1. all these words. The number ten is not stipulated, but the formulaic number ten, despite other ancient numerations of the commandments, exerted a powerful force. Jewish and Christian traditions have different ways of dividing the “words,” here called devarim but in later Hebrew usage usually referred to as dibrot (singular, diber), which means something like “utterance” or perhaps even “inspired speech.” The formulation of the ten injunctions is, in the most literal sense, lapidary—terse enough to be carved in stone. There is a good deal of plausibility, then, in the inference of some scholars that the wordier commandments here embody explanatory glosses on or elaborations of the original succinct formulations. Moshe Weinfeld proposes that the original version might have looked something like this:

But writing on stone is also an archaic medium of communication and as such lines up with the archaic cooking (fire-roasting) and the archaic baking (unleavened bread) earlier in the story.

2. I am the LORD. As we had occasion to note in earlier passages, this formal announcement of the identity of the sovereign whose authority underwrites what is to follow is a convention of ancient Near Eastern royal proclamations.

3. You shall have no other gods. Throughout the Ten Words the commands are cast in the second-person singular (elsewhere in Hebrew law, plurals or third-person singulars are often used): the commandments are addressed to each person in Israel.

beside Me. The literal meaning of the Hebrew is “upon my face.” As Abraham ibn Ezra acutely observes, this same idiom, ʿal peney, is used in Genesis 11:28 in “Haran died in the lifetime of [ʿal peney] Terah his father.” The sense here, then, may be something like this: I am eternally, and so you must have no other god alongside Me, instead of Me, infringing on My eternal presence that brooks no successors.

4. the heavens above . . . the earth below . . . the waters beneath the earth. These are the three realms of the biblical world-picture, each duly registered in the first Creation story. If the LORD in His initial proclamation announces himself as the God of history, “Who brought you out of the land of Egypt,” here the language implies that He is equally the God of the cosmos, not limited to one of its realms (in contrast, for example, to Aton, elevated by Akhenaten over all other gods of Egypt but still a solar deity). In Canaanite mythology, as in the corresponding mythologies of other ancient peoples, different gods presided over the different realms of creation: Baal over the land, Yamm over the sea, Mot over the underworld. The invocation here of pagan pantheons argues strongly that the ban against fashioning images is a ban against cultic icons (verse 5, “You shall not bow to them . . .”) and not, as some currents of later tradition concluded, a comprehensive prohibition of image-making.

5. a jealous god. The Hebrew qanaʾ can mean either “jealous” (including the sexual sense) or “zealous,” “ardent.” The appearance of the term in connection with God’s banning all cultic rivals suggests that the leading edge of the word here may in fact be jealousy. The revolutionary idea of a single God uniting all the realms of creation may be a noble and philosophically bold idea, but it is imagined in ancient Israel in powerfully anthropomorphic terms: God does not tolerate rivals to the hearts of His people. The word “god” here is not capitalized because the Hebrew employs the generic term ʾel: this, the LORD is saying, is the kind of god I am, and you had better take that to heart.

reckoning the crime of fathers with sons . . . for My foes. This troubling statement is explained by many Hebrew exegetes through reference to “my foes” (or, “those who hate Me”) at the end of the clause—it is often the way of the world for sons to follow the path of their fathers, and as long as the offspring of the original offenders qualify as God’s foes, they will be subject to retribution. But the ancient view may well have been that God’s mercy was manifest in demanding retribution from only three or four generations while granting kindness for a thousand generations. The word “foes” here is antithetically paired with “for My friends,” (or “those who love Me”) in verse 6.

6. doing kindness to. This could also be rendered as “keeping faith with”—ḥesed is an act of kindness and also the loyal performance of an obligation in an alliance or treaty.

the thousandth generation. The Hebrew ʾalafim would ordinarily mean “thousands,” but the parallel passage in Deuteronomy 7:9 plausibly glosses this as a reference to generations, in parallel to the previous verse.

7. take the name of the LORD your God in vain. The Hebrew verb literally means “bear” and indicates the taking of a vow or oath. The reference is to the use of the potent divine name in adjuration and perhaps also in magical conjuration, not to the mentioning of the name in casual speech. “In vain” has the sense of “falsely.”

8. Remember the sabbath day. This sole ritual—or at least calendric—injunction among the Ten Commandments is a hinge that connects the two principal aspects of the deity already invoked: the God of creation and the God of history. The observance of the sabbath is a commemoration or reenactment of God’s creation of the world, as verse 11 explains. At the same time, the liberation from labor, especially with the stipulation that one’s male and female slaves should equally be freed of labor on the seventh day, surely would have brought to the mind of these newly freed slaves the blessings of freedom, of cessation from labor. Jewish liturgy would pick up this clue by designating the sabbath “a remembrance of the going out from Egypt.”

