Part VIII: How the Ten Commandments Were Reshuffled

THE THREE NUMBERINGS, SIDE BY SIDE #

   TEXT (Exodus 20 / Deut 5)        JEWISH   PHILO /     AUGUSTINE
                                    TALMUD   ORTHODOX /  CATHOLIC /
                                             REFORMED    LUTHERAN
   -------------------------------  -------  ----------  ------------
   "I am the LORD thy God, which      1      preface     1 (preface)
    brought thee out of Egypt"
    (Ex 20:2 / Dt 5:6)
   No other gods before me            2      1           1
    (Ex 20:3 / Dt 5:7)
   No graven image; do not bow        2      2           1  <== MERGED
    down to them (Ex 20:4-6 /         (same)             into "no
    Dt 5:8-10)                                           other gods"
   Name of the LORD in vain           3      3           2
    (Ex 20:7 / Dt 5:11)
   Sabbath day                        4      4           3
    (Ex 20:8-11 / Dt 5:12-15)
   Honor father and mother            5      5           4
    (Ex 20:12 / Dt 5:16)
   Do not kill (Ex 20:13 / Dt 5:17)   6      6           5
   No adultery (Ex 20:14 / Dt 5:18)   7      7           6
   Do not steal (Ex 20:15 / Dt 5:19)  8      8           7
   No false witness                   9      9           8
    (Ex 20:16 / Dt 5:20)
   Do not covet neighbor's WIFE      10     10           9  <== SPLIT
    (Dt 5:21a; in Ex 20:17b)
   Do not covet neighbor's HOUSE,    10     10          10  <== SPLIT
    goods (Ex 20:17a; Dt 5:21b)      (same) (same)

   Lutheran order of 9 and 10 follows Exodus: 9 = house, 10 = wife,
   servants, animals, "any thing that is thy neighbour's."

Sources for the numberings: the Jewish division appears in rabbinic tradition (e.g. the Mekhilta on Exodus 20); the "Philonic" division in Philo of Alexandria (On the Decalogue 50-51) and Josephus (Antiquities 3.91-92), followed by the Greek Fathers, the Orthodox and the Reformed churches; the Augustinian division in Augustine, Questions on Exodus 71 (Quaestiones in Heptateuchum 2.71).

WHAT THE CATHOLIC NUMBERING DOES #

Look at the right-hand column.

• It MERGES "no other gods" (Ex 20:3) with "no graven images, do not bow down to them" (Ex 20:4-6) into ONE commandment.
• That leaves nine. So it SPLITS the single prohibition of coveting into TWO: the ninth (your neighbor's wife) and the tenth (your neighbor's goods).
• Ten again. But the commandment against images is no longer a commandment of its own.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church admits the variation openly: "The division and numbering of the Commandments have varied in the course of history. The present catechism follows the division of the Commandments established by St. Augustine, which has become traditional in the Catholic Church. It is also that of the Lutheran confessions. The Greek Fathers worked out a slightly different division, which is found in the Orthodox Churches and Reformed communities." (CCC 2066)

GET THE FACTS STRAIGHT -- BECAUSE THE FACTS ARE WORSE #

This is where cheap anti-Catholic pamphlets go wrong. Do not repeat them. The truth is stronger.

• NOT A LATE CONSPIRACY. The merged numbering goes back to Augustine around 400 CE (Questions on Exodus 71). Augustine's reasoning: Deuteronomy 5:21 separates the wife from the house and uses two different Hebrew verbs (tachmod for the wife, titavveh for the house), so he counted two coveting commands. Defensible as a reading. Fine.
• THE BIBLE TEXT WAS NEVER CUT. Every Catholic Bible -- Vulgate, Douay- Rheims, NABRE -- prints Exodus 20:4-6 in full: "Thou shalt not make to thyself a graven thing..." (Douay). Nobody tore it out of the Book.
• THE CUT IS IN THE CATECHISM LISTS. And that is where it counts. Almost no one learns the commandments from Exodus. They learn them from the short list -- the one recited in class, printed on the poster, memorized for First Communion.

Here is that short list, from the Baltimore Catechism (1885), the standard catechism of American Catholics for generations:

   1. I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt not have strange gods before Me.
   2. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.
   3. Remember thou keep holy the Sabbath day.
   4. Honor thy father and thy mother.
   5. Thou shalt not kill.
   6. Thou shalt not commit adultery.
   7. Thou shalt not steal.
   8. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
   9. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife.
  10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's goods.

Read it slowly. Where is "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image... Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them" (Exodus 20:4-5)?

It is not there.

Not deleted from the Bible. Dropped from the list that millions of children actually carried in their heads. The Catechism of the Catholic Church today uses the same "traditional catechetical formula" in its summary table (first commandment: "I am the LORD your God: you shall not have strange Gods before me"), with the full biblical text printed in a parallel column most people never read. Luther's Small Catechism (1529) does the same thing. Remember Part V: the Lutherans kept Rome's numbering too.

