Ten Pretty Great Ideas

The Treehouse: Conversations About God

I know it’s a little cheeky to replace “commandments” with “pretty great ideas,” but my entire goal with this Treehouse project is to pry you loose a bit from the “chiseled in stone, forever and ever, amen” perspective that pervades so much conversation about faith and to see if I can share what I hope may be some fresh insights.

So let’s talk about Moses and the giving of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20), but let’s not do it from our projected image of God. In other words, because we are finite and the world operates on us willy-nilly, and therefore we often function out of anxious self-concern, we may imagine God to be like us — blaming and judgey, distancing and “othering.” Those are too often the eyes through which we imagine God and read and interpret scripture. We project our understanding of power onto God, assuming God wants what we want.

Honestly, I see so much bloodthirstiness these days among those who profess to be followers of the Prince of Peace. The general tone when attacking someone who expresses questions