The Ten (ish) Commandments

Dan McClellan The idea is basically you're paying money so that you don't have to sacrifice this animal or this child.

Dan Beecher "That's a nice donkey you got there. I'd hate for anything to happen to it. If you give us a little bit of money, well, we'll let it go."

Dan McClellan Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we seek to increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Dan Beecher It's grand.

Dan McClellan It's all Decalogue all the time today.

Dan Beecher And I'm having a screaming good time. It's a beautiful fall day here in Salt Lake City.

Dan McClellan Yep. It's commandments, commandments, commandments.

Dan Beecher That's right.

Dan McClellan You can rent the whole seat, but you'll only need the edge.

Dan Beecher Well, we've been hinting at it. We might as well just launch into our first segment, "It's the Law."

Dan McClellan "It's the Law," dang it.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan We're talking about the Ten Commandments today.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan That specific segment of the law, except we got a bit of a problem here.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Which is that which Ten Commandments are we talking about?

Dan Beecher Yeah. It's funny because there have been controversies in the last 10 years about people wanting to put the Ten Commandments up in a courthouse here in the United States, or in the state capital of Arkansas or whatever.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher And then people are like, "Yeah, no. Separation of church and state." But then what nobody's yelling about is, but which Ten Commandments, though? Which is funny, and you don't think that there could be any question about that until you look up the Wikipedia article on the Ten Commandments, and there's a table that's showing you who thinks what is which commandment and all sorts of stuff. And let me tell you something, they don't agree.

Dan McClellan Yeah. We've got several different verses, in fact, and in order to get 10 out of them, you have to combine some and divide some a little bit. And are you including the very first or the second verse of Exodus 20, if that's your Ten Commandments? Or is verse three the first, and is 10 about coveting all these things plus someone's wife, or is that a separate commandment? And then the biggest problem, though, I want to start off pointing out, though, is that Exodus 20, this is traditionally where we get the Ten Commandments from.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Right. It's nowhere referred to as the Ten Commandments.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And we get an almost identical list of laws in Deuteronomy 5. Again, nowhere referred to as the Ten Commandments. So, where are we getting this Ten Commandments title from? Well, it actually comes from another set of Ten Commandments that is found in Exodus 34. At the end of Exodus 34:28, and this is after the commandments are listed, you have this statement that Moses wrote all these things down. He wrote upon the tablets the words of the covenant, and then in Hebrew it says, "Aseret had'varim," which would be the 10 words.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan And in the ancient Greek translation of this, the Septuagint, it's dus dekalos, or the Decalogue.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan So, it's in later translations of this into other languages that we go from 10 words to 10 principles, 10 concepts, and then ultimately we get the Ten Commandments. Commandments, not a great translation of devarim, which just means words or issues, concepts. If it were mitzvot, that would be a little easier as commandments.

Dan Beecher Okay, so we've got our 10 words, but I think that if people are looking at Exodus 34, they're going to be surprised by- Yeah ... what the 10 words are.

Dan McClellan Yeah. It's missing what we generally associate with the Ten Commandments, which is our little listicle that we are so fond of quoting.

Dan Beecher But- Yeah, it's got you shall not make cast idols. That sounds familiar.

Dan McClellan That seems- Yeah ...

Dan Beecher in there. But then immediately after that is the commandment that everyone's familiar with, "You shall keep the Festival of Unleavened Bread."

Dan McClellan Yep.

Dan Beecher Which doesn't feel like one of the ones that Roy Moore wanted on the courthouse- ... back in the day.

Dan McClellan Yeah, and depending on where you start the Commandments in Exodus 34, which, by the way, are usually referred to by scholars as the Ritual Decalogue because it's a lot more focused on ritual and festival than it is on what we might label ethical issues.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So, a lot of people refer to what we find in Exodus 20 and in Deuteronomy 5 as the Ethical Decalogue, whereas here we have the Ritual Decalogue. But it starts off in verse 11, 34:11, if you're following along at home. God says, "Observe what I command you. I will drive out the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. Don't make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land to where you're going. It will become a snare among you. You got to tear down their altars, break their pillars, cut down their Asherim." And then parenthetically, we get this statement, "For you shall worship no other god because Adonai, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God." So, we're just kind of telling a bit of a story. It's commandments kind of embedded within God seemingly wagging their finger at the people of Israel.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan "And you will take wives from among their daughters for your sons, and their daughters who prostitute themselves to their gods will make your sons also prostitute themselves to their gods." So, it's kind of warning about all these things. Oh yeah, "Don't make cast idols." So suddenly, it's almost like they're pulling from the traditional Ten Commandments and just kind of sprinkling them in amidst these comments.

