Sinai and the Ten Words

Israel reaches Sinai in the third month, and before any legislation God summarises what has happened in one sentence: you saw what I did, I carried you, I brought you to myself. The destination of the exodus, stated here, is not Canaan. It is God.

Then comes the conditional in 19:5-6, and every word of it repays attention. The BSB reads: 'Now if you will indeed obey My voice and keep My covenant, you will be My treasured possession out of all the nations - for the whole earth is Mine. And unto Me you shall be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.' The Hebrew behind 'treasured possession' is segullah, which is the treasured personal property of a king, held apart from the state holdings. The middle clause prevents the obvious misreading: Israel is treasured while all the earth remains God's, so election is not exclusion.

A kingdom of priests is a vocation, not a privilege. Priests exist for the sake of those who are not priests; they stand between. Israel's separateness is therefore functional, aimed outward at the nations from whom it is separated. Any reading of Sinai that ends with Israel's status rather than Israel's task has stopped halfway through the sentence.

The theophany that follows is deliberately terrifying: smoke, fire, a mountain that trembles, a ram's horn growing louder, boundaries the people may not cross on pain of death. And when it is over the people ask Moses to listen on their behalf, because they are afraid they will die (20:18-19). The mediator exists because the people asked for one.

The Bible does not call them commandments. Exodus 34:28 and Deuteronomy 4:13 call them, in Hebrew, aseret hadevarim, the ten words, which is where Decalogue comes from. The BSB prints 'the Ten Commandments' at both places, the usual English convention, and footnotes each one 'Hebrew the Ten Words', so a student comparing the two should know the Hebrew word underneath is devarim, words. The distinction is not pedantry: 'word' covers the declaration in the first line, which commands nothing.

The traditions number them differently, and the differences are old and principled. Jewish tradition counts 'I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery' as the first word, and takes the prohibitions of other gods and of images together as the second. Catholic and Lutheran numbering also joins other gods and images into one, and then divides coveting into two to reach ten. Reformed, Anglican and Orthodox numbering keeps the image prohibition separate and leaves coveting whole.

Nothing about the content changes; the sequence of obligations is identical. But a student should know why a Catholic catechism and a Presbyterian catechism print different lists, and should be able to say that neither is hiding a commandment.

Note also that the Sabbath command is grounded differently in the two versions. Exodus 20:11 grounds it in creation, God resting on the seventh day. Deuteronomy 5:15 grounds it in the exodus: remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt. The same command carries two rationales, one cosmic and one political, and a people who had just come out of unbroken forced labour would have heard the second sharply.

In 1954 George Mendenhall observed that the covenant material at Sinai follows the structure of second-millennium Hittite treaties between a great king and a subject king. The elements line up: a preamble naming the sovereign, 'I am the LORD your God'; a historical prologue recounting what the sovereign has already done for the vassal, 'who brought you out of the land of Egypt'; stipulations, the words themselves; provision for deposit of the document in a sanctuary and periodic public reading; and, in Deuteronomy's fuller version, witnesses with blessings and curses.

The form is illuminating because of what the historical prologue does. In these treaties the obligations follow from a rescue already accomplished. The vassal does not obey in order to be delivered; he obeys because he has been. Sinai's order is therefore not accidental, and it is the single most important structural fact in the chapter: law comes after salvation, as its response.

There is a live scholarly argument attached. Mendenhall and Kenneth Kitchen argue that the closest parallels are second-millennium Hittite, which would support an early setting for the covenant material. Others, following the work on Deuteronomy's parallels with first-millennium Assyrian vassal treaties such as those of Esarhaddon, argue for a later setting. The structural insight holds either way; the dating inference is contested, and a student should keep the two claims apart.

Read as a whole, the ten words divide between obligations toward God and obligations toward neighbour, and both halves are covenant loyalty rather than general ethics. Murder, theft and false witness are prohibited here not because a well-run society needs them prohibited, though it does, but because they are betrayals of the relationship in which Israel now stands.

Three features deserve comment. First, the commands are addressed to a singular 'you' in Hebrew, to each Israelite individually, in a document given to a nation. Second, the tenth word prohibits an interior state, and so prevents the whole from being read as a code of external compliance. Third, the Sabbath command is the longest and the only one that extends explicitly to servants, foreigners and animals, which in a document handed to former slaves is not an accident.

The classical Christian discussion of the law's uses starts here: the law restrains evil in society, exposes sin and drives the sinner to grace, and guides the life of the redeemed. Reformed and Lutheran traditions weight those uses differently, and the difference is worth studying carefully rather than settling quickly. What Exodus 20 itself supplies is the order: a God who has already acted, a people already free, and then the words.