Out-Interpreting the Ten Commandments
Photo by Sean Foster on Unsplash
It turns out that the state of Louisiana is the first state to approve the public exhibit of the Ten Commandments under public auspices. No doubt that action will evoke resistance and opposition from many quarters, surely among them the ACLU. As I reflected on this new state action, however, I wondered if a very different response might be more useful and more effective. An alternative response might be that we take up the assignment of speaking about the Ten Commandments in order to show that the commandments may indeed function as a generative force for good community. This would simply require that thoughtful preachers should “out-interpret” whatever is intended by the legislature in Baton Rouge. Such an alternative might proceed in the following way.
For starters we notice, of course, that the God who utters and sponsors the Decalogue is the God of the Exodus, the one who “brought you up out of land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Exodus 20:2). It is this emancipatory God who first heard the desperate cries of the slaves who “came down to deliver” (Exodus 3:8). It is the desperate cry of the slaves that evoked the emancipatory action of the exodus that overthrew the slave system of Pharaoh. As Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution, has shown, the memory of the exodus is the seedbed of every revolutionary, emancipatory movement in the history of humanity. This memory places God on the side of liberation who is opposed to every exploitative system of brutality, of course including the long-running oppression of non-whites in our nation. The Decalogue can be posted as a charter for revolutionary social change that overthrows every hierarchical system of politics and economics. There is no god who can displace this God or tone down the urgency of such emancipation.
The Decalogue forbids the worship of idols, i, e, false articulations and embodiments of God. The idols that beset us and that distort our culture include all of the “isms” of race, class, gender, and nation. This God is “jealous” and will not allow any such “ism” to claim our loyalty or our energy, so that practices of racism, sexism, classism, or nationalism are brought under severe judgment. It is singularly this God of freedom who specializes in fidelity.
God’s command cannot be mobilized to support any ideology, such as:
God and nation, or
God and whiteness, or
God and maleness, or
God and wealth.
Any effort to attach God as guarantor and legitimator of any such “ism” is dismissed by the prohibition of the second commandment.
Sabbath observance completely reorganizes our understanding and practice of time. The Sabbath is not and cannot be simply a pause or respite in order to rest up for more work. The Sabbath is the culmination of the week, and the culmination of life in God’s good creation. Thus it is a mighty protest against every ideology that imagines that Sabbath rest is only a prelude for more work, or more power, or more wealth. Such ideologies violate the order of creation, and so defy the will and purpose of the creator God who intends that all creatures (including slaves!) should be protected from exploitation.
The alternative rendering of the fourth commandment in Deuteronomy 5:12-15, moreover, displaces appeal to creation by yet another reference to the Exodus:
Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day (Deuteronomy 5:15).
Sabbath observance is the reiteration of Exodus emancipation. Beyond that we must notice what Patrick Miller terms the “sabbatical principle” that extends to the Year of Release (Deuteronomy 15:1-18) and the Jubilee Year (Leviticus 25).* In the “Year of Release” debts are canceled for poor people. As I have noted elsewhere, the rhetoric of Deuteronomy 15:1-18 includes, in its Hebrew grammar, five “infinitive absolutes” that serve to accent and emphasize the urgency of the Sabbath. Indeed it is the most urgent of all of the commands of Moses. The Jubilee Year, moreover, provides for the return of property for those who have lost their property through the rough and tumble of the economy, that is, the Sabbath (and the sabbatical principle) in every way possible seek to preclude productive work (especially coerced work) as the purpose of society.
The commandment concerning “mother and father” makes the honoring and protection of aging people (perhaps all vulnerable people who are non-productive) a prerequisite of socio-economic wellbeing. The predatory economic system of our society aims at private wealth at the expense of vulnerable, non-productive people. It champions a stark individualism in which vulnerable, non-productive persons are readily disregarded. The commandment is a guard against the dismissal of those no longer productive among us.
It is quite remarkable to notice that in the sixth commandment, the conventional translation, “Thou shalt not kill,” has been changed in the NRSV, now translated as “Thou shalt not murder.” The changed translation makes room for “legitimate killings” such as in war and via capital punishment. The commandment, however, intends no such exceptions, to insist that all human life is precious, including social offenders and “inconvenient” persons who disturb our preferred social arrangements. The commandment is more readily inclusive than we are mostly willing to affirm. The commandment may indeed serve to challenge our easy quid pro quo of
life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe (Exodus 21:23-25).