Dan Beecher Yeah, the first commandment, in this particular decalogue, feels very xenophobic.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher It's like, "Everybody else is bad. Only we are good. Also, no cast idols."

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Really.

Dan McClellan And, don't forget the Festival of Unleavened Bread and you get- Yeah, you can't forget that one ... a little explanation of when. And then we get into probably what is a secondary version of something that we find in the covenant code. And the term covenant code is something that scholars use to refer to Exodus 20, verse 22, so immediately following our traditional Ten Commandments, to Exodus 23, verse 33. And a lot of scholars consider this to be the oldest layer of legislative material in all the Hebrew Bible. And the language is a little idiosyncratic. It's kind of technical. It's basically an adaptation of some other ancient Southwest Asian law codes, and specifically, the laws of Hammurabi from about 1,000 years earlier. And a great book that discusses the relationship of the two is a book by David Wright called "Inventing God's Law." But in the covenant code, we have this commandment to sacrifice your firstborn child.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan The text literally says, "You will give them to me," and then immediately says, "And you'll do the same thing with the firstborn of your oxen and your sheep. They'll be with their mother for eight days, and then you will give them to me." And here- It's an awkward one. It's an awkward one. It's an awkward one. And we've talked about this one before- Yeah ... on the channel. Or on the podcast, excuse me.

Dan Beecher And- It's a channel.

Dan McClellan I don't know ... do podcasts have channels? Is it a channel?

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan I don't know.

Dan Beecher Who knows what anything means anymore?

Dan McClellan Yeah. You know none of this.

Dan Beecher Channel, it feels like it's an old-school TV reference, and that feels impossibly antiquated at this point.

Dan McClellan So, in Exodus 34, we have a similar statement, "All that first opens the womb is mine. All your male livestock, the firstborn of cow and sheep. Firstborn of a donkey, you will redeem with a lamb." So, we get into this idea of redemption, and then it says, "All the firstborn of your sons you shall redeem." And so, some scholars think the ritual decalogue is earlier than the Exodus 20- Mm ... ethical decalogue, and this is based on this idea that Israel kind of evolved from being more concerned with ritual and cult to being more concerned with ethics. This is kind of an outdated model that sees the prophetic literature as kind of proto-Protestant faith alone kind of material. And that trajectory is not taken too seriously by many scholars these days. Most would probably say Exodus 20 is earlier.

Dan Beecher Yeah, it seems hard to me to make the claim that redeeming your firstborn son is less ethical than sacrificing your firstborn son. Help me understand what redeeming means. I don't understand what redeeming... Like, redeeming a donkey with a lamb, I'm lost.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Does that mean we sacrifice the lamb because a donkey is too valuable to sacrifice? Or what?

Dan McClellan Yeah, the word there is padah in Hebrew, which means to buy out. And so the idea is this is owed, but you can exchange, rather than giving that, you can give money instead.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan So, you can buy it out. And so, the idea is basically you're paying money so that you don't have to sacrifice this animal or this child.

Dan Beecher "That's a nice donkey you got there. I'd hate for anything to happen to it." "If you give us a little bit of money, we'll let it go."

Dan McClellan Yeah, there are some parts of this that sound an awful lot like a shakedown. And it seems like just don't require the child to be sacrificed to begin with- Yeah ... and there would be no need for a redemptive stopgap. You would just not have to sacrifice the child.

Dan Beecher Hey. So- Look, the Lord works in mysterious ways.

Dan McClellan And, well, particularly when it comes to these commandments, because according to the narrative right before Exodus 34, the ritual decalogue, this is the second copy of the law, because Moses broke the original copy, and then God is going to reinscribe the exact same thing onto this second copy, but it doesn't really match up- ... with what we had in verse one.

Dan Beecher He forgot some stuff. That could happen to anybody.