9. tasks. In the Hebrew a collective noun in the singular.

12. Honor your father and your mother. This fifth commandment (according to the numeration of Jewish tradition) effects a transition, as Nahmanides nicely observes, from obligations vis-à-vis God to obligations vis-à-vis human beings, beginning with the human pair through whom each of us comes into the world. It is also the only commandment in which “no” or “not” (Hebrew loʾ) does not appear, though some have argued that prohibitions—e.g., not showing disrespect—are implicit. (In any event, the assumption of these Ten Words is that the way to monotheistic loyalty and ethical behavior is paved with prohibitions, that human nature is fraught with impulses that must be resisted.) It is hard to square the causal link between honoring parents and longevity with empirical observation, and one probably has to regard this as part of the traditional wisdom of the ancient Near East, the sort of hopeful moral calculus reflected in the Book of Proverbs.

on the soil. The Hebrew ʾadamah could also mean “land” or “earth,” but an emphasis on soil (the same stuff of which the altar in verse 24 is fashioned) sounds right for a people who will chiefly make their living from farming.

13. You shall not murder. Readers thoroughly conditioned by the King James Version’s “Thou shalt not kill” need to be reminded that the Hebrew verb ratsaḥ clearly means “murder,” not “kill,” and so that ban is specifically on criminal acts of taking of life.

17. You shall not covet. The Hebrew verb ḥamad exhibits a range of meaning from “yearn for,” “desire,” even “lust after” (the usual sense in postbiblical Hebrew), to simply “want.” But here, as in 34:24, it clearly suggests wanting to possess something that belongs to someone else, and so the King James Version rendering of “covet” still seems the best English equivalent. The attempted legislation of desire is problematic enough for Abraham ibn Ezra to devote what is almost a miniature essay to the subject in his commentary. His solution is along the following lines: Desire itself cannot be absolutely legislated but we all learn to condition ourselves as to what is realistic desire and what has to be confined to the realm of mere fantasy—for both moral and practical reasons. A peasant, ibn Ezra argues (perhaps a little too confidently), may be struck by the beauty of a princess, but knowing that she is inconceivably beyond his reach, “he will not covet her [or, lust after her] in his heart to go to bed with her.”

18. seeing the thunder and the flashes and the sound of the ram’s horn. Logically, of course, the objects of seeing would be only the lightning and the smoking mountain, but the writer presents the Sinai epiphany as one tremendous synesthetic experience that overwhelms the people while—the temporal force of the participial “seeing”—the Ten Words are enunciated. Just as qolot, “sounds” or “voices,” is not the usual word for thunder, lapidim, “flashes,” is not the usual designation for lightning but rather a term that generally means “torches,” here conveying the visual immediacy of the lightning flashes.

drew back. Literally “swayed,” suggesting a motion of involuntary recoil.

23. with Me. The preposition ʾiti appears to have approximately the same meaning as ʿal panai, “beside Me,” in the first commandment, and this prohibition of idol-making is a reiteration of the first of the Ten Words.

make them. The accusative pronoun is merely implied in the Hebrew.

24. An earthen altar. These instructions have the effect of orienting the people toward a temporal horizon when they will be planted on the soil (ʾadamah, the material for building this altar). As Umberto Cassuto notes, this injunction dissipates any sense the people might have that Sinai alone is God’s dwelling place and that the worship of the deity is a one-time event. The earthen material of the altar is also in stark antithesis to the silver and gold of the idols.

In every place that I make My name invoked. As scholarship has abundantly observed, the presumption here of a multiplicity of valid places for sacrifice contrasts with the later insistence of Deuteronomy on a centralized cult “in the place that I choose.”

25. your sword. English translations from Tyndale in the early sixteenth century to a spectrum of translations at the end of the twentieth century have rendered this as “tool” because the context obviously requires an implement for hewing stone. But the Hebrew ḥerev patently means “sword,” here a kind of metaphoric stand-in for “chisel,” and pointedly used because of its association with killing. Rashi succinctly catches the implication of the term: “The altar was created to lengthen a man’s days and iron was created to shorten a man’s days; it is not fit that the means of shortening should be brandished over the means of lengthening.”

26. that you may not expose your nakedness. The priests in fact wore linen breeches and so would not have had this problem, though this text probably antedates the introduction of trousers that the Priestly writers adopted. The prohibition, then, as Nahum Sarna notes, may envision a local altar where sacrifice is offered by laymen, who would have been wearing loose tunics without undergarments (like the dancing David in 2 Samuel 6). There is some evidence of ritual nudity in the ancient Near East, to which this injunction might be a response.