The Ten Commandments: A Moral Code?
God was distracted on the day he wrote the Ten Commandments. How else can you explain the mediocre quality of the product? Oh, he got some good stuff in there, all right—like thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, and thou shalt not commit adultery. But wouldn’t you know, when you’re called upon to carve something really important into a stone tablet—something like a moral code to guide the conduct of millions of people for millennia and beyond—you’re going to forget something.
Oops!
And God did. He left out “Thou shalt not assault thy neighbor.” So as it stands, you can ambush and beat your neighbor mercilessly, attack him (or her) with a knife, club, or sharp stick, poke his eyes out, disfigure and dismember him, pour salt in his wounds, and leave the poor guy writhing in agony and crippled for life, and as long as he doesn’t actually die, you’re off the hook. Not a word in the Ten C’s would find fault with your behavior. That seems to be a rather serious omission.
Sexual assault is OK, too, with one exception. You can rape a single girl, or a child, but if you rape your neighbor’s wife, that’s adultery, and God has that covered. It doesn’t even have to be rape; even if it’s consensual sex—she belongs to your neighbor and that’s that. Actually, God has it covered twice if you also covet your neighbor’s wife. I’m not sure why that neighbor’s-wife thing required redundant coverage. Wouldn’t ruling out coveting pretty much cover adultery, too? Oh, I suppose there’s a difference, and that if you can argue that you had no sexual interest in your neighbor’s wife when you raped her, and you were thinking about how to lay tile in your bathroom, then you are guilty on only the count of adultery. But it’s best to stick to single girls. They’re fair game on both counts. It’s always open season on single girls by Ten Commandment rules.
Surely God didn’t intend to leave out the assault commandment. It must have been an oversight. They’re probably still ribbing him about it in heaven.
Words, Words, Words
Or maybe there just wasn’t enough room on the stone tablets to cover everything, even by, for example, adding just two words to say, “Thou shalt not kill or harm.” But then why go into such wordy detail as to say, in the King James version, Exodus 20, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s?” And this is all just about coveting—a state of mind, not a deed. Actual theft warrants only a brief “Thou shalt not steal.” No mention of oxen, asses, maidservants, and the like. Are we to conclude that coveting something that belongs to your neighbor is a more serious crime than actually stealing it? Or do we just have a case of really bad writing, in any language?
And it gets worse. Compare the fourth commandment with the sixth, in the King James version. Commandment 4 carefully spells out every contingency, leaving very little room for interpretation or hedging, and even explaining the historical background. “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.” Ninety-four words in English. That one must have used a lot of tablet space.
Now compare it to the sixth: “Thou shalt not kill.” That’s it. Four words. Seems pretty simple and absolute. But is it? There are said to be some significant exceptions allowed by God, including killing of innocent young men in warfare, self defense, defense of the lives or well-being of others, defense of important property, killing of serious sinners and law-breakers, abortion of fetuses, withholding or withdrawing lifesaving treatment to the hopelessly ill, and others. Which of these are allowed, and which are not? Wouldn’t a few more words to clarify God’s intent have been helpful here? Is working on the Sabbath so much more serious than killing that it warrants a vastly more complete treatment? Or is this just bad writing again?
Goddam Scriveners!
Now one can argue, of course, that while God inscribed the tablets, the Bible was written by a number of other authors and subsequently translated and copied by still others, so perhaps God wasn’t the bad writer. Maybe someone else screwed it up badly, adding all kinds of extra words into some commandments, abbreviating others, and completely forgetting some.
If so, that’s important to know, because there are many who believe that the Bible is divinely inspired and has no mistakes. And, indeed, if the Bible is to be our ultimate authority on moral precepts, it ought to be pretty accurate when listing them. The Commandments were a pretty important list, and warranted some careful proof-reading by someone.
So let’s assume that God didn’t allow any mistakes. Then how do we account for the fact that the Catholic version doesn’t include the very wordy second commandment of the Protestant and Hebrew versions—the one about graven images? It’s quite long—with 91 English words according to Protestants and 101 according to Jews—but it doesn’t even exist in the Catholic version. The Catholics still end up with ten commandments, however, by splitting the last one, about coveting, into two commandments—one dealing with the neighbor’s wife and another with the neighbor’s other property. Splitting is OK, I guess, but what about the graven images? Did the Catholics wrongfully omit that one, or did the Protestants and Jews wrongfully include it? Is it one of God’s commandments that he inscribed on the stone tablets, or isn’t it? We’re in trouble if it is, of course, because it outlaws making a “likeness of any thing that is in the heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” Fortunately, a “graven image” is generally understood to mean a statue or other sculpture, not a two-dimensional painting, drawing, or the kind of color-crayon artwork most parents attach to their refrigerator door. But beware the modeling-clay images of people, or dogs or cats, or even trees and houses—really anything except fire-breathing dragons and unicorns. These latter are OK because they don’t really exist in the heaven, on the earth, or in the water. You can go to hell for sculpting anything real. Unless you’re Catholic, of course.
