The Ten Commandments

The Biblical account of the Ten Commandments:

1) The first time Moses came down from Mount Sinai with commandments, he merely recited a list (Exodus 20:2-17), which is the version most churches today erroneously call the "Ten Commandments," although they were not engraved on stone tablets and not called "the ten commandments."

2) The first set of stone tablets was given to Moses at a subsequent trip up the mountain (Exodus 31:18). In this farcical story, Moses petulantly destroyed those tablets when he saw the people worshipping the golden calf (Exodus 32:19).

3) So he went back for a replacement. God told Moses: "Hew thee two tables of stone like unto the first: and I will write upon these tables the words that were in the first tables, which thou brakest." (Exodus 34:1) Here is what was on the replacement tablets (from Exodus 34:14-26):

1) Thou shalt worship no other God. 2) Thou shalt make thee no molten gods. 3) The feast of unleavened bread shalt thou keep. 4) Six days thou shalt work, but on the seventh day thou shalt rest. 5) Thou shalt observe the feast of weeks. 6) Thrice in the year shall all your menchildren appear before the Lord God. 7) Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leaven. 8) Neither shall the sacrifice of the feast of the passover be left until the morning. 9) The first of the firstfruits of thy land shalt thou bring unto the house of the Lord thy God. 10) Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother's milk.

Keep this in mind next time you are tempted to boil a goat. This list differs, obviously, from the one in Exodus 20 (was God's memory faulty?), but it is only this list that is called the "Ten Commandments": "And he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten commandments." (Exodus 34:28)