Louisiana mandate stirs debate about what the 10 Commandments and their purpose
AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
This month, the Louisiana Legislature mandated that the Ten Commandments be displayed in all public school classrooms. And Oklahoma's top education official has ordered that the Bible, including the Ten Commandments, be taught starting in the fifth grade. Those Ten Commandments seem straightforward, but as NPR religion correspondent Jason DeRose reports, context and nuance are everything.
JASON DEROSE, BYLINE: At Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles, Kristine Henriksen Garroway is taking me on a tour.
KRISTINE HENRIKSEN GARROWAY: This is our atrium. It is a historical part of the building.
DEROSE: She's a professor of Bible at the rabbinical seminary.
HENRIKSEN GARROWAY: And one of the art installations we have is a giant statue of Moses, and it's trying to capture the moment when he goes down and sees the golden calf and gets so angry that he smashes the first set of the tablets.
DEROSE: The tablets representing the Ten Commandments. For Jews, Garroway says, the Ten Commandments listed in both the biblical books of Exodus and Deuteronomy are just the beginning.
HENRIKSEN GARROWAY: That's a stand-in for the entire Torah, for the entire revelation and covenant that was given to the Jewish people.
DEROSE: A covenant that includes 613 laws, about which Garroway says ancient rabbis loved to argue.
HENRIKSEN GARROWAY: The one they really hone in on is Shabbat, so the commandment to keep the Shabbat versus the commandment to remember the Shabbat, and the different wording appears in Exodus and Deuteronomy.
DEROSE: It's a tradition of conversation that makes room for multiple understandings. But it's evangelical Christians who are the main proponents of posting the Ten Commandments in Louisiana classrooms and teaching the Bible in Oklahoma. Professor Kyong-Jin Lee teaches Bible at Fuller Seminary, an evangelical school in Pasadena. She says knowing the Ten Commandments is crucial.
KYONG-JIN LEE: It is a very important part of a covenantal relationship, which is about how you relate with divinity vertically and how you relate with your fellow human beings horizontally.
DEROSE: Meaning the first five, including no graven images and not taking the Lord's name in vain, are about God.
LEE: God has delivered you from slavery in Egypt, and he has walked with you all this time. You are going to become a nation. You're going to have an identity.
DEROSE: And the second five are about people's relationships to each other - don't lie, don't covet.
LEE: There are these basic guidelines, and they will teach you how you can make major decisions in terms of the basic ethics.
DEROSE: Necessary, says Lee, in any society. But they're not meant to be understood out of context, says Marvin Sweeney. He teaches Hebrew Bible at Claremont School of Theology in Los Angeles, a Methodist seminary. He says the commandments aren't even easy to count.
MARVIN SWEENEY: When you look at the Ten Commandments, there are more than ten. The different traditions number them differently - one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine different orders of the Ten Commandments.
DEROSE: For example...
SWEENEY: In Judaism, I am the Lord your God is the first commandment, and in the Roman Catholic Church, that is part of the first commandment, which includes what Judaism numbers as the second commandment, thou shalt have no other gods before me.
DEROSE: And Sweeney says specific translations are laden with interpretation.
SWEENEY: Thou shalt not murder is sometimes rendered as thou shalt not kill. The Hebrew lo tirtzach means specifically murder.
DEROSE: Louisiana mandates the word kill. In fact, the wording of the Ten Commandments specified in the law isn't a direct quote from either Exodus or Deuteronomy. It's heavily edited lines from the 17th century King James version. Hebrew Union College Professor Kristine Henriksen Garroway has this reaction to plucking highly altered biblical verses out of context and posting them anywhere.
HENRIKSEN GARROWAY: As a scholar of the ancient world, this drives me nuts.
DEROSE: Because not providing a fuller context and playing fast and loose with the text itself dishonors the very tradition from which the commandments come.
Jason DeRose, NPR News, Los Angeles.
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