Now why don’t Catholics find themselves in continuing debates with Protestants and Jews about the morality of these images, including crucifixes? It’s simple—nobody pays any attention to that commandment, anyway. The graven image commandment is never cited except with a snicker, and the one about not working on the Sabbath is routinely ignored by all but the most devoutly orthodox Christians and Jews. So do those commandments qualify as part of the Christian and Hebrew moral code, or don’t they? They are, after all, by far the wordiest commandments in both the Protestant and Hebrew versions, contributing more words than all of the other commandments combined. God must have thought they were important, unless he just started scratching on the tablet and couldn’t stop. Can we just ignore them because we don’t agree with him about their importance, or because we’ve decided that they probably don’t apply anymore?
It Don’t Matter
Maybe we can. The truth is, very few of us, even the most devout, ever look to the Ten Commandments as a source of moral guidance, anyway. Oh, sure, some of the commandments, such as the short ones that prohibit killing, stealing, adultery, and perjury, are observed by Christians and Jews as widely as they are observed by Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and atheists, but not because they are listed among the Ten Commandments. They are just reasonable rules of conduct in any civilized society. And so are prohibitions against violent assault and rape. Christians and Jews don’t consider themselves morally exempt from those two prohibitions just because they didn’t make the cut for inclusion in the Ten Commandments.
Another that didn’t make the cut is dishonesty and lying, except for bearing false witness against thy neighbor. There’s nothing in the Ten Commandments that prohibits lying about ourselves, our accomplishments, our intentions, the investments we are promoting, or whether the check is in the mail. Honesty is apparently not a moral issue as long as we don’t defame our neighbor. But still we understand that it really is, and that dishonesty in general is inconsistent with any reasonable moral code, so we invariably include some kind of honesty requirement in our personal moral code.
There is also nothing that requires us to honor, respect, and be nice to other people, except to “honor thy father and thy mother.” Not our spouses, our children, our siblings, our friends, our employees, or people we meet in the course of the day. But does that stop us from honoring and offering our respect and courtesy to a variety of people as a part of a reasonable moral code? Of course not. In fact, as regards “thy father and thy mother,” today we usually expect a man to stand by his wife, not his mother, when there is an in-law conflict between them. How do we square this with the Lord’s very specific commandment to honor one’s parents, with no mention of one’s wife? The truth is, we don’t even try to square it; we just ignore the commandment when it doesn’t seem to express our view of what’s right in a particular situation. No sweat.
So the Chicken Begat the Egg?
In short, our moral code is not based on the Ten Commandments at all, and probably never was. It’s more likely that most of the Ten Commandments were based on certain common pre-existing moral precepts of the time. Murder, theft, and adultery were almost certainly considered crimes long before Moses presented the tablets to his followers, which may explain why only four or five words (in English translation) were considered sufficient for each. Bearing false witness against thy neighbor was no doubt also a pre-existing crime or at least a moral error, and therefore was allocated only nine words. What may have been new, and therefore required more words, were the first four commandments (three for Catholics), which have nothing to do with moral relationships between people. They prohibit (1) worshiping other gods, (2) making graven images, (3) taking the name of the Lord in vain, and (4) working on the Sabbath. The second and fourth are routinely ignored, as I have pointed out, and the third (the name of the Lord) is violated so often that most people consider cursing just a minor infraction of good manners. And the first (worshiping other gods) is arguably repudiated by the hallowed first amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees, in both letter and spirit, our legal right to violate the first commandment if we choose to.
The truth is that we accept the Ten Commandments only to the extent that they agree with our own sense of right and wrong. Most of us will fix the car or work at a task of some sort on the Sabbath or even work for pay if we need the money, and we let our kids use Play-Doh without supervision and admonishments about graven images, but we don’t go around beating up on people and raping unmarried women or children with no pangs of guilt just because the commandments don’t prohibit it.
