The Ten Commandments Explained!

Explaining The Ten Commandments

Preliminary Notes

If the three 'religions of the book' have anything in common other than a mutual veneration for Abraham, it is surely that their core laws are pretty much the same. Judaism and Christianity call these laws 'The Ten Commandments' and while I do not believe that Islam codifies them in quite this manner, nonetheless the majority (And certainly all the important ones) are in there.

Furthermore, if you look at other religions and the kind of lifestyles that they espouse, most if not all come pretty close to considering the same list of dos and don'ts. This must mean they are pretty good rules, right? But 'pretty good' doesn't explain WHY the rules are what they are.

It is the goal of this article to explain them.

First, though, a few notes are needed. It is not the goal of this article to explore the validity or invalidity of any religion or religions as a way of life, nor to offer any opinion on the existence or non-existence of any deity or deities. My approach will be purely sociological and based upon my understanding of the purpose of religion as a creator and guarantor of social cohesion. Any connection that may or may not exist between any religion and any deity I leave purely for the reader to decide.

One thing I will say: it took me a good few years to reverse-engineer all this, so I take my hat off to whoever came up with it all in the first place.


Setting The Scene

Religions tend to first arise in a small tribe facing intense hardship, often surrounded by enemies and facing some very adverse living conditions. As such, there are a number of things a religion usually incorporates, such as dietary advice (The ban on pork in Judaism and Islam makes perfect sense if you know that pork goes off very fast in the desert and eating it will likely give you food poisoning, for example) and examples of proper behaviour (Usually written as histories: so-and-so was a good king because, etc.) that will inspire others to be good citizens.

But more than anything else, a good religion needs to set down a code of behaviour that will help unite its believers, while protecting them from exploitation and encouraging them to think of themselves as a single community as far as is possible. This code has to allow for the lives its people will be leading and the perils they will face and it must help them to minimise social divisions. The alternative is extermination - the fate of all fallen peoples and failed religions.

Religions actually operate on a particularly vicious form of social Darwinism: the better a religion is at unifying and inspiring its followers, the more likely it is to survive. People like to have meaning and direction in their lives and so a good religion offers that.

But I digress. Picture the scene: a small tribe under threat, unsure of their future and surrounded by hostile conditions and even more hostile enemy peoples. They need unity, certainty and strength. They must avoid division and the perils of inbreeding (Already known and understood, hence the age old taboo on incest). They need to be able to defend themselves, but must be prevented from killing too many of their own side, lest the entire tribe sufer for it.

So we come to the Commandments...


ONE: 'Thou shalt place no other gods before Me.'

You will notice that the first Commandment does not say 'I am the only god'. Only Islam, of all surviving religions, makes that claim. The clergy of the others may like to interpret it that way, but what it actually says is 'I am the only god for YOU, so worship me and only me'.

So why no claim to be the only god? Because back then with the vast number of other religions in the world, any claim to represent the ONE god would have been met with laughter. No-one would ever have taken the speaker seriously and the possibility of converting others to your faith would be very low.

Saying 'I am the only god for YOU' on the other hand has significant benefits. It really simplifies the entire system and establishes a very clear chain of command within the faith: Deity -> Prophet -> High Priest -> Clergy. There's no messing about with different gods wanting different things and having different responsibilities and allows for the setting down of a clear and unambiguous code of conduct. It also gives the ordinary people a single focus for their worship and thus greatly increases their unity by removing all religious rivalry within the tribe.

One god = one set of rules, so everyone is judged by the same standards as everyone else and knows exactly what to expect FROM everyone else. The value of this to a society under threat cannot be over-estimated.


TWO: 'Thou shalt not worship graven images.'

This is really a reinforcement of rule one. I suspect the main reason for it being here is because 'The Nine Commandments' doesn't really sound complete. Of course, it also means that a particularly cash-strapped church or govt or people don't need to build huge statues and they can still feel virtuous, because they can read this as expressly forbidding them to do so. particularly useful for nomads, also.

Of course once they settle, the rule can be happily re-interpreted as other peoples' graven images, so they get to start building impressive places of worship again.


THREE: 'Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD your God in vain.'

Show respect to your god. Makes sense on two levels: first, if the name itself holds such power that you can only use it in certain ways, that means the god is really impressive (And so the people are impressed) and secondly the best way to get people to think about something all the time is to tell them not to. A good member of a religion is always careful not to break this one, which means they are always thinking about their god. Which is one step away from remembering the code of conduct.

A very clever psychological trick. I'd never have thought of this one, myself and I have to admire someone who was downright sneaky enough to do so.


FOUR: 'Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.'

IE: gather the entire community and worship together. Superficially, this honours the god and reinforces the religion, which is the stated purpose. More importantly from a sociological perspective, it brings the entire community together in one place, regardless of how separated their trades or lives might make them normally. This encourages them all to get to know each other, to think of themselves as a genuine community and to interact socially, thus strengthening the bonds between all members of the community.

By including everybody, it means even the loners are accepted and allows new members of the community a chance to get to know their neighbours and to fit in more easily than if they were left to their own devices. In essence, the whole thing is a weekly ceremony.


FIVE: 'Honor thy father and thy mother.'