Dan McClellan And there's an interesting commandment in here that I've always found fascinating. This is Exodus 34:23. "Three times in a year, all your males shall appear before Adonai," the deity, the God of Israel. And this is found in a couple of other places. It's found in Deuteronomy 16:16. We have references to it in places like Isaiah 1, I think it's verse 12, and elsewhere where it talks about how three times a year the males are going to go up to, and it's always translated appear before God. But, the funny thing is that in Isaiah's reference to it, we have the word for appear in the infinitive form, and the consonants of the text are not the right consonants for understanding this word to mean appear, which would be the passive form of the verb to see.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan The consonants indicate that the verb there is an active verb, and so do the prepositions, and just the syntax of the sentence indicates that, at least according to Isaiah, this commandment was not to appear before God, but to see the face of God. If you look in the Hebrew, it says et-penay Adonai or Ha-Adon or Eloah Yisrael, and this means literally, to the face of God. And according to the traditional understanding, reading it as a passive, it would be, be seen to the face of God.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan But, many scholars argue that that is a later alteration of what the text originally said, that it was intended to refer to seeing the face of God. And the idea here would be, you go to the temple, and you see the divine image, and that is gazing upon the face of God, which is something that in the Psalms and elsewhere, you have authors yearning for. When will I see your face?

Dan Beecher Considering that you've said that they found evidence of cannabis on the altars of the temple- ... maybe they did see the face of God. Maybe that was an interesting way of wording that.

Dan McClellan Yeah. It's that, and also, I put some Biscoff cookie butter and some Nutella together in a sandwich, and I saw the face of God. I'm going to tell you.

Dan Beecher That'll do it, man.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher That'll get you there.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And- You'll either see the face of God or have to deal with diabetes for a while. But one or the other.

Dan McClellan But no lighter required. So that's an interesting commandment that is probably reflective of this tradition that we find in Deuteronomy 16:16. So there are folks who think that some of Exodus 34 is reflecting a Deuteronomistic perspective, or at least is kind of riffing on a Deuteronomistic perspective. And I think this is one of the passages where we see that Deuteronomy 16:16 probably is the original version of that commandment.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan But yeah. And so this is a ritual commandment, and then your favorite prohibition- ... in the ritual decalogue is what?

Dan Beecher Look, it's just common sense. You can't boil a kid in its mother's milk.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Everybody knows that.

Dan McClellan There's not a lot of detail there.

Dan Beecher I assume we're talking about a goat in this case, not- Yes ... an actual child.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher Correct. You can't do that either.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher You can't boil a human kid in its- Yeah ... mother's milk either. But yeah, we're talking about goats.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And that's covered elsewhere. But- And there's not a lot of detail here, and we've had a lot of commentators over the millennia trying to figure out what on earth is the concern here, why is this a problem, and then how far does the scope of this prohibition extend? And so, this is the reason that anybody who offers to take a Jewish friend to Burger King might be surprised by what they do and don't order. But you will not find, on a lot of kosher menus, cheese being served with meat as a part of a hermeneutic extension of this issue right here. This is the origin.

Dan Beecher That comes from this- Yeah ...

Dan McClellan verse? Well, trying to contemplating what is the concern here and- Right ... and then whatever we identify as the concern, does that impact anything else that we're doing?

Dan Beecher So no dairy with meat comes from just not boiling a kid in its mother's milk.

Dan McClellan It is an extension of that, within a broader- That's interesting ... kind of hermeneutic context. But yeah, that's where- Wow ...

Dan Beecher that comes from.

Dan McClellan The idea being, don't cook meat and cheese or milk together.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher That really cuts out a lot of really delicious cuisine. I'm just going to say it.

Dan McClellan And then we get into verses 27 and 28. "The Lord said to Moses, 'Write these words. In accordance with these words, I've made a covenant with you and with Israel.'" And then we get at the very end, these are the Aseret Hadvarim, or the Ten Words. And so if you're going by what the text says, it seems like the Ten Commandments refer specifically to Exodus 24. We have no such statement in reference to Exodus 20 or in reference to Deuteronomy 5, so this should be what we're referring to. But this has not- But it's not.

Dan Beecher It's not.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher We know.

Dan McClellan Because Christianity took over the Hebrew Bible and decided we're going to rearrange things. We are going to figure out what we want to keep and what we don't want to keep. And primarily, this served their own structuring of power and values, so that they could do what they wanted to do and not feel bad because there's some commandment against this in the Hebrew Bible.

Dan Beecher I feel like it was a culinary choice. I feel like they wanted cheese and meat and- Well, that surprisingly- And they made some decisions based on that.

