ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY EDUCATION NETWORK EXODUS DR. DAVID ADAMS #48 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> Why do my Baptist friends insist that the Ten Commandments should be numbered differently than we number them? >> Eric, this is a perennial question. And as a pastor teaching Bible class, people will ask you this all the time because they go into Christian bookstores and they encounter material that have the commandments numbered differently. The first thing we need to realize is these things we call the Ten Commandments are never actually called the Ten Commandments in the Bible. There are three references in the Bible to the Ten Saying or as I might prefer to translate it, the Ten Principles. These occur in Exodus 34 Verse 28, Deuteronomy Chapter 4 Verse 13 and Deuteronomy Chapter 10 Verse 4. But none of those three directly connect that reference of the Ten Sayings to what we call the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20. Now, we presume that that's what they are talking about. And that's a reasonable presumption. But we ought to at least be clear that they are never actually called Ten Commandments. And they are -- while there are ten of them, we're not sure that that even refers to Exodus 20. The second thing that's not so obvious is -- it's not obvious because you have to read the Hebrew text to see it. And then even most readers of the Hebrew text would miss it. And that is that the punctuation of the Hebrew text is really messed up in the Ten Commandments. There are some verses that -- some sentences that don't have periods at the end. There are places where there's a comma at the end where there should be an end of a sentence or something like that. And when I talk about periods and commas, you understand that I'm using the English equivalent of the kind of punctuation we have in the Hebrew Bible. It's really as if the Mazarites or the scribes who provided the punctuation really couldn't agree upon how to divide the text even among themselves. And it's really kind of confusing when you try to read it in Hebrew. One thing is clear. You can -- when you look at these verses, you can group them together and get as few as eight commandments. Or you can separate them and get as many as 13 commandments. But there aren't obviously any ways to get ten out of them. And so when we group them together to get ten different groups -- and different scholars are going to disagree somewhat upon how the groupings should go -- this has no affect really at all upon what the commandments mean. Because there are no -- there's no listing of numbers from 1 to 10 in the Hebrew Bible or for that matter in the English Bibles. So let's look at the three major ways that these commandments are divided. The first way is the way that's traditional among Roman Catholics and Lutherans. And that's to divide them the way that you have encountered them in the Catechism into one group of three that talk about our relationship with God and another group of seven that talk primarily about our relationship with our neighbor. Then there's the way that's used amongst most Protestants. It's the way you'll encounter in most books and things written in Christian bookstores. And that's to divide them into two groups: One containing four commandments and the other containing six. They do this by dividing what we caw the First Commandment into two different commandments and then by combining the Ninth and Tenth Commandment into one. So they end up with ten but they change the numbering so that you have four that now talk about our relationship with God and six that talk about our relationship with our neighbor. And finally, there's the way that's common among the rabbis, particularly the later rabbis. And that's used primarily in Judaism today. And that's to divide the text into two groups, each with five commandments in it. And they do this by taking what we would call the historical prologue, the statement "I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt," and they call that the first saying. And then they continue and count the commandment about the parents as part of the first Table of the Law. They keep one and two together the way that Lutherans and Catholics do. But they move the commandment about honoring your parents from the second table of law into the first table on the sort of conceptual theory that parents are God's representatives. And so really the parents stand in for God into human community so it belongs together with the first Table of the Law. And then in the second Table of the Law, they do what the Protestants do. They combine Commandments 9 and 10 into one. So they end up with ten commandments divided five and five instead. So we have these three major ways of dividing the Ten Commandments into groups. And as I said, there's none of them that is right in the absolute sense that it must be that way. You know, that if you don't think it's that way, then you can't be saved. Although, frankly, I have some evangelical friends that are almost that convinced that their numbering system is correct. There's a real irony about all of this, of course. And that is the one part of the numbering of the Ten Commandments that everybody agrees on, namely, that there are two tables, one that talks about our relationship with God and one that talks about our relationship with our neighbor, that's technically incorrect, even though it's almost universally accepted. There are really three different parts to what we call the Ten Commandments. There's one group of commandments -- regardless of how you number them, there's one group of commandments that talk about our relationship with God. And that group primarily focuses on worship. There's a second group of commandments that talks about our relationship with our neighbor. It's horizontal rather than vertical. And that primarily is concerned with holiness and ***yustis and mercy in our relationships with our neighbor. And the third part, the part we call the Ninth and Tenth Commandments, doesn't address either one of those. But rather, it talks about our internal motivation. That is, what is it that motivates us to keep the other commandments? Especially the second Table of the Law. And ironically, it's this third group that is in some ways overlooked and really important. It's this -- the fact that it's not merely the external conformity of the law, but the internal state of the heart that Jesus picks up and makes most important in his interpretation of the Ten Commandments. So he can say something like "You've heard it said that you shall not commit adultery. But I say to you that any man who looks after a woman to lust after her is committing adultery." So Jesus puts his major emphasis in teaching the commandments on the third table, what I would call the third Table of the Law or the third part of the law. By the way, I didn't want to be a heretic on this point. So I asked some of our honored systematicians at our seminaries whether I was falling into false doctrine by calling this the third Table of the Law. And he assured me that I was not. He said and sometimes he even talks about four tables of the law. And that left me really puzzled because I couldn't figure out where he was getting that. But at least if you haven't heard this distinction into three parts before, don't be too worried about it. Just recognize that the Ninth and Tenth Commandments have a different emphasis. Their focus is not on what you do but why you do it. And Jesus picks up on that in the New Testament and makes that a very important part of his teaching as we do, also, in our moral teaching in the church. So I would say if your Baptist friends insist that the Ten Commandments should be numbered differently than we number them, sit down with the text and actually count the number of commandments with them. You'll probably come up with 12 or 13 rather than 10. And you know, see what they make of that. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***