Almost everything that we, you know, get wrong, or at least
everything that we think about the 10 commandments today, that
isn't what I think the 10 commandments were about when
they were originally written. Almost all of that is actually
about 2000 years old. The big question I'm asking here
is really like, how did we get from this?
You know, however you want to think about ancient Israelite or
like ancient Jewish biblical text in the Hebrew Bible, how
did that thing become the symbol actually of like contemporary
right wing Christianity? And why is it that it's like a
Christian obsession rather than a Jewish one?
Are Americans obsessed with the 10 commandments?
And if so, is it a uniquely American thing or a part of a
long story? Hey, I'm Jordan, and this is
Bible and archaeology. I'm so happy to be joined today
by Doctor Joel Baden for a discussion about the 10
Commandments, the context that you should be reading them in,
the problem of taking them out and acting like they are
independent, and why Americans seem to interact with the 10
Commandments in the way that they do because it may not be so
uniquely American. I think some parts are, some
parts aren't. If you are interested in a deep
dive into the 10 Commandments and learning more, you're in
luck because Doctor Baden is going to have a class all about
the 10 Commandments at the end of April.
There's a link down in the description.
You'll get 10 hours on the 10 Commandments with Doctor Joel
Baden. Go and sign up.
But for now, settle in and I hope you enjoy our conversation,
conversation all about the 10 commandments.
Doctor Baden, thank you so much for taking the time to come back
again. There said long time no see.
Happy to have you here to talk a little bit about the 10
commandments, something you're going to be talking about a lot
here in the near future. At the end of April, 10 hours on
the 10 Commandments, which isn't the name, but feels like it
could be the 10 Commandments class.
You're going to be covering it all.
So we're going to dip our toes into that today.
So thanks for coming over my. Pleasure.
Can we start with maybe the elephant in the room, which is
the American obsession with the 10 commandments, 'cause I think
this is maybe the entry way that we have to acknowledge before we
can talk about anything else. Do you have any sense for why
you think Americans are obsessed with the 10 commandments in the
way that they are? Yeah, I mean, this is sort of
where the the course starts too, which is like, you know, the 10
commandments are like this text that somehow like this is the
one that we want to put in front of courthouses.
This is the one that we want to put in classrooms and curricula.
And, you know, the question that I'm, I'm looking to answer a
little bit is not so much like why that's the case, Because,
you know, I think there's, there's like a, a big long story
there that has a lot to do with like contemporary evangelical,
sort of, you know, thoughts about the Bible.
I'll get there. But you know, how is it that
the, the big question I'm asking here is really like, how did we
get from this? You know, however you want to
think about ancient Israelite or like ancient Jewish, like
biblical text in the Hebrew Bible, How did that thing become
like the symbol actually of like contemporary right wing
Christianity? And why is it that it's like a
Christian obsession rather than a Jewish one, say?
And you know, part of the story is like part of the story has to
do with, you know, a, a, a very sort of modern Bible centric,
like Christian movement. You know, like all the stuff you
see out there, like phrases like biblical worldview and like,
like these, these, these notions of like, I were like we're
upholding the Bible, of course, colored in Christianity by the
fact that, you know, not the whole Bible, like not all the
laws, just these laws and that right.
And, and, and, and that like selectivity, right.
The notion that like these ten are the laws that matter and the
other laws that like Jews follow really don't that, of course,
isn't modern. That's nearly 2000 years old.
And actually not just that, but basically almost everything that
we, you know, get wrong, or at least everything that we think
about the 10 commandments today. That isn't what I think the 10
commandments were about when they were originally written.
Almost all of that is actually about 2000 years old in terms of
like interpretation. And so, you know, the class is
going to be looking at like all these different facets of this,
of this text, it's history. You know, who wrote it, when it
was written, why it was written, what it's like, what it was,
what its function was both in the real world and in the text,
like how important it was. And of course, like what's
actually in it and what those, those words mean.
We're like 2000 years deep into a bunch of, I don't want to say
misunderstandings, but just like interpretations that are
different from what any of those things would have been, you
know, in ancient Israel when the text was written.
When you're looking at that question of how we came here, do
you see that 2000 year cycle as fairly constant or are there
real like jumps and starts and movements in direction along
this path of misunderstanding or shifting or understanding or
however you want to frame that because that is such a long
scope to look at for the how? Yeah, I mean it actually.