Not only do Mummy & Daddy bring you up, but they teach you the language, lifestyle and values of the community in which you are born. Without centralised schooling, this is even more vital as a way of passing on the duties and rights of a citizen to the next generation and encouraging the growth of responsibility to the community.

As they grow older, parents would come to rely on their offspring as their offspring once relied on them, too, so encouraging filial responsibility aids not only the smooth transition of values from generation to generation, but also means that society is seeing to the care of the old and the infirm.

This kind of 'be grateful to those who are good to you' mentality has obvious beneficial knock-on effects in other areas of society, too.


SIX: 'Thou shalt not commit murder.'

One of my favourites, the most often misquoted and the second least understood, this commandment is in fact very carefully worded indeed because of the immense problems if you start teaching it wrong. Thou shalt not KILL means the extermination of your tribe by others less scrupulous who have no such commandment, after all. It would be a foolish religion indeed that chose that as an option.

Thou shalt not commit MURDER, by contrast, allows for self defence - both of person and country/tribe. Murder is UNJUSTIFIED homicide, after all. Killing for the sake of it is wrong; killing in defence of friends, family, tribe, etc is allowable.

This obviously means that one cannot just kill members of one's own tribe on a whim (And this is reinforced by other Commandments AND the 7 Deadly Sins. This is one serious Commandment!) and encourages the settlement of internal conflicts without bloodshed.

Conversely, if the tribe is attacked it is allowed to kill the aggressor in the sure knowledge that their god will not have any objections.

I suspect another reason for this rule is to discourage wars that are nothing but gratuitous resource grabs (And thus a waste of the far more important human lives). Sadly, it has not always been successful, here. On the whole, though, it has probably saved quite a lot of lives down the centuries.


SEVEN: ''Thou shalt not commit adultery.'

My favourite, because it by far the least well understood and even the meaning is mired in confusion. Hardest always = best from my very specialised POV

The original meaning of adultery - and certainly the Commandment meaning (Shared by all three major monotheistic religions) is not 'no cheating on your husband/wife' but rather 'no sex outside of marriage'.

So why no sex? Well, a large part of the reason came down to lack of birth control and the rest to stable families. There is no injunction against re-marriage, after all.

If you have a small tribe with no ability to prevent pregnancy you have two major problems: accidental inbreeding and a tendency to create 'families' consisting of Mother & child with no Father present. People who simply have casual sex are rarely if ever looking to become lifemates and would see no reason to stay together just because the woman was pregnant. In the days before DNA testing, it would not even be very certain as to who the Father was.

Given the hardships of life in those days, you would likely end up with a lot of women with small children who could not properly support themselves because they had the child(ren) to look after and a lot of young men who would quite happily work only for themselves and feed a woman only in exchange for sex. Not exactly an ideal of social unity, I trust you will agree.

Further, the fact that no child could with any certainty identify its Father, combined with the fact that the best looking men (Or possibly those with the most food) would doubtless be able to seduce the greatest number of women would vastly increase the possibility of incest and thus of weak or malformed children. The less desirable males not being able to breed at all would further reduce the gene pool, creating yet more risk.

Commandment Five also plays in here, of course, as the parents are the passers-down of the values of the society. It was also likely understood then (As has been proved now) that a child is more likely to be happy and secure if it grows with two married parents than otherwise.

On a single-person level, of course, sex plays with the emotions (With women being particularly prone to fall in love with anyone they have regular sex with, thereby rather taking good judgment out of the equation). Humans being creatures of habit, we also react to our sexual relationships on a habitual level: if we truly believe they are special and treat them accordingly, they are more likely to last; if we think they are nothing to get excited about, splitting and divorce becomes vastly easier.

It is a fact of modern life that the divorce/split-up rate has far more to do with the idea that relationships are relatively disposable than to any other factor. "With our thoughts we make the world."

So there are many reasons, ancient and modern, for this one. Which almost no-one actually realises.


EIGHT: 'Thou shalt not steal.'

Pretty obvious 'respect the community' one, really. Strong cohesion requires strong degrees of respect and trust for the rest of your tribe. Nicking someone else's stuff breaks the trust, breaks the respect, so damages the community. About the only one everyone understands the reasons for, I suspect


NINE: 'You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.'

Another 'trust and respect' one. Lying encourages suspicion, distrust, etc. The more subtle side is 'tell the truth' - backed up by Honesty being one of the Cardinal Virtues. More unity stuff.


TEN: 'You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor's.'

You got it already, right? Another really easy one. Envy causes deceit, theft, sometimes adultery etc, etc. If you want to own/possess/get stuff you don't own and have no right to, it's a bit hard to get on with the people who have those things and that damages tribal unity. Carried too far, it leads to many possible outright breaches of the Code, as already noted.

***

That's the Ten Commandments. Looked at from the POV of social cohesion and the historical environment they arose in, they aren't really much of a mystery, are they?The 'graven images' one is, frankly, padding and the bottom three could probably be condensed into something like 'Treat thy neighbour with respect', though that would lose a lot of the clarity. I suppose in modern terms 'Don't be an @sshole to thy neighbour' would get the point across well, but the vernacular may not have played well to an audience

But you know the REALLY scary thing? Padding to get ten or not, whoever created these didn't miss a trick. I can't think of one single major thing he forgot, can you?