The REAL 10 commandments?

[Superman]

Found this passage in a book I read a while ago. I found it amusing.

Every Decalogue you see — from the 5,000-pound granite behemoth inside the Alabama State Judicial Building to the little wallet-cards sold at Christian bookstores — is bogus. Simply reading the Bible will prove this. Getting out your King James version, turn to Exodus 20:2-17. You'll see the familiar list of rules about having no other gods, honoring your parents, not killing or coveting, and so on. At this point, though, Moses is just repeating to the people what God told him on Mount Si'nai. These are not written down in any form.

Later, Moses goes back to the Mount, where God gives him two "tables of stone" with rules written on them (Exodus 31:18 ). But when Moses comes down the mountain lugging his load, he sees the people worshiping a statue of a calf, causing him to throw a tantrum and smash the tablets on the ground (Exodus 32:19).

In neither of these cases does the Bible refer to "commandments." In the first instance, they are "words" which "God spake," while the tablets contain "testimony." It is only when Moses goes back for new tablets that we see the phrase "ten commandments" (Exodus 34:28 ). In an interesting turn of events, the commandments on these tablets are significantly different than the ten rules Moses recited for the people, meaning that either Moses' memory is faulty or God changed his mind.

Thus, without further ado, we present to you the real "Ten Commandments" as handed down by the LORD unto Moses (and plainl listed in Exodus 34:13-28 ). We eagerly await all the new Decalogues, which will undoubtedly contain this correct version:

I. Thou shalt worship no other god.
II. Thou shalt make thee no molten gods.
III.. The feast of unleavened bread thou shalt keep
IV. Six days thou shalt work, but on the seventh day thou shalt rest.
V. Thou shalt observe the feast of weeks, of the firstfruits of wheat harvest, and the feast of
ingathering at the year's end.
VI. Thrice In the year shall all your men children appear before the Lord God.
VII. Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leaven
VIII. Neither shall the sacrifice of the feast of the passover be left unto the morning.
IX. The first of the firstfruits of thy land thou shalt bring unto the house of the LORD thy God.
X. Thou shalt not seethe a kid [ie, a young goat] in his mother's milk.

[Academia Nut]

A Mr. Wong, you might have heard of him, pointed this out a little while ago

[defanatic]

Yeah. It's an interesting little passage in the Bible that demonstrates that very few people have actually read the damn thing all the way through, and God depicted in the Bible is an arrogant liar.

But, as the person above pointed out, it's pretty old.

[Androsphinx]

Gosh. Incredibly the Pentateuch , which as has been known for about 150 years is a composite of at least four different texts, contains three versions - here "E" and "J", and in Deuteronomy "D" - of the same event. Ex. 20 is E, Ex. 34:1-28 is J - so there's no reason at all why the two texts should have identical versions of events which happened very differently.

It should also be noted that the author of the above quote seems to have missed that in Deuteronomy (4.13 and chap 5) the "Ten Commandments" are very plainly identified with both being spoken at Sinai and being written on the tablets. So while this critique might have been worth something in, say 700BC, it's pretty worthless since D collated the two versions together.

I understand that it's much easier to read the Bible like a fundamentalist - it's easier to critique, you don't have to know anything about the history of the text or its construction, but I would have thought that somewhere there might be an acknowledgement of the actual reason why this confusion occurs.

I should also note that the version of the commandments you quoted above is a stupidity - once you've listed in III and V three festivals, VI does not need to repeat them. Instead, a chunk about firstborn animals and sons which should be IV has been omitted - probably because whoever wrote the book was too dumb to realise that VI repeated III and V, and fixed things to make the numbers work. Doesn't speak wonders for either his ability or his integrity.