The Ten Commandments 1-3 By Enda Conlon The ten commandments of the traditional Catholic catechism are a summary of  Exodus 20 1-14 and Deuteronomy 5: 6- 18. These passages essentially replicate each other. The passages describe how Moses ascended a smoke covered Mt. Sinai to receive the commandments from God while the people waited at the foot of the mountain. The commandments were written on two tablets of stone which were stored in the Ark of the Covenant. The Ark – a sort of portable chest -  was stored in a special shrine – “the holy of holies”  - in the temple of Solomon. The Ark was lost during the Babylonian exile and there was no Ark in the holy of holies of the second Temple.  The “ten commandments” are also known as the Decalogue (or 10 words) . In Judaism the Decalogue is thought of as a summary of a more elaborate set of 613 commandments (or mitzvot) , and some esoteric strands of Jewish piety attach significance even to the fact that the digits of 613 add up to 10.  The 10 commandments are numbered differently in the Jewish , Eastern Christian and Western Christian traditions. Anglicans and Lutherans follow the Western Christian tradition and most other Protestant churches the Eastern Christian  tradition. The Western Christian tradition is the one that we, in the Latin church, use . It derives from St. Augustine of Hippo in the 5 th century and divides the commandments into two groups – the first 3 dealing with our obligations to God and the remaining 7 to our obligations to ourselves and to each other as creatures made in the image and likeness of God.   Today we are looking at the first 3. Preamble: I am the Lord  your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Commandment 1. Thou shall have no other gods before me. Commandment 2. Thou  shall not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. Commandment 3 Remember to keep holy the Sabbath day. The first important thing to notice is that in the 10 commandments, as in the two great commandments , our obligations to God come first. Judaeo-Christian  ethics are an application and a consequence of Judeo-Christian doctrine. They only make  real sense in the context of belief and, in the longer term, Christian morals will not survive the loss of  Christian belief. The First Commandment The first commandment is a prohibition of idolatry. We may have childhood images  of idolatry as  a matter of   worshipping golden calves or  offering incense to statues of long dead Roman emperors. There is not much pressure to engage in either of these activities today and we may be inclined to regard this commandment as not very relevant. The continuing force of it was brought home to me by reading an account of the destruction of  the Jews of Eastern Europe in the second world war. When the Rabbis and their flocks were herded into the concentration camps, the camp guards found it very  droll to see how far they could humiliate them and  rob them of their dignity as religious men and women before killing them anyway. The Rabbis had to advise on what  activities were or were not permissible under the immediate threat of death. Their advice was that death was to be preferred to three things :-  committing idolatry, committing incest or committing murder. Even in extremis  the duty  of faithfulness to God came  before life itself. Adherence to the first commandment is the corner stone of the Jewish and Christian way of being in the world. When allied to the doctrines that God is transcendent and the Creator of everything and yet we are made in His image and likeness the implications of this commandment are profound.  They deeply affect the individual’s  sense of himself,   his relationships with others and the nature of the authority that can be properly exercised in society and the nature of human freedom.  The commandment requires that the ultimate loyalty of the individual  Christian is to God alone and our acceptance of the claims of the  many other forms of lawful authority to which we are subject is in the end conditional and limited. In accepting such authority we are merely rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’ s.  In the modern era we see the sin of idolatry operating on a large scale in the setting up of structures of authority which demand our ultimate and unconditional loyalties. These are false gods demanding to be preferred  to the Lord, our God.   Background ideologies justifying idolatrous systems  involve such  ideas as the “divine right of  kings”   prevalent in  much of Europe  from the 16th to the 19th centuries, the “Fuhrer prinzip” of Nazi Germany , the excessive nationalism which justified  the slogan “ my country right or wrong” , the dictatorship of the proletariat  of Russian communism which made the party the focus of all loyalty. One of the marks of an idolatrous system is the tendency to co-opt religious language.  