This article is a Cover Story selection, a weekly feature highlighting the top picks from the editors of America Media.
Pressure on state legislatures to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms has only increased after Louisiana’s 2024 law requiring it. North and South Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas have all also seen recent attempts to pass similar initiatives. What is usually forgotten, however, is that the Bible itself contains the most powerful argument against making the Ten Commandments a moral guide for all citizens.
As a scholar of the Bible with 55 years of experience teaching at Boston College, I would like to argue that posting the Ten Commandments contradicts the Bible itself—as well as the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.
In the Bible, the Ten Commandments appear in two places: Deuteronomy 5:5-21 and Exodus 20:1-17. The versions differ slightly.
To interpret the commandments, it is imperative to understand the narrative context. In Exodus, the older of the two instances, God fulfills his earlier promise of progeny and land to the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In Exodus, God comes to the aid of Abraham’s family, who had been forced by famine to migrate to Egypt and where they are now on the verge of extinction at the hands of the pharaoh. Moses, however, empowered by the Lord, succeeds in leading the people’s escape to the safety of the Lord’s mountain, Sinai. There the Lord asks the beleaguered people to be his people, and when they accept, he comes into their midst to announce the Ten Commandments—detailing how they are to live.
The First Commandment (Ex 20: 1-6) grounds the Lord’s claim on the people and sets forth the people’s orientation to their God.
I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall not have other gods beside me. You shall not make for yourself an idol or a likeness of anything—in the heavens above or on the earth below or in the waters beneath the earth; you shall not bow down before them or serve them. For I, the Lord, your God, am a jealous God, inflicting punishment for their ancestors’ wickedness on the children of those who hate me, down to the third and fourth generation but showing love down to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.
Scholars are in agreement that the Ten Commandments are the textual expression of a solemn covenant, a legal agreement, between the Lord and the people. (Ancient Near Eastern peoples did not hesitate to use legal language and instruments to articulate their relations to their deities.) According to the Franciscan Old Testament scholar Leslie Hoppe, “To detach the commandments from this narrative framework risks misunderstanding the significance of the commandments themselves. The commandments, then, are not arbitrary regulations but the revelation of the God who freed the Hebrew slaves.”
In The Ten Commandments: A Short History of an Ancient Text, Michael Coogan writes: “Nor did the biblical writers intend the Decalogue to be universal. It is rather a contract between God and one historical group, the Israelites newly escaped out of Egypt and their descendants—not between God and the Egyptians, or the Midianites, or any of the other groups mentioned in biblical narrative, nor for that matter the rest of the world.” Coogan concedes that “[i]n Jewish tradition there are such supposedly universal laws, the so-called Noachian or Noahide laws [Genesis 9:8-17], the commands given to Noah and his descendants after the biblical Flood, but not the Ten Commandments.”
Further, Moshe Weinfeld of Hebrew University, who has written authoritatively on the Ten Commandments, observes:
These commandments are not intended as concrete legislation, however, but as a formulation of the conditions for membership in the community. Anyone who does not observe these commandments excludes herself or himself from the community of the faithful. This is the function of the Decalogue.
The above interpretations represent the consensus of critical biblical scholars from the Jewish, Catholic and Protestant traditions. Such a well-nigh universal scholarly view of the Ten Commandments constitutes a decisive argument against posting the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. Why? Because the Ten Commandments lay the foundation for the relationship of Jews and Christians to their Lord, but not for adherents of other religions or of no religion.
Two more important reasons for not posting the Ten Commandments should be noted: First, the Tenth Commandment accepts as normal the enslavement of another human being: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, his male or female slave, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.” And second, the First Commandment rejects religions that are not the developed forms of Judaism and Christianity.
In other words, the Ten Commandments establish a particular religion; but the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is unequivocal: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” To detach the Ten Commandments from the covenant between a particular deity, the Lord, and a particular people, Israel, and to treat them as a moral and philosophical text applicable to everyday life, is to misunderstand the original purpose of the Ten Commandments and to disregard the Bible’s own narrative.
It is worth noting that posting the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms is also not in line with the Second Vatican Council’s teaching. In “Nostra Aetate,” the “Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions,” the church recognizes the good in other world religions—such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Judaism. But when a state sponsors the Ten Commandments as a model for all its citizens, it favors one religion over another, even denigrating the others.
The Ten Commandments themselves make no claim to universality. In fact, the Ten Commandments distinguish Israel from other religions. Unfortunately, the culture wars in the United States make opponents of posting the commandments seem hostile to religion, even though the majority of them believe firmly in the Bible and the Constitution.
Let me offer an alternative for American classrooms: the Golden Rule, treating others as one would want to be treated by them. It is found in the Old Testament, Leviticus 19:18, as “Love your fellow as yourself: I am the Lord,” and in the New Testament, Matthew 7:12, with: “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.” A version of the Golden Rule is found in several places in the Bible and in almost every religion in the world. It is inspiring and gives a challenging ideal to strive toward, rather than an abstract text.
