer is: none of the above.
Coogan says that the variants at issue in these First Amendment cases are “severely abridged, stripped of the particulars that make [them] a very Israelite text” (p. 5). He “mischievously” suggests that, if the Ten Commandments are to be displayed in public spaces, “copies of the full text of all three versions of the Decalogue be posted in classrooms and other venues, to teach readers how the Bible was formed over time, and what that implies for its status as a supreme authority” (p. 34).
That’s kind of what I’m doing with my novels and with this blog, but not precisely. I’m a reform-minded Jew who considers the Hebrew Bible part of my personal cultural heritage, and I’ve never accepted the Ten Commandments’ authority over my life or my beliefs. For me, it’s all about identity. I’m figuring out my people’s place in history, and the impact of that history on my own place in the moment I am living right now.
If you’ve read this far, I suspect that you are, too.

Bonnie,
Thanx so much for sending me your blog. You may remember I am a Jew by Choice. So I want to share something from my experience. Of course I noticed inconsistencies as I read the Bible, before and after I converted. I like the fact that the Rabbis acknowledged the inconsistencies in the wording of some parts of the Bible, particularily Torah, and worked with them as a way God was using to communicate deeper nuances of meaning to humans reading God’s word. Fundamentalist Christians deny there are any inconsistencies at all. They prefer to deny reality rather than accept what is clearly in front of their eyes and deal with the deeper meanings “hidden” in God’s creation. So it was easy for me to chose Judaism, whose philosophers, the Rabbis, prefer to acknowledge all of reality .
Barbara G Louise (my nom-de-p]ume)
I’m so glad this post resonated with you, Barbara! I don’t know many “fundamentalist” Jews, but I’ll bet they aren’t that different from fundamentalist Christians, or fundamentalist any other religion, in terms of taking every word and letter of scripture literally and seeing inconsistencies as a sign of the worshipper’s lack of understanding or purity. My guess is that it’s the fundamentalism that’s at the root of the intolerance, not the Jewishness or Christianity of the fundamentalist.
Yeah, I really don’t like fundamentalism of any religion in the modern world. But recognizing and reading deeper meaning into “inconsistencies” was done by our early rabbis, was it not? And they, in their own time, were not Liberal, were they? They were bedrock Orthodox. I stand by my understanding that Christian scholars tend to ignore reality whenever it becomes any more complicated that straight-forward simple.
I read a comment by a “devout” Christian the other day that of course the “Liberal” nonsense that the Earth is Billions of years old, rather than 6000 — or is it the Universe — which is Trillions of years old? — is clearly false if it insists God took that long to make creation!
I guess we need to clearly define “fundamentalism.” My personal definition would be unfailingly negative.
I’d definitely agree with you that we need to clearly define “fundamentalism” – not to mention “Liberal” and “Orthodox,” which are pretty anachronistic in this context. I didn’t want to get deep into the weeds of what has lately become of the “Documentary Hypothesis” in this post, but the current trend is called the “Supplementary Hypothesis” and it says that a lot of the Torah was put together quite late – 7th-5th centuries BCE – and shows signs of being a battle not between Liberal and Orthodox traditions, but between rival priesthoods in the Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah. The point is that there’s an enormous amount we don’t know about the history of the Torah, and at the moment a lot of the scholarship is based on who is making the best argument for their position among the experts. For me, the amusing irony is that this is carrying on the EXACT tradition of the rabbis of old who wrote the Talmud, but with another set of assumptions.
Bonnie,
Thanx so much for sending me your blog. You may remember I am a Jew by Choice. So I want to share something from my experience. Of course I noticed inconsistencies as I read the Bible, before and after I converted. I like the fact that the Rabbis acknowledged the inconsistencies in the wording of some parts of the Bible, particularly Torah, and worked with them as a way God was using to communicate deeper nuances of meaning to humans reading God’s word. Fundamentalist Christians deny there are any inconsistencies at all. They prefer to deny reality rather than accept what is clearly in front of their eyes and deal with the deeper meanings “hidden” in God’s creation. So it was easy for me to chose Judaism, whose philosophers, the Rabbis, prefer to acknowledge ALL of reality .
Barbara G Louise (my nom-de-plume)so it is obvious “Louise” is my last ame
Pingback: Generations, not Centuries
Pingback: How to Escape from Pharaoh
Pingback: Calendars and Culture
Pingback: The Mountain of God
Pingback: Pithom and Ra’amses
Pingback: The Genesis of Judaism