This is Life as a Sacred Text, an expansive, loving, everybody-celebrating, nobody-diminished, justice-centered voyage into one of the world’s most ancient and holy books. We’re working our way through Exodus these days. More about the project here, and to subscribe, go here.

Let’s talk about the Ten Commandments, shall we?

They are a source of significant emotional, theological and spiritual weight for a lot of people, and, as such, merit some time and attention.

The first thing I want to note is that, in the Jewish tradition, we don’t refer to them as the Ten Commandments. They’re the Ten Statements, the Ten Utterances–Aseret HaDibrot. The Ten Spoken Things.

As we reckon, God created the world with ten utterances (Pirke Avot 5:1), there were ten generations each from Adam to Noah and Noah to Abraham, (Pirke Avot 5:2), ten plagues, and more. It’s regarded as a–-not the only, to be sure, but one–-number of perfection, completion.

And more than that, from our traditional reckoning, they contain more than 10 separate mitzvot, commandments (out of the 613 mitzvot total that Maimonides itemizes as listed in the Torah.) For example, Maimonides identifies four commandments contained within the second statement (they’re all listed below, never fear): not to believe in any other deity, not to make graven images, not to bow down to idols, and not to worship an idol as it is usually worshipped.

And even more than that, one Jewish reading of them is that, in fact, all 613 commandments of the Torah are implicitly contained within those Ten Utterances (which isn’t to say that we don’t also need them spelled out elsewhere.) There are 620 letters (in Hebrew!) in the 10 utterances, so the Rabbis count that to represent, symbolically, the 613 mitzvot plus the seven days of Creation (Midrash Numbers Rabbah 13:15).

As Rashi, our favorite 11th c. French vintner slash Biblical commentator puts it:

“All the six hundred and thirteen commandments are implicitly contained in the Ten Utterances and may therefore be regarded as having been written on the tablets.” (Rashi on Exodus 24:12)

Which, again, isn’t to say that we don’t need to have all of our mitzvot spelled out elsewhere throughout the Torah; just that

what these ten are, what’s being counted, and how, and why, and what they mean is not spiritually straightforward.

The reading here is that all of the Israelites heard the whole Torah directly from God, in this divine revelation, and then when Moses went up to the mountaintop later, it was just to get caught up on the details.