Dan McClellan There is an awful lot that has to do with culinary conventions.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan When we get into the Book of Acts, for instance, we have the idea of all foods being clean is a metaphor for taking the gospel to the Gentiles in the Book of Acts. But we have, at the end of the Jerusalem Council, in Acts 15, when they're trying to decide if things like circumcision are still going to be necessary for someone who joins Christianity, not from Judaism, but from the Gentile world. And when they get down to the end, they say, "Okay.

Dan Beecher Great.

Dan McClellan That settles it." We're only going to require four things. And this is like the four commandments of Christianity that resulted from the Jerusalem Council. They wrote a letter, they're sending it out to all the churches, and those four things are abstain from idolatry, from fornication, from eating blood, and from eating things strangled.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So you have idolatry and fornication, and then you have two prohibitions on eating certain types of food.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So we're carrying on part of this kind of ritual ceremonial ideology. But then you get Paul in Paul's own writings who are like, "None of that matters." Paul says, "We know that an idol is nothing in this world, and the only reason you should ever avoid eating meat sacrificed to idols is if it might scandalize one of your weaker brothers or sisters." And so Paul doesn't care about that. And when we look at how Christians interpret the Bible today, who do you think they side with? The Jerusalem Council who said Christianity has four commandments, these are they, or Paul who said, "Meh- Right ... let's just do the first two." They side with Paul.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And so now there aren't really any dietary restrictions for most Christianity. Even though if we go by a the Bible says so, that settles it ideology, the Bible explicitly and emphatically says Christians should not eat blood or things that have been strangled.

Dan Beecher And if you go back to the Hebrew Bible, which Christians still revere, you got a whole bunch of other things that they're- Yeah ... going to have to deal with, too.

Dan McClellan Yeah, and those get rationalized away in a variety of different ways. Some people- Yeah ... say, "Well, a law from the Hebrew Bible is only still in effect for Christians if it's repeated in the New Testament." Well, the whole blood thing is something that is in the Hebrew Bible and is emphatically repeated in the New Testament, and nobody cares about that anymore.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Other people say, "Well, there were ceremonial and moral laws, and so the ceremonial laws are done away with. The moral laws we keep." And then later they added a, "Oh, they're also civic laws."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And no such divisions are identifiable anywhere in the Hebrew Bible or in the New Testament. That is a second and third century Christian innovation.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan They said, "Well, we could say the ones we don't like are this, and the ones we do like are this." So these are much later rationalizations of why we should hold onto the things we want to hold onto, which for some reason have an awful lot to do with what other people are doing together in the privacy of their own beds or the backseat of their Chevy Novas or- Right ... whatever, and a lot less to do with things like what you're eating or who you're oppressing or who you're bombing.

Dan Beecher Or, yeah, or what to do when your ox falls in a hole. Yeah, picking and choosing seems to be the... There's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with each group, each person finding what rules, what laws make most sense to their ethics, but you've got to acknowledge that that's what you're doing at least.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And it's inevitable. You have to.

Dan Beecher The Bible- Yeah ...

Dan McClellan is not a consistent, unified, univocal text. And if you want to leverage it as something authoritative, then you are going to have to say, "We're listening to this side and not the other side." But yeah, I think people ought to acknowledge that that's what they're doing and have the cards on the table regarding the methodologies that we're using and be consistent about it. And unfortunately, that's not what usually happens. Because people want the authority of the Bible, which is the highest authority ever, nobody trumps the Bible, and so they're going to pretend that, well, this is what the Bible says.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Which is problematic.

Dan Beecher So we've talked a bit about picking and choosing. We've talked about the thing that the Bible calls the Ten Commandments. Let's zoom in on the thing that we all call the Ten Commandments- ... which is something totally different and has nothing to do with what's boiled in whose milk.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So we find the traditional Ten Commandments in Exodus 20, and then it's also repeated in Deuteronomy 5. It's mostly the same, but there are some small differences, and this is one of the reasons Deuteronomy 5 is generally ignored in favor of Exodus 20.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan So now we have what we understand today as the Ten Commandments, depending on what tradition you like and what text you like, because the different traditions and the different texts number them differently. And even if we go back to the Samaritan Pentateuch, which has a verse at the end that represents their 10th commandment, which is, "You shall set up these stones, which I command you today on Mount Gerizim."

Dan Beecher So because- Yeah, I was surprised to see that one. I was like, "Whoa, we got a whole- ... the Samaritans are coming in hot with their own thing.