For instance, during the Nazi era German couple, in an appalling parody of the Christian sense that our children are a gift from God, had taken to referring to their new born infants as “little presents for the Fuhrer” ; Stalin liked to have himself referred to  by quasi religious titles such as “Great Leader and Teacher of all nations”. The Second Commandment In the Old Testament the name of God was written as the Tetragrammaton “YHWH”. As a mark of the intense Jewish reverence and piety towards God  it was never pronounced except once a year by the High Priest on the day of atonement (Yom Kippur) in the Holy of Holies of the Temple at Jerusalem. The last time it was pronounced authoritatively would have been on the Yom Kippur before the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 AD.   Modern pronunciations such as Jehovah or Yahweh are conjectural. From Hebrew grammar we (apparently) know for certain that YHWH is a verb – an archaic form of the verb “to be”. Three understandings of the name are possible – “I am who am” i.e the author of being and life in the world  , “I am who I am” – i.e. it is not for you to know the transcendent God  or  “I shall be there for you” – i.e. the God that engages with humanity. In Jewish piety various circumlocutions such as  “Adonai”  ( = Lord ) or just “ha Shem”  ( =  the Name) are used. In the Christian tradition the second commandment has been understood as a prohibition  on showing disrespect to God by the careless or profane use of His name. The Third Commandment The Sabbath (and by extension the weekend) was invented by the Jews as a social institution to remind them at regular intervals of their duty to maintain their awareness of their God. On these days Jewish law required that a wide range of work-a-day activities be desisted from  so that the day would be clearly set aside for the worship of God. The Jewish Sabbath runs from dusk on Friday to dusk on Saturday. The precise (perhaps over precise)  elaboration of what is and isn’t lawful on the Sabbath constitutes a great and continually updated part of rabbinical  law-making (the Halakah) and is still observed by orthodox Jews. The institution of the Sabbath was continued in Christendom and in Islam. In the Christian tradition  it is observed on Sunday in commemoration of the resurrection of Our Lord and in Islam on a Friday. The Catholic tradition of Sabbath observance was formed in an era where manual work was the norm for most people. On the Sabbath, Catholics were enjoined to abstain from manual labour and to worship God primarily through attending the Mass  but also through attendance at other devotions such as Benediction. The Catholic tradition also generally encouraged uplifting  intellectual and recreational activity on Sundays. Thus in Ireland Sunday has always been the day on which competitive Gaelic games were played at every level  throughout the whole country.  In most Protestant traditions  a rather more narrowly religious view of what constituted the observance of the Sabbath prevailed. Attendance at Church several times on Sunday was often the norm and the playing of sport was certainly not countenanced.  Thus, throughout most of Britain,  Saturday became the day for sporting and recreational activity and I recall  heated debates in Northern Ireland about the propriety of keeping children’s swings in Belfast’s public parks locked on the Sabbath. Only in the last 30 years or so has the distinctiveness of the English Sabbath been  lost to a general secular indifference.      Return to R.C.I.A. menu                Back to the top
		The Ten Commandments 4-10 By Enda Conlon The first three commandments of the Decalogue dealt with our relationship to God. The remaining seven deal with our conduct towards our fellow men and women.  They are : (4)    Honour thy father and thy mother (5)    Thou shall not kill (6)    Thou shall not commit adultery (7)    Thou shall not steal (8)    Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbour (9)    Thou shall not covet thy neighbours house (10)  Thou shall not covet thy neighbour’s wife nor his man servant nor his maid servant nor his ox nor his ass nor anything that is thy neighbours. In the Christian reading of the Bible  the commandments of the Decalogue have a different and more fundamental   status than the many other commandments written  by Moses. They are considered as written by the ‘finger of God’ not just on tablets of stone but on the hearts of all men and women. Though given as revelation  to the specific man Moses in the specific circumstances of  Sinai they are accessible to reason and are binding on all men at all times and in all places. The Jewish tradition is to see the commandments as  a kind of summary of the very much more numerous precepts of the Mosaic law set out in Deuteronomy, Exodus and Leviticus.  Hence the Jewish tradition attaches  much more weight to the Mosaic law which, in the long tradition of rabbinical reflection, has been elaborated into a very detailed code of conduct which governs the lives of orthodox Jews to this day. Commandments  4- 8 set out in terse bullet-point style the  fundamentals of the Judeo-Christian ethical system. Commandments 4 and 6  concerned with the relationships within the family ; -  four,  with the duties of children to parents,  and six, with the  sexual exclusiveness of the relationship between husband and wife.  