So what I, what I think I would say, what I think I'm going to
say is that like most of the interpretations of the 10
commandments that sort of shaped how we think of them today are
really very, very, very old. Essentially like we've been,
like, I say, we've been sort of sitting with an understanding of
the 10 commandments and like, not like, like, not like 1
moment and then 2000 years of nothingness, but you know, like
moments in antiquity where meanings were lost or shifted or
adjusted. Sometimes it's Jewish, sometimes
it's Christian, sometimes it's even inner biblical, you know,
and, and some of it is like, you know, overtly Augustinian, for
example. But I, I guess part of what I'm,
what I would argue is like, so the 10 commandments are from
somewhere. I'm not going to give away
where, but like somewhere in the, you know, first half of the
first Millennium BCE. And I would sort of argue that
by the first half of the first Millennium CE it they were what
they are now. And like that to me is actually
like fascinating. This is not a question of sort
of modern readers or believers or interpreters or Christians or
Jews sort of like coming to it and thinking, oh, this says
something different from what it said, you know, back then.
It's just picking up on and really sort of like adhering to
an old set of readings and understandings and, and
exploring like how and why those shifts happened.
And they happened again at like various times in antiquity.
Sometimes it was historical, sometimes it was theological,
sometimes it was, you know, about Judaism, sometimes about
Christianity. All of these sort of factors in
antiquity shaped the text into basically what we think it is
today. I feel like you're touching on
so much of the the problem in thinking about these.
When we think of them as we're going to set something up or
someone wants to set something up someplace, it feels like this
fixed thing. We've got a number, there's ten
of them. You see it in this like
monolithic thing, like the thing from 2001 Space Odyssey, and
there it is, and it just sits there and it has appeared.
And yet you're talking about so much of how this is not fixed,
but very flexible and adaptable over time.
And yet our approaches to it can almost be fixed at the same
time. When you're thinking along this
long how process, how do you balance the fixed and not fixed?
It has descended as one thing and yet is very much back and
forth because in some ways it's like an encapsulation of that
struggle across all of the text, but in one nice narrow little
list that almost makes it worse. Yeah.
I mean, I think, you know, that notion of like it being fixed is
part of the understanding we have today, right?
That is like not actually maybe as accurate to antiquity as as
we'd like to think, you know, and part of that is, you know,
this is like the literal set in stone.
Like these are texts. It's it's words that we're told
were like inscribed on stone. And so they were fixed.
But of course, that's like, that's in the world of the story
that that that we don't have and nobody had these like tablets of
stone. And honestly, even if we did,
and even if they did, it's not like that means that they're not
interpretable or that their meaning is fixed.
But you know, part of what we'll look at is not just that the,
you know, the, the whole like stone tablet thing is a little
bit of a, a distraction, but also that, you know, the words
themselves actually weren't particularly fixed.
You know, there are two versions of the 10 commandments in, in
the Bible. There's the, the, the moment in
Exodus where God speaks them. And there's the moment of
Deuteronomy where Moses like, and this is what God said back
then. And they're not the same.
And, and they're not, and, and then, you know, Jesus quotes the
10 commandments famously, but only half of them and not in the
same order as in our Bibles. And we have other texts of the
10 commandments for antiquity that aren't in the same order.
So there's like this notion of sort of fixedness is part of the
myth of, of the 10 commandments, right?
Is this part of this, this notion of like this eternal, I
mean, you know, sort of like you said, right?
Like the like space Odyssey, right?
Like it like came down to earth in this like fixed form.
And it's always been that way, and it just hasn't always been
that way. In the moments that you're
talking about here where they show up, the different
storylines that the 10 commandments or a version of
them appear in, as you're noting, differ so wildly.
And yet I think when we talk about the 10 commandments, it
usually happens completely removed of any narrative context
around them. Like they are just a world of
themselves. When you try to plug people back
into considering the commandments within the
narratives, does it create discomfort?
Because I think of this idea of like, we want them to be a fixed
thing. Suddenly narrativizing it makes
it so radically different. Yeah, I mean, we're, we're
obviously going to talk about that.
I, I, I don't know whether it causes discomfort.
I'll find out, you know, from people's questions afterward.
But yeah, like the narrative matters.
And The thing is, we, we, we know the narrative matters in a
few ways, right? The, the, the like Augustinian
ancient Christian claimed that like, these are the only laws
that really matter and all the rest of the laws we can do
without is not like separable from the story, right?
Because that's really grounded in the notion in the story that
God spoke these words directly to the Israelites, right?
These are the only laws that were mediated by Moses.
So like that part of the story is part of the story, right?
It's part of it's part of the 10 commandments like as a concept.
But when you really get into what's going on actually in the
in the biblical narratives, plural, right, The one in Exodus
and the one in Deuteronomy, you know, actually only one of them
says that God spoke directly to the people.
And like, that's going to I just gave it away, but that's going
to freak people out, right? Like it's or at least it should
give people some pause, right? Like how did we get to how did
we get to thinking that when it only appears in one place?