Dan McClellan Okay." Yeah, which means they have to move everything down a commandment so that the 10th can be- ... this verse that is coming in. So their first commandment covers the first six verses of Exodus 20, and there are other traditions that agree with that as well. So when we line up what we have in the Septuagint, what we see quoted by early Jewish writers like Philo, what we have in the Targumim, what we have in the Syriac version what we- There's the Talmud. That's another- There's the Talmud, yeah We have a traditional Christian version. The different denominations within Christianity will divide it up a little differently as well. For instance, within Catholicism, you have verse two, which says, "I am Adonai, your God." That's a commandment, or part of the first commandment, according to Catholicism and the Talmud, but most don't consider that a commandment. They consider that kind of an introduction to- That's just an opening statement.

Dan Beecher Yeah. The preamble, if you will.

Dan McClellan Yeah. If you will, yes. According to the Talmud, or the second commandment is, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." So- Right ..."I am Adonai, your deity," is a self-contained single commandment, and then we move right on to commandment number two, which includes, "You shall have no other gods before me," and, "You shall not make any graven image." So these two are lumped together, whereas other traditions will divide them.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan "No other gods before me" is one commandment. "You shall not make any graven image" is a second commandment. And all these are efforts to make sure the number we arrive at is 10.

Dan Beecher So that- ...

Dan McClellan tradition that we have yanked from Exodus 34 and brought over to Exodus 20 is governing how we divide up these sense units, which I think is interesting. It's not letting the text operate on its own terms.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan It is imposing this interpretive lens upon the text, and it's not really changing a ton of things, but it is indicating that the tradition is what is most authoritative rather than the text itself.

Dan Beecher Yeah, because when I first read this, you've got Moses goes up on the mountain, and God says all of this stuff to Moses. There's nothing that indicates, "This is one commandment, and this is the next." As a matter of fact, the way that I'm used to seeing these presented is as succinct little nuggets, but it's not just, "You shall not make for yourself an idol." It's, "You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on earth beneath, or that is in the water underneath the earth." It goes on and on, and I had no idea that that was the case.

Dan McClellan Yeah, and that's because we're used to seeing them in kind of a condensed, abbreviated form.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan In fact, a lot of times you'll see people try to represent how this would've looked like on the tablets, and they just have this abbreviated Hebrew that isn't even complete sentences. But yeah, the "Don't make a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, on earth beneath, or that is in the water below," and this has been interpreted historically as a prohibition on just any representation of animals and humans and buildings and things like this, which is why you have kind of an aniconic tradition within Judaism.

Dan Beecher Yeah, I was going to ask you about that, but let's save that for the second segment- Yeah ... because I do want to get into that a little bit. Because that, when I first read it, it reads very differently in the King James Version versus the NRSV and RSV. I get those letters mixed up.

Dan McClellan But yeah.

Dan Beecher And then as I was reading it, not only does it not specify the number 10 or easily delineate out these different things, if you move on to the next chapter, a whole bunch more commandments appear. So it just feels- Yeah ... almost arbitrary that we've set aside this group and we've chopped it up to 10 when, looking at how these various traditions have cut it up and stuff- Mm-hmm ... you could easily have 12, and that would be defensible.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And you could have 12A, and then you could have- ... Exodus 34 would be your 10B or whatever- Yeah ... your JV squad of commandments. But within Judaism, I think the traditional number is 613 total commandments.

Dan Beecher Oh, wow.

Dan McClellan But they get reduced down to 10 because the 10 here tend to have this kind of generic ethical tone to them. And so as we get into the Greco-Roman period and early rabbinic period, you have a desire to kind of systematize, distill things down to underlying principles. And so the Ten Commandments kind of encapsulate everything else that we find. And then we go even further, and in the New Testament, and this is something you see within Greco-Roman period Judaism as well, it gets distilled down to the two greatest commandments, love God and love your neighbor. And if you look at the first few commandments, this is about your relationship with God. If you look at the last five, six, however you number them, those are about your relationship with your neighbor. And so we've further distilled it down to just two commandments. All of the law and all the prophets hang on these two commandments as a way to say, "We've got our 613, and then we can whittle that down and down and down to 10, and we can even whittle it down further to two."

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan So it's a way of consolidating what we find in there, and they function as kind of marquees, or they function as proxies for the more detailed commandments that we find elsewhere.

Dan Beecher Excellent.

