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Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go Josh 1:9 |
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Dear
Friend,
If you do not already have a habit of gathering daily manna the first thing in the morning (we can look at the example given to us in Exodus 16 and find the pattern for make it a habit. Establish your life and your schedule to allow you the necessary time to do your daily collection first thing every morning to give you the strength to make it through the day. And remember that today’s manna will not be sufficient for tomorrow; tomorrow’s manna must be collected tomorrow morning. Sunday, November 8, 2026
Today's Passage : Today's Passage :What Ten Commandments? Bible Verse :Exodus 34:1-2, 27-28 "Now the Lord said to Moses, “Cut out for yourself two stone tablets like the former ones, and I will write on the tablets the words that were on the former tablets which you shattered. So be ready by morning, and come up in the morning to Mount Sinai, and present yourself there to Me on the top of the mountain. * * * Then the Lord said to Moses, “Write down these words, for in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel.” So he was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights; he did not eat bread or drink water. And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant, the Ten Commandments." Message:
It may shock some people, but the Bible does not really tell us what the Ten Commandments are. What we call the Ten Commandments are certainly laws God wants us to follow, so they are “good Scripture.” We know God engraved ten fundamental matters on stone tablets. But the neat package of ten fundamental laws are the product of a lot of supposition and interpretation. (And in fact, Protestant and Catholic churches give somewhat different versions!)
We must start our discussion with two ancient Hebrew words: mitzvah and ha-dibrot. Mitzvah is the Hebrew word for law or commandment. Ha-dibrot is the Hebrew word for “word”, and this produces our first problem in translating the ten commandments: the term used in Exodus and Deuteronomy is the ten ha-dibrot. And in fact, the Greek Bible and the earliest English Bibles translated the term “The Ten Words” (Greek — dekalogos) or “The Ten Verses” (Tyndale and Coverdale).
Ten Words Moses on stone
So, Moses’ tablets might have contained only ten words or short phrases. We see this possibility in paintings, sometimes.
What we commonly call the Ten Commandments comes from Deuteronomy 5. It is a straightforward and understandable passage. We call them the Ten Commandments, because we can pretty well divide the laws of Deut. 5 into ten statements, and we know from another passage that God (twice) gave Moses ten ha-dibrot, “and no more,” which he wrote on two tablets of stone.
Here's the rub. The only time “ten words” is mentioned in Exodus (as opposed to Deuteronomy) is in Exodus 34, and the laws stated in Exodus 34 are quite different from the commandments of Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5. (The term “ten commandments,” referencing words written on stone tablets, is also used in Deut. 4 and Deut. 10.)
If we decided that the Ten Commandments were the laws God gave Moses in the passage where they are mentioned, they would look like this! The Ten Commandments as Stated in Exodus 34.
We thus have conflicting, confusing, and possibly inconsistent accounts. Christian scholars over the ages have probably done well to set down the Deuteronomy version and call it the “Ten Commandments.” The Bible, taken as a whole, seems to indicate that if we are to set aside ten laws and call them “the Ten Commandments,” the Deuteronomy version — the one with which most Westerners are familiar — must win the battle. It is clearer and it harmonizes almost perfectly with the words spoken by God directly to the Hebrew people, as recounted in Exodus 20.
Proto-Hebraic scroll
ca. 800 B.C. Proto-Hebraic scroll ca. 800 B.C. See Full-size Even once we decide that Deut. 5 contains the ten words mentioned in Deut. 4, there are no numbers and no paragraphs to tell us where one ends and another starts. Hebrew is not full of line breaks and punctuation. And, in fact, different churches have different numbering! Notably (although in totality, the content is pretty much the same) the Catholic Bible, Jewish Bible, and Protestant Bible are all numbereddifferently. We don’t need to change our understanding of the Ten Commandments for practical worship and spiritual guidance. Whichever version you use is fine. It is God’s word. But I hope readers will take the time to actually read Exodus as we go through it. I, for one, find that the complexity and even confusion deepens my appreciation of the covenant between the Lord and the Hebrews, and especially the miracle of such an ancient document, recorded in so much detail, in a language and alphabet so primitive (proto-Hebraic) that we could barely translate it today. (Note that the scroll in the illustration was written 500 years after the original of Exodus!) Meditation : Prayer : Oh Heavenly Father, in whom I live and move and have my being, I humbly pray you so to guide and govern me by your Holy Spirit, that in all the joys, occupations, and cares of this day I may never forget you, but remember that I am ever walking in your sight. In Christ’s name, I pray, Amen. |
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