You know, this is a little bit then a story about, you know,
like how some versions of narratives become dominant and
others and others fall away. But the yeah, the the the idea
of like re situating them in their story also obviously helps
us answer the question of, you know, for the texts that give us
these this, this thing, you know, fixed or not, what do they
think it was doing? Like, what was the point of
because as you say, once you sort of pull it out and say
these are like the 10 most important, the only like
relevant laws you're not thinking about.
You know what, why they why they were just that they are.
And, and, you know, this is really, this is, this comes back
to the last thing we talked about actually, but the last
time we, we chatted. But this, this, this sort of
like readerly approach of taking a text and removing it from it's
context and then treating it as like an independent little item
is like a very old reading technique.
But it's it's one that like, you know, changes the meanings of
things or allows for, for new meanings to emerge and, and re
situating them back into their narrative contexts, at least
lets us sort of get a handle on, you know, what somebody might
have thought they were doing when they were doing something
with them. When we put them back in that
context, should we be reading them more as a narrative than as
law? Because when we take them out,
it's easy to say here's a list, do or don't do these things, Oh,
law, there we go. We can move on.
But in plugging it back in and looking at the why they're here
questions instead of just that they are, should we take a more
narrative instead of legal approach to understanding them?
Yeah, I mean, you're setting me up, you know, That's my thing,
right? Like yes, we should.
I'm happy to set you up, I love. You we should always be thinking
about these. The 10 commandments appear and
exist exclusively in a world of a story and.
But for some people that like is a mind break thing because they
almost exist exclusively without a story for so many people
today. Yeah, yeah.
And you know, this is this is part of the like, you mean you
can hardly imagine taking almost any other like biblical chunk
and being like, I'm going to put that on the monument.
That's its own thing. But law has that, has that sense
to it. But there's not a single law
given in the entire Bible that isn't given in a story, right?
There's no, like there's not even in that in that sense, like
law or legal, the, the narrative or the literary genre of legal
literature is, is, is almost, almost unique biblically in that
way, right? We have an entire book of just
Proverbs, just Proverbs. We have an entire book of
Psalms, just Psalms. But we have stories.
We have, you know, we have histories, we have all of these
like we have prophecy. Obviously we've all of these
literary genres that exist in their own, like there's a book
of them. And obviously in antiquity we
also had laws that existed as their own sort of document,
their own independent being. But that that's not the case in
the Bible. Every single law in the Bible is
given by a character in a story. That character is God, all
right. But by by character to another
character or another set of characters, it's, you know, it's
always embedded. There is no such thing.
There's no biblical book that is just a book of law.
And I think that's interesting and meaningful and it at least
gives us the opportunity to ask the question not like not how
did these laws function in the real world, but rather how did
they function in the story world?
Because, you know, again, unlike, I mean, we can ask
about, you know, Psalms, how did a Psalm function the real world?
How did Proverbs function the real world?
How did prophecy like who were prophets?
What were they actually doing? But we don't have any, we we
can't really ask that question with law in ancient Israel
because we don't have such a thing as just like a law code.
That would have been, I don't know, put on stone and plopped
in front of the ancient Israelite courthouse.
And thinking of it in the narrative way complicates the
idea of, well, we can apply these when you take them out and
they're their own thing and you imagine that they plopped them
in front of some courthouse and applied them as they were
written. Instead of that this is from a
character within a narrative as a part of a thing suddenly makes
them no feel feel very different and presents a different
question of like what they are trying to address.
When you look at them again in that narrative context and as a
character and as a voice for a character going this way.
Is there a real misdirection in that long 2000 year scope of
where we're looking at them now that we're looking at the wrong
maybe point they're trying to address by removing them and
making them function in this way?
Yeah, sure. You know, the, the really, like
we're sort of keep on circling back around to the same idea,
which is like the removal, the, the removal of the 10
commandments from their narrative context is like not a
separable process from our changed understanding of them
and their function. And once you start talking about
them, even even just talking about them as an independent
thing, you start to make a, you're starting to make a claim
for them as existing outside of the story in which they appear.
Right. And, you know, this is like, I,
I like, I do this all the time and I kind of hate to do it.
But, you know, if anyone today were to write a story set in
antiquity in which laws appeared, would we ask?
Like, would we be talking about, you know, those laws as their
own thing or were we talking about like, well, in the story,
what were they? What were they for and what were
they doing? And who will listen to them?
And and you know what, what did they mean?