Dan McClellan But yeah, I find it interesting when you look at these Ten Commandments, you find both ceremonial and moral- ... uh, commandments. So, this later idea that, oh, everything that's moral is still in force, everything that's ceremonial has gone away, would kind of, uh, tear apart the Ten Commandments, but folks don't like to do that.

Dan Beecher Yeah. That's true. Don't chop it up like that.

Dan McClellan No.

Dan Beecher The Six Commandments. We'll just whittle it down to the Six Commandments.

Dan McClellan Seven. Seven chipmunks sitting on a branch eating lots of, what is it?

Dan Beecher Peanuts?

Dan McClellan On a branch.

Dan Beecher I don't, I do not know what reference you're making.

Dan McClellan You know that old tale from the season. Listeners will get that reference.

Dan Beecher Um- I'm sure. I'm sure somebody- Yeah ... knows what you're talking about.

Dan McClellan One thing I find interesting is that Philo, uh, is a Greco-Roman period Jewish philosopher and writer. Uh, and Philo changes the order, uh, of the thou shall nots, uh, once we get to you shall not kill, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal. Philo puts committing adultery the first- Hmm ... and says, "You shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not kill." And comments that the idea of adultery for him is kind of foundational to the rest of the law, that everything else is kind of encapsulated in this because he's kind of analogizing, uh, and metaphorizing what's going on here. So, switches up the order a little bit to serve his own, uh, rhetorical interests.

Dan Beecher Interesting.

Dan McClellan That's a- Hmm ... it seems like a sneaky move, uh- ...

Dan Beecher to just flop things around, but okay.

Dan McClellan Well, yeah, and that's not the only time that Philo, uh, fiddles with the text a little bit and says, "Hey, let's move this over here. Let's move this thing over here."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan That Philo.

Dan Beecher And even- He's such a fiddler, that guy.

Dan McClellan Tradition. Um, and then, uh, Josephus kind of retells a lot of the biblical narrative as well, and does similar things, uh, moving things around. Uh, and in the Targumim, uh, the Aramaic paraphrases of the Bible, uh, they do the same thing in order to try to make it a little more relevant, in order to gloss over inconsistencies, in order to harmonize things. So this is not something that was unheard of at the time. And for folks like Philo, the text was not the locus of the authority, and so the text was not inviolable.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan It was the ideas, and the text was just an iteration, a materialization of the ideals, but the authority was located in those concepts, not in their textual manifestation.

Dan Beecher Well, that just sounds crazy. Well, it's- You're saying that the ideas are the most important thing instead of just sort of whatever the words say? That seems nuts.

Dan McClellan Yeah, imagine that. But today we think of the text as, like, our guarantor that this is how the idea was articulated. But anciently, uh, the authority was opposite. The idea was most important, uh, because these are primarily oral cultures. These are cultures where most of the information was being exchanged orally rather than through text, and so that was just what was considered to be most authoritative.

Dan Beecher Interesting.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And you see kind of the transition toward the text within early Christianity in the first and second centuries. That's where you see a lot of this kind of switching, where it's no longer the words of Jesus, but the writings about Jesus, because, uh, the graphi, uh, were considered subordinate to the- The scriptures were considered subordinate to the words of Jesus because they were living words. The scriptures were dead letters.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And then as you get a few generations away from Jesus, and there's not really a plausible case to make that you have heard the words of Jesus directly from Jesus or from one of his followers, suddenly, "We need to write these things down."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Um- "This needs to be less living.

Dan Beecher Less living."

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And so then we get the gospels, then we get, uh, things being written down. Uh, although the agrapha, the unwritten things, still have authority for a couple generations, but eventually they go away as well, and the text becomes the locus of authority within Christianity. Well, I think this is all great.

Dan Beecher I'm loving it. Let's move on to our next segment, uh, so that we can actually zoom in and talk about at least the first few of these, uh, commandments- Sounds good ... with a chapter and verse.

Dan McClellan All right. So I assume the chapter we're going to be doing is Exodus 20, since, I mean, those are the real Ten Commandments.

Dan Beecher Since you already rejected the other one. You already told us they were wrong.

Dan McClellan Poor Deuteronomy. Ah, poor Deuteronomy.