In other words, although we might sometimes find it rhetorically convenient to cite a commandment when it seems to express our own sense of right and wrong in a particular situation, we don’t look to the commandments as a source of moral guidance at all. Remember “thou shalt not kill?” Even the most devoutly religious born-again Christians, unless they are pacifists, will support killing people who may be every bit as moral, as innocent, and even as Christian as they themselves are, just because they happen to wear the wrong army’s uniform. Defending our nation, which isn’t mentioned in the Ten Commandments, or even a minor military operation in a distant land always trumps the Sixth Commandment. Except, that is, in the view of those pesky liberal pacifists who try to treat the commandment as some kind of absolute mandate. The rest of us work fairly comfortably with the situational ethics of killing, and most American religious conservatives generally have no problem with that. In fact, some are more likely to find fault with the “liberal” pacifists’ absolute refusal to kill enemy soldiers. Sometimes patriotism trumps all.
You Had To Have Been There
But maybe some of the apparent mistakes in the Ten Commandments aren’t really mistakes after all — maybe they just reflect the moral culture of that time. For example, consider the way the Commandments, except for the Catholic version, prohibit coveting thy neighbor’s wife in the same breath with coveting his house, his manservant, his maidservant, his ox, his ass, and anything that is thy neighbor’s. Evidently, the problem with this “coveting” has nothing to do with sinful lust. It’s about wanting what rightfully belongs to your neighbor. Just as in the adultery commandment, the crime was in wanting or taking the property of your (male) neighbor. The victim is not the house or the wife or the maidservant or the ox; it is the (male) neighbor, because his property rights are being violated. Is it therefore part of God’s eternal laws that women should forever be chattel with no important rights of their own? Is this a reasonable moral law for the 21st century? Maybe it isn’t just the writing, but also the morality behind the writing, that really needs to be brought up to date.
Ouch! Could the 10 C’s represent a dated morality that was once appropriate to its culture and circumstances, but is now out of date and even immoral in some respects? Can you even say that and not be struck by lightning?
Maybe the 10 C’s were never intended as a general moral code, but rather to address specific issues that were unclear to the Jews at that time and place, and not fully bought-into by them. Maybe that’s why the Commandments jump right off the bat into anti-competitive rules denouncing the worshipping of false gods and the making of the cursed graven images. The whole thing starts out, remember, “I am the Lord thy God…,” as though that is the most crucial point to be made, not how the average Joe should behave in polite company.
Everyone already knew you shouldn’t kill wantonly, or steal, or spit on your parents. There was no need to dwell on the obvious and go into ponderous detail on what was not at issue at the time. The 10 C’s skimmed lightly over the basic rules of morality, and even skipped some of them entirely, and that was probably OK under the particular circumstances confronted by Moses. No one at that time and place was claiming the moral right to steal or beat up his neighbor, but issues of leadership and faith were front and center. It is in this context as a response to a situation, not as a comprehensive guide to moral behavior for all time, that the Ten Commandments make sense. They gave Moses the script for a powerful performance as the Sheriff standing at the jail house door confronting a lynch mob, or as a General inspiring his war-weary troops to go into battle one more time. They were obviously successful.
In summary, the Ten Commandments fail, quite badly, the quality test for a useful moral code and perhaps were never intended to be one, and accordingly they are seldom, if ever, really used as a source of moral guidance (rather than a conditional affirmation) by any significant number of people. It is our own internal sense of morality that controls, augmented sometimes by a common community moral consensus or civil law. Whenever there is a conflict between the Ten Commandments and our own sense of right and wrong, as there frequently is, we always accept our internal sense and reject or ignore the Commandments, and seldom feel a need to explain our choice. We may not even be aware of a difference. Very few of us actually think about the Ten when confronted with a complex real-life issue involving love, marriage, our job, our children, our society. We refer to our own internal moral compass for guidance. Then maybe we cite a supportive Commandment as an afterthought, if we feel that’s necessary.
So what, then, is the source of this internal sense of morality and our pretty-much common community moral consensus?
Hold that thought, because we’re not quite ready for it yet. Before we address it, we first need to consider whether the written word of God might still be the source of our morality, but in the sense of the entire Bible rather than just the Ten Commandments. Even though the 10 C’s, by themselves, are inadequate as a moral code, maybe the larger document in which they are imbedded provides a more complete basis for our moral sensibilities.
We’ll look at that possibility next Friday.