So yeah, recontextualizing them sort of gives us space, gives us
space to think about them not as what they have become, but as as
what they like authentically, originally were, right, Which is
an object in a story. I want to come back to the the
starting question, the American obsession, because in thinking
about how they've been removed and what they were from my
approach, obviously, if you're experiencing the 10 commandments
in this removed context in America, it feels like something
that might be uniquely American or in some ways the certain
expressions of it might be particularly American or
American evangelical or whatever it is out of that.
But as you're talking about this longer history, is it really a
uniquely American thing in the way we might be seeing it
expressed now? Or you might be knowing it in a
news story now that is put it in a school room or put it in front
of a courthouse? Or is that a longer part of this
no continued cycle of people taking it out and doing it and
different expressions of it, but a a similar type of concern or
mistaken addressee in it? Yeah, it's interesting.
I mean, I don't know that there is any like pre or non American,
you know, equivalent to the like, oh, we should make a
statue of these things, right? And like put it out there
publicly as a symbol of our belief system.
Not like not in that material way.
Certainly, you know, they get pulled out and used
symbolically. I mean, you can see it in in
arts, right, like the famous Rembrandt, which I think is
probably the, is the art that's being used for the, for the
course is like the, you know, the Rembrandt portrait of Moses
holding the 10 commandments. So like they, they, they, they
get pulled out and sort of held up in, in, in in various ways
over over time. But, but I'm not sure that we,
you know, I mean, you know, not Calvin, Luther, right, makes you
know, Luther's little little catechism, which is like, you
know, like Protestantism for kids, basically like starts with
here's the 10 commandments, right?
So this notion that they are this fundamental basis of this
particularly Christian identity and, and, and life is, is, is
not, is not contemporary, but, but the sort of the
monumentality of it, the, the, the desire to use it as a
symbol. It does is, I think, pretty
inextricably LinkedIn contemporary American culture
to, you know, desires for like really like publicly, like
stating something, saying something about what we as a
country are. Obviously it's not, it can't be
separated from this notion of like America as a Christian
nation. That's that's all in the in the
background of what's going on in in America today.
But you know, similar things were were going on again in
terms of like taking them as fundamental as foundational for
identity and for religious belief.
That's been going on for a long time.
And again, that's, you know, I think it does go back to
Augustine at the very at least back to Augustine who very
openly is just like, yeah, yeah. Like the biblical, we shouldn't
ignore the biblical laws, but especially the 10 commandments,
right? Those are the those are great
except for the except for the 19.
The 9 commandments are awesome for Augusta.
And then there's then there's one that's not so good.
When when we're talking about them as being set up, in some
ways it feels like past work that you've done in talking
about the way certain expressions of Christianity have
sought to use artifacts, biblical artifacts, in holding
up this thing. And the 10 commandments feel
like that same type of point where we don't maybe have the
things and yet those representations of them that we
can make stand in as a helpful pseudo artifact that we can roll
out or put in certain places to Marshall those same arguments.
And we don't have to deal with the where did you get it from
and who did you buy it from? Problems and just say same same
solution but a a different presentation.
Yeah, it it's funny that like the artifact thing really gets
at the materiality of the 10 commandments, which is a an
issue that's isn't, isn't unique, as I sort of suggested
earlier, among biblical texts. There are virtually no other.
I mean, there are plenty of like especially laws in the Bible
that are said to have been written down, right, but not
written down in stone. And like that part of the story
that that notion that this of of all things in the entire Bible
in New Testament included, was like was monumental back then.
Back then being in the world of the story, I think very much as
part of it's sort of like monumentality today.
And again, I, I sort of, I kind of assume that underlying this,
I don't know if I remember to say it is, is a notion that
there must really have at some point been a stone like tablets
of the 10 commandments that existed in the real world.
So that such that we can, as you said, sort of like make a
replica of them that would, that would contain some of the same
kind of like numinous power that a physical object would have.
Of course, there's like no evidence.
In fact, I think it's no reason to even be looking for evidence
that there ever was like stone monumental 10 commandments in
the real world at any any time honestly before, like in front
of courthouses today. Before you can go and find a
bunch of versions of them now that have been put up all over
the place. Yeah, I mean, you know, there,
there, there are like there are texts with them on them, but but
not this sort of monumental thing.
That's it's my knowledge at least, that's reasonably new.
Well, if you're interested in diving deeper into this 2000
plus year story here that Joel's going to be talking about,
you're in luck. There's a link down in the
description. April 19th through 23rd, you can
go join 10 hours on the 10 Commandments with Doctor Joel
Baden and walk through a lot of the little teases that you got
here. So if you are interested in
learning more, go and sign up. Again, link down below.
Joel, thank you so much for taking the time to tease out
some of this. I always love getting to poke
you to talk about the story in the context of things.
So anytime you have the time, I'm happy to good.
Pleasure as always.