Dan Beecher So, yeah. So, one of the reasons why I thought that it would be a good idea to talk about, uh, what most people consider the first four commandments in the 10, in our top 10- Okay ... uh, is because it's the part that is kind of non-transferable, non-translatable. Uh, so when somebody... Like, this is the part that most people, secular people like me, when someone like Roy Moore wants to put the Ten Commandments on the courthouse wall, these are the parts that don't apply to me. Like, I'm down with thou shalt not kill.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher That's fine. Some of the other things, you'd have to convince me why coveting is so bad, but okay.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher But then there are these, and they're very, very specific to the audience, uh, for which they were written, and they're also very, uh... There's a couple of them that I think aren't as cut and dry- As people want them to be, as Roy Moore would make them out to be.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher So I'm excited to get into these.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Talk to us about what we got here.

Dan McClellan So I remember in the movie, oh gosh, I watched it with my kids a year ago, and they were like, "This is awful." The Zorro with Antonio Banderas.

Dan Beecher Even your kids rejected it?

Dan McClellan Oh, man. They like the second one better, which I don't get. But, there's a part where he's hiding out in the church, and she comes in to do confession, and it's Antonio Banderas on the other side of the screen. And she says, "I've broken the fourth commandment." And he goes, "Did you kill somebody?" And she goes, "No, Father, that is not the fourth commandment." And I remember, she says she dishonored her mother and father or something like that. And I went and looked it up and I was like, "One, two, three, four."

Dan Beecher Right?

Dan McClellan "One, two, three." I was like, "This doesn't seem to me to be the fourth commandment." For some traditions it's the fifth, for others, it's the fourth.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan We'll throw it in, just because- Sure ... I think it is interesting what's going on in this particular commandment.

Dan Beecher Well, and if Banderas says it's so, then it must be so.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Who am I to contradict?

Dan Beecher If no less an authority than the Zorro movie- Yeah ... is claiming this, we'll honor it.

Dan McClellan And he's Puss in Boots, too.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Although I don't know that there's a reference to the Ten Commandments in Shrek and Puss in Boots. So in order to get the fourth commandment to be honor thy father and thy mother, the first commandment has to be two things. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make any graven images for yourselves. And the have no other gods before me is an interesting one. A lot of folks will point out right off the bat, this seems to suggest that there are other gods out there.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But this is making kind of ambiguous use of this word for God, Elohim. Because anciently, you use the word to refer to the deity itself, wherever it may be located and whatever form it may take, but you also use the word to refer to any material indices or material manifestations of that deity. So an idol, a divine image, could be referred to as a god. And so you see this kind of pejoratively, you see mockingly, idols referred to as gods. "Ooh, he's got his gods with him." And that's kind of rejecting the fact that they're gods. But then within the biblical text, the narrative also refers to idols, and divine images, teraphim, and things like that, as gods in kind of an unironic, totally straightforward way. So the Bible itself seems to refer to divine images as gods. And so we could interpret this to mean, you will not have any gods in the sense of divine images. And then the before me, actually in Hebrew is al-panai, which means over or against my face. And so one way to interpret this is to mean, in our Holy of Holies, where you have my divine image set up, you won't have any other gods on the other side of the room. You won't have any other divine images in front of me, across from me, by me. That's one way to interpret it.

Dan Beecher I just don't like looking at them. It's fine for you to have them, I just don't want to see them.

Dan McClellan Yeah. "Get them away from me, kid. They bother me."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan If we understand this to be primarily a commandment about worship, and it obviously is, then this has to do with the cultic centers and the sacred precincts. And in the sacred precincts, you had benches and rooms where you set up divine images. And this is true of the Israelites as well. We have uncovered Judahite temples that contain bench rooms and places where we have found different kinds of divine images. We have found, at Arad, the Holy of Holies that had a standing stone set up in the Holy of Holies and had two incense altars in front of it. And so the earlier we go in time, the more and more sense to me it makes to understand this to mean, don't put any other divine images in my Holy of Holies. So it's kind of a- But would that...

Dan Beecher Sorry.

Dan McClellan Go ahead.

Dan Beecher Would that mean that it would be okay to have other divine images, Asherah poles, for example, outside of the Holy of Holies?

Dan McClellan So this is an interesting question. It depends on what you think the scope of the commandment is. Because we could say, "Not in this room," but you could also understand that to mean, you're not supposed to do this at all. But it might not. We don't get any vilification of the Asherah poles until the seventh century BCE with Josiah and Josiah's campaign of cult centralization, where it's not just Baal who's being demonized. And Baal is being demonized because Baal is the direct competitor to Adonai as the Northwest Semitic storm deity with home court advantage. And so prior to Josiah, it seems like they were worshiping Asherah as the consort, the partner of Adonai, of the God of Israel. So it depends on when you date this. This does not go back to Moses.

