The Ten Commandments

Once they were free of the Egyptians, Moses hiked his merry band to the foot of Mount Sinai where they set up camp.

God told Moses to go up the mountain so he could give him some instructions. These instructions are what the Hebrews call ‘The Ten Sayings’ and Christians call ‘The Ten Commandments’.

So Moses went up the mountain and God gave him the Ten Commandments, etched out on stone tablets. These sayings are the cornerstone of Hebrew law.

If you’ve never actually seen them, here they are:

1. You shall have no other Gods before me.
2. You shall not make any idol or image and bow down before it.
3. You shall not take the Lord’s name in vain.
4. You shall honor the Sabbath.
5. You shall honor your father and mother.
6. You shall not kill
7. You shall not commit adultery
8. You shall not steal
9. You shall not bear false witness
10. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife or any of his things

Maybe Moses was recognizing all these previous mistakes and was trying to figure out a way not to make them again. Who knows? Let’s just accept it as a good standard to shoot for.

So Moses came down the mountain and read the Ten Commandments to the people and they all agreed they were a great set of rules and they would abide by them.

But then Moses went back up to the mountain where God gave him a bunch more instructions. And I mean a bunch.

By the time he was done, Moses had been up on the mountain so long that the people were getting restless. Was he coming back? Was he dead? What should they do?

So rather than send somebody up to look for him, what did they do? They gathered up all the gold jewelry they had plundered from the Egyptians, melted it down and got Aaron to make them a big golden statue of a calf. They called it their new God and partied like it was 1999.

But God got wind of it and was totally irate. He was ready to kill them all but Moses talked him out of it. As we’ve seen before, talking God out of something is not as hard as you might think.

Anyway, Moses came down the mountain with two stone tablets. People usually think these stone tablets had the Ten Commandments but that can’t be because he’d already brought them down. ¹

What is actually on these particular tablets is open to debate but regardless, when Moses saw the people partying around the golden calf he slammed the tablets down, breaking them to pieces.

Then he ground up the golden calf into dust and demanded Aaron tell him why he let this happen. Aaron’s answer is priceless.

He said all the people gave him their gold and he threw it in the fire and out popped this golden calf, I’m serious, that’s what he said. Seriously, if that actually happened, I’d worship it too. Sounds more like something a six year old might come up with when he got caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

Well, that didn’t cut it for Moses. He rounded up Aaron and the rest of his clan, the sons of Levi², and they killed three thousand of their own people. So much for ‘thou shalt not kill.’ Moses was old school, he knew how to take control.

For good measure God sent them a plague killing another untold multitude.

After all this, it was time for Moses to lay down the Law.