Commandments 5 7  8 apply to our relationships with our neighbours generally. The eighth  commandment is particularly directed to lies of calumny and false accusation but is understood as prohibiting lying generally.  Commandments 4-8 prohibit specific deeds.  Commandments 9 and 10 are of a somewhat different type. They recognise  that evil deeds proceed  from   corrupted minds. Eight and nine prohibit indulgence in the spiritual vices which dispose us to commit wicked acts – particularly those of envy and lust. The commandments of the second group have a very down to earth quality that is  a profound feature of Judaism and Christianity.  They deal with the problems and temptations of real people in  the real circumstances of their lives. Taken together with the first three we see that the mainstream Christian way of being in the world is not to despise or to withdraw from it  but to seek sanctification and salvation through our relationship with our fellow men and women which we conduct in the light of our relationship to God. In this second group of the commandments the Christian sees a continuation of the process of God’s  engagement  with mankind – a process ultimately  culminating in the Incarnation. A long tradition of the Catholic Church , in particular, holds that the Commandments, as well as being given by God are accessible to human reason. This is in contrast  to  the doctrines of the Incarnation or the Trinity which the Church holds not because they are humanly reasonable but because they have been revealed .  In respect  of scepticism  about the validity of the  Commandments the Church  tends to echo Ecclesiasticus – “the fool in his heart has said there is no God” ; however, in respect of the radical and extreme doctrines at the heart of specifically Christian orthodoxy, the Church echoes St. Paul’s cry that these are and remain “to the Jews a scandal and to the Greeks a folly” and acknowledges that their acceptance requires  the gift  of faith. We can thus ask ourselves if there is any  reasonable human sense in which we can say that the Commandments are true – that the system of ethics derived from them is the right one for human beings. Strictly speaking, of course, we cannot say that one system of  ethics is “better” than another for the word “better” only makes sense in the context of  an ethical system. If your ethical system  recommends , say, that you maximise your opportunities for sexual intercourse, the better to propagate your genes, then the 6th Commandment is not a precept of virtue but of vice. However if we allow ourselves  the validity of  what seems to me the most primitive moral impulse – that it is right that  as individual human beings  we should flourish  then the Commandments 4-10 are plain good sense. The argument simply is  that as individuals, especially as children,  we flourish best in sexually faithful, mutually respectful family units and  as social  beings we  best flourish when we cooperate rewardingly, for the benefit of all,   with our fellow men and women in relationships of trust and mutual  esteem where we do not kill each other, steal from each other, defame each other or  seduce each others spouses. This is  not rocket science ; it is just seems reasonable and true. A marked feature of the Catholic Church’s thinking about the commandments is the adamantine conviction that they are knitted together into a seamless garment. They are not items on an a la carte menu from which we may select our favourites and turn up our noses at the rest. Nor are they questions of an exam paper on which we might cast a wary eye and reckon that, on a good day with a bit of  last minute revision, we might be able to manage four  and that will probably be a pass.  The Catholic Church  believes that the Christian responds to the Commandments in a single act of loving commitment to our relationship with God. In the words of Our Lord “If you love me, keep my Commandments”. The keeping of the Commandments is, as it were, just the manifestation, in our conduct toward others,  of  our relationship to God.  There is no being selective, no unravelling of individual commandments, no artificial distinguishing of one from another and no emphasising some at the expense of others. Part of the Petrine ministry, exercised by the see of Rome, has been to preserve and to guard  the Church’s sense of the organic unity of the Commandments. Throughout the Church’s long history there has been constant pressure to be a la carte  about the commandments. Last time I mentioned the idolatrous tendencies of the last few hundred years acting against the first commandment. Throughout the Western world today I think  it is fair to say that, from a Catholic perspective, the Commandments most under pressure, most subject to a revisionist agenda,  are the 3rd  5th and 6th . The Church continues to remind the faithful, that, irrespective of their legal standing at any given period, our obligation as Catholics are to observe all the commandments given to Moses at Sinai.               Return to R.C.I.A. menu                Back to the top