Dan Beecher This is- Right ...

Dan McClellan eighth, seventh, maybe ninth century BCE. And so if this predates Josiah, they might've been like, "Eh, not worried about Asherah."

Dan Beecher So it's a plausible interpretation of this commandment That it just means, "Yeah, go ahead and worship other gods, but like, not in my room."

Dan McClellan Yeah. That is a plausible interpretation. However, when we get to the next commandment, or actually, Commandment 1B, "You shall not make any graven images of them."

Dan Beecher Oh, right.

Dan McClellan That seems like that is kind of cutting that off.

Dan Beecher It does. Never mind.

Dan McClellan You're right. That seems like a very big no on that one.

Dan Beecher Although it says, "Make for yourself" in this one. And man, the wording is so different, bro, between like the KJV and the NRSV.

Dan McClellan It is.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And, let's see, we got lo ta'aseh-lekha pesel. So do not make for yourself or to yourself pesel, which is an idol, a graven image, or any t'munah, which would be a form, image, likeness, which is in the heavens above, and which is in the earth beneath, and which is in the seas beneath the earth, or yeah, the waters beneath the earth. And so the question then becomes, is Commandment 1B, does that originate at the same time as Commandment 1A, or does it come afterwards? Is it expanding the scope of Commandment 1A, or is it clarifying the way it was always understood? Was it always there? We don't have enough data to answer that question.

Dan Beecher I want to stop on the graven image thing because I don't know what it means.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher I don't know what a graven image is, really.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher The NRSV has, "You shall not make for yourself an idol." It doesn't use the term graven image. But the other thing is that it seems like it says, "No pictures." That's what it feels like it says to me- Yeah ... is you're not allowed to make pictures. And I know the Muslims have prohibitions against, or used to have prohibitions against any imagery. Now it's sort of been interpreted to mean at least you can't make images of Allah. But, if you go into the Alhambra or something in Spain, you'll see very pretty writing because they want it to be decorative, but no portraiture of any kind, no paintings of any kind. So could this be a prohibition against paintings, against imagery?

Dan McClellan Well, it seems unlikely in light of the fact that we have a commandment as they're building the tabernacle and later the temple, to create images of cherubim- Oh ... to adorn the walls of the temple, which ostensibly are things that occupy the heavens.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So this is a point of contention. It's all about what the scope of this commandment is, because if it means in that Holy of Holies, then the cherubim would not be a violation of that. Well, shoot, I don't remember if the cherubim are inside the Holy of Holies.

Dan Beecher At least- This is very confusing.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Grr.

Dan McClellan So graven means engraved.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So something that is carved, chiseled, cast. So it has to do with a divine image that has been produced. That's the whole idea there. Whether it is something that is cast or carved or however you are going to do it, tatted, you don't want any such images being produced. And whether or not this means don't make anything that is conventionally used in worship, like don't make a deity, whether it's in the skies, whether it's in the seas beneath the earth, whether it's on the earth, don't make that thing, or whether it's don't make anything at all, is not clear from the text itself, and is not clarified by the context given that we're making images of other things later on. And then within Greco-Roman period Judaism and late antique Judaism, you have a tradition of including a lot of imagery in mosaics. The altar that was found in Magdala, in the synagogue there, depicts the temple and depicts other things like that. It's not depicting a bunch of deities or anything like that, at least not in this part of town. The Dura-Europos synagogue is doing those kinds of things. And so the history of interpretation is mixed, but I don't think we can delineate a clear scope based just on the text alone.

Dan Beecher All right.

Dan McClellan Unfortunately.

Dan Beecher That's very confusing, but well, I guess we'll just keep going.

Dan McClellan And then, in verse five says, "You will not bow down to them or serve them." Two different verbal roots that are conventionally translated worship, "For I, Adonai your God, am a jealous God." And here we have the accurate use of the word jealous.

Dan Beecher Well, I'm not going to be a prescriptivist, but- I was going to say, are you defining things, Dan?

Dan McClellan No, no. So the word jealous, a lot of people use jealous to mean envy, which is fine. I do it all the time. But I used to get harassed a lot by people who'd be like, "Jealous doesn't mean envy. Jealous means you have something, and you don't want anybody else to have it either, or to take it from you," or something like that. But that's exactly what this means. God has your worship and does not want you worshiping anyone else.