It is of course plausible that the commandment might be taken as well as protection for unborn children, which leaves us the hard work of adjudicating when a fetus is to be reckoned as a “child.” In any case Jesus clearly asserts that the old “law of retaliation” is abrogated in the new world he enacts (Matthew 5:38-42).
The seventh commandment concerning adultery firmly positions sexual activity in the fabric of viable, sustained human relationships. It insists that sexuality belongs in such relationships and so precludes the reduction of any sexual partner to a usable object. Physical interaction is legitimate only in on-going relational connections.
It has long been suggested that the eighth commandment on stealing is derived from an old prohibition of kidnapping as in Deuteronomy 24:7 where the idiom for kidnapping is “steal a life.” The prohibition refuses the reduction of any human life to a commercial object, a practice that variously takes the form of enslavement, sex-trafficking, or making a human person a participant in exploitative labor. It is possible, to be sure, that the prohibition intends no more than the protection of one’s property from either a rapacious government or a predatory economy. But the human dimension of the theft of personhood serves well as an emancipatory intention of the Exodus, for Pharaoh is a model for what it is like to “steal a person.”
In the ninth commandment we get, for the first time, the term “neighbor.” The prohibition imagines a traditional society of upright neighbors who have no impetus or inclination to leverage the neighbor, whether in court or in market transactions. Thus the commandment intends to protect society and its members from distortion and false representation. The defining reason for truth-telling is the enhancement of the neighbor and the neighborhood. This reason for truth-telling is a powerful protection against propaganda and much misleading advertising that offers a world organized against neighborliness for the sake of manipulation and exploitation.
The tenth and final commandment mentions the “neighbor” three times. In this threefold accent, the commandment offers a perfect envelope with the intention of verse 2, thus pairing the God of the Exodus and the neighbor in covenant. This pairing readily calls to mind the pairing of the two “great commandments” of love of God and love of neighbor, with the recognition that the way we love God is to love the neighbor in generative and sustainable ways. The prohibition against coveting no doubt intends to protect vulnerable neighbors from predatory neighbors who have leverage for exploitation. One exhibit of such unequal neighbors is the narrative of Naboth and Ahab in I Kings 21. Ahab is a coveter who is willing to commit violent, dishonest acts in order to possess the property of Naboth, a vulnerable peasant farmer. The God of the Exodus is indeed the patron and protector of the vulnerable and has been so since the Exodus emancipation.
It is plausible to think that the legislature in Louisiana had not thought through the intent of the Decalogue in its legislative action. The Decalogue, taken in the context of the Exodus emancipation and covenantal neighborliness, is a mighty counter to the predatory proclivities of our society. Its focus is on the most vulnerable in societies who are to be protected from exploitation by the more powerful. The yield of the Decalogue is a vision of the neighborhood in which all parties enjoy full freedom and have the benefits of a viable economy. We may indeed hope that this legislative action in Louisiana will evoke exactly such an alternative society that defies predation, exploitation, and racial measures of equity.
In Christian rendering our reading of the Decalogue will readily lead to the exposition of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus does not take up each commandment per se. But we are able to see that his interpretive perspective, in each case, is to radicalize the commandment so that it is not simply rule-keeping but concerns the deeper requirement of a genuinely humane society.
It is my suggestion that preachers should take up the challenge of the state of Louisiana to do a careful, thorough interpretation of the commandments to show how each element of the Ten pertains to an alternative social order and practice. It will not do to take the Ten Commandments as only a set of rules that can be readily printed on a pencil. Rather the commandments, each and all of them together, constitute a picture of what a counter-community of neighbors might look like. After all, the emancipatory God of the Exodus does indeed summon to a quite alternative community. The action of the Louisiana legislature turns out to be a liberation for the alternative. Such an alternative might emerge anywhere that good preaching evokes such possibility. In the end the commandments have to do, in response to the emancipatory God, with love of neighbor. As we know, given the parable of Jesus, neighborliness concerns those who have urgent need and those who show great mercy (Luke 10:36-37). This community is defined by nothing less than a fabric of mercy that defies our habitual assumption concerning power and wealth. We may say to Louisiana, with gentle Southern irony, “Bless your heart.”
*Particular attention should be paid to Patrick Miller, The Ten Commandments (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009). The book is a masterful, comprehensive, and insightful exposition of the Decalogue with its full context in scripture, and smart in its connections to our contemporary social circumstance in which the teaching of Moses is powerfully counter-cultural. We have nothing like this study for its depth and breadth, a study sure to generate wise, passionate reading among us.
