You shall not covet your neighbour’s house (17a) You shall not misuse the name of the Lord (7) You shall not make for yourself an idol (4–6)
You shall have no other gods before me (3)
Peshitta 3, Clement of Alexandria, Augustine, Roman Catholic, Lutheran Philo 2, Josephus, Eastern Orthodox, Reformed, Anglican Three different numbering systems have been used, which result from different divisions at the beginning and end of the list: Content (verse numbering from Exodus 20) 1Īlthough all traditions agree on the number ten, they differ slightly on the division of the material. Or the number itself may be incidental, simply resulting from the fact that the matters of crucial importance which were included in the list came to ten. Perhaps it was simply a practical number for memorisation, one for each finger of the hands. It would seem there is no need to look for theological significance here. Why ten? Does this number have any particular significance? Nielsen (1965:6–10) surveys various possibilities, but is unable to come to a clear conclusion. There are two canonical versions of the text, in Exodus 20:2–17 and Deuteronomy 5:6–21. 4:13 10:4), though it was not commonly used before Clement of Alexandria in the second century ad (Houtman, 1996). The term ‘Ten Commandments’ or-more accurately-‘Decalogue’ comes from the Hebrew asérét haddevarim, literally ‘the ten words’ (Exod. So what exactly are the Ten Commandments, how does the numbering work, and how do the various traditions and texts relate to each other? The present article sets out to answer these questions. A follow-up letter revealed that even an adult who claimed to know all Ten Commandments was quite confused about the numbering and thought that ‘Catholics, Protestants and Jews have different versions of the commandments’ (Lloyd, 2004). The Ten Commandments are the basis of Western civilisation, yet according to a recent article in The Times (Gledhill, 2004) few young people in Britain today even know what they are.