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Ten Commandments, Ten Commandments

Some scholars distinguish between this "Ethical Decalogue" and a different series of ten commandments in that they call the "Ritual Decalogue". Although Exodus 34 contains ten imperative statements, the passages in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 contain fourteen or fifteen.

This creation of a written mosaic law and the idea that it should be held sacred and sovereign over all the commandments of other gods lead to the idea of an inflexible law carved in stone but this was later modified by the selection of judges who could interpret any ambiguities. There are biblical passages that also refer to ten commandments being written by God on stone, and it is widely though not universally held that these were the Ten Commandments as detailed (see also: "Ritual Decalogue" for an alternative view).

In the era of the Sanhedrin transgressing any one of six of the Ten Commandments theoretically carried the death penalty, the exceptions being the First Commandment, honoring your father and mother, saying God's name in vain, and coveting, though this was rarely enforced due to a large number of stringent evidentiary requirements imposed by the oral law.

It is thought that these differences originally represented the difference between the customs of Eretz Yisrael and those of Babylonia. As it happens, the verse numbering in Christian Bibles follows the ta'am elyon while that in Jewish Bibles follows the ta'am tachton . In Jewish Bibles the references to the Ten Commandments are therefore and.

For example, an organization by the name of Summum has won court cases against municipalities in Utah for refusing to allow the group to erect a monument of Summum aphorisms next to the Ten Commandments. The cases were won on the grounds that Summum's right to freedom of speech was denied and the governments had engaged in discrimination. Instead of allowing Summum to erect its monument, the local governments chose to remove their Ten Commandments.

However, there is a continuous narrativestarting in Exodus 31:18 (where the first tablets are created), through Exodus 32:19 (where these tablets are broken), Exodus 34 (where the commandments are dictated to Moses a second time), to Exodus 40:20 (where the second pair of tablets are placed in the Ark of the Covenant)which enumerates a very different set of commandments, sometimes called the "Ritual Decalogue". Proponents of the documentary hypothesis, starting with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, propose that the phrase "ten commandments" in this narrative (at Exodus 34:28) refers to the commandments of Exodus 34 rather than to the lists in Exodus 20 or Deuteronomy 5, and note that this is the only place in the Bible where the phrase is immediately associated with a set of commandments. There are two other instances of the phrase in the Old Testament, at Deuteronomy 4:13 and 10:4.

Source: Wikipedia > Ten Commandments