WHY IT MATTERS: STATUES, ICONS, AND BOWING DOWN #

Now walk into any cathedral. Statues. Painted saints. Candles lit before images. People kneeling before them.

• Exodus 20:4-5 (KJV): "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above... Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them."
• The SECOND COUNCIL OF NICAEA (787) decreed that holy images are to be venerated with honor (Greek proskynesis) but not with the true worship (latreia) due to God alone, because "the honor paid to an image passes to its prototype" (a principle it borrowed from Basil of Caesarea). CCC 2131-2132 repeats this.
• Here is the detail they never mention. In the Greek Septuagint -- the Bible of the early Church -- Exodus 20:5 reads "ou proskyneseis autois oude me latreuseis autois": "you shall not BOW DOWN (proskyneseis) to them nor SERVE (latreuseis) them." The very word the Council approved for images -- proskynesis -- is the very word the commandment forbids.

Rome's reply: veneration is not worship, and the Incarnation made God visible. Then why does the short list children memorize leave out the one commandment that would make them ask?

The numbering came from Augustine. The silence in the catechism list came from the institution. The statues came after.

THE SABBATH THAT BECAME SUNDAY #

The fourth commandment (third, in Rome's count) says: "Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy... the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God" (Exodus 20:8-10). The seventh day is Saturday. Jesus kept it, and said "The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath" (Mark 2:27).

Now look at the verses Rome leans on, one by one.

• REVELATION 1:10 -- "I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day." The Greek is kyriake hemera. John never says WHICH day. Not Sunday. Not any day of the week. Reading "Sunday" into it is tradition poured back into the text.
• ACTS 20:7 -- "upon the first day of the week, when the disciples came together to break bread." By Jewish reckoning the day began at sunset, and Paul preached "until midnight." Read that way it was a Saturday- night meal before a journey -- and either way, a farewell meal is not a new holy day.
• 1 CORINTHIANS 16:2 -- "Upon the first day of the week let every one of you lay by him in store." Setting money aside at home. No gathering. No worship. No rest.

That is the whole case. Three verses, and not one of them moves God's day.

So where did Sunday come from? Watch the name. Around 155 CE, Justin Martyr, writing in Rome to a pagan emperor, says the believers meet "on the day called Sunday" -- in Greek, the day of the Sun (First Apology 67). Rome's church was already speaking the empire's language. The Sun-god was everywhere: Emperor Aurelian made Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun, an official god of the state in 274, and Constantine kept the Sun on his coins for years after his conversion. Then came the law.

• MARCH 7, 321 -- CONSTANTINE'S SUNDAY LAW: "On the venerable Day of the Sun let the magistrates and people residing in cities rest, and let all workshops be closed." Farmers were exempted. (Codex Justinianus 3.12.2.) Note the name: the Day of the SUN.
• c. 363-364 -- COUNCIL OF LAODICEA, CANON 29: "Christians must not judaize by resting on the Sabbath, but must work on that day, rather honouring the Lord's Day; and, if they can, resting then as Christians. But if any shall be found to be judaizers, let them be anathema from Christ."

Read the canon again. Christians were RESTING ON THE SABBATH in the fourth century -- that is why the council had to forbid it. And the penalty for keeping the day God wrote in stone was to be cursed.

No verse of the New Testament moves the Sabbath to Sunday. The Catholic Catechism itself says Sunday "fulfills" the Sabbath (CCC 2175) -- a theological claim, not a biblical command. Sunday as the "Lord's Day" was not handed down by Christ. It was sold to you by an emperor of the Sun and a council that cursed anyone who refused it.

THE COMMANDMENTS, READ WITH GNOSIS #

The Valentinians did not throw out the Ten Commandments. Ptolemy, writing to the Christian woman Flora, divides the Law of Moses into three parts: commandments from God, additions from Moses, and traditions of the elders (Letter to Flora, in Epiphanius, Panarion 33.4). The Decalogue, he says, is the pure part of the law -- good, but incomplete -- which the Savior came "not to destroy, but to fulfil" (Matthew 5:17; Panarion 33.5, PARAPHRASE of Ptolemy's argument).

And the Gospel of Truth reads the Sabbath inwardly: the Savior labored on the Sabbath for the sheep fallen into the pit, "that you may know interiorly... what is the Sabbath, on which it is not fitting for salvation to be idle" (NHC I,3 32:18-26, Robinson; lightly abridged).

For the one who knows, the Lord's day is not a square on the calendar. It is the day the spark remembers where it came from -- and that can be any day, and every day.

They did not need to renumber God's words. They needed to understand them.