What are the Ten Commandments?
Short answer
The Ten Commandments are the laws that, according to the Bible, God gave Moses on Mount Sinai and wrote on two stone tablets. The text appears twice: in Exodus 20 and in Deuteronomy 5. They deal with the relationship with God and the relationship with one’s neighbour. How the ten are numbered varies between Christian traditions.
- Written by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 3 min read
The list is recorded twice, and the two versions say the same thing with small differences of wording. The first appears at the moment of the giving, at Sinai. The second is on the lips of Moses, decades later, retelling everything for the generation that was not there. Reading the two side by side shows that the text was handed on as living speech, not as a bronze plaque.
The Bible says there are ten, but it does not number them one by one. Nowhere in the text is there a list with figures beside it. What exists is a continuous block of commandments and, in other passages, the information that they are ten and that they fitted on two tablets. The division into numbered items is later work, and that is precisely where the difference between catechisms is born.
The content, though, has a visible organisation. The first part deals with the relationship with God: exclusivity, images, the name, the day of rest. The second deals with the relationship with people: parents, life, marriage, property, truth and desire. It is this two-block structure that Jesus condenses into two commandments when asked for the greatest of all — love God and love your neighbour, in that order.
One observation that heads off a misunderstanding: both major Christian traditions read the Ten Commandments as moral instruction that still stands, and neither treats them as a repealed text. The disagreement between them is about how the list is divided, not about its authority.
What the passages say
1And the Lord spoke all these words:
2“I am the Lord your God, who led you away from the land of Egypt, out of the house of servitude.
3You shall not have strange gods before me.
4You shall not make for yourself a graven image, nor a likeness of anything that is in heaven above or on earth below, nor of those things which are in the waters under the earth.
5You shall not adore them, nor shall you worship them. I am the Lord your God: strong, zealous, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the sons to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me,
6and showing mercy to thousands of those who love me and keep my precepts.
7You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. For the Lord will not hold harmless one who takes the name of the Lord his God falsely.
8Remember that you are to sanctify the day of the Sabbath.
9For six days, you will work and accomplish all your tasks.
10But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. You shall not do any work in it: you and your son and your daughter, your male servant and your female servant, your beast and the newcomer who is within your gates.
11For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and the sea, and all the things that are in them, and so he rested on the seventh day. For this reason, the Lord has blessed the day of the Sabbath and sanctified it.
12Honor your father and your mother, so that you may have a long life upon the land, which the Lord your God will give to you.
13You shall not murder.
14You shall not commit adultery.
15You shall not steal.
16You shall not speak false testimony against your neighbor.
17You shall not covet the house of your neighbor; neither shall you desire his wife, nor male servant, nor female servant, nor ox, nor donkey, nor anything that is his.”
The full text, in the first of its two occurrences. Notice that it does not begin with a prohibition: it begins with God identifying himself through something already done — the exit from Egypt. The whole list comes after that, which frames it as a response to something received rather than a condition for receiving it.
13And he revealed his covenant to you, which he instructed you to carry out, and the ten words which he wrote on two tablets of stone.
The passage that states outright that they are ten and that they were written on two stone tablets. This is where the number comes from — and not from any numbering done inside the list itself. The edition published here calls them the ten words, following the Hebrew term.
28Therefore, he was in that place with the Lord for forty days and forty nights; he did not eat bread and he did not drink water, and he wrote on the tablets the ten words of the covenant.
The name the Hebrew text gives the collection appears here rendered literally, as words rather than commandments. The original term means words, and it is the source of the technical term Decalogue — literally, ten words.
37Jesus said to him: “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God from all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind.’
38This is the greatest and first commandment.
39But the second is similar to it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’
40On these two commandments the entire law depends, and also the prophets.”
Asked about the greatest commandment, Jesus answers with two, and their order mirrors the order of the two tablets. The closing sentence is the key: he does not replace the list, he says the whole of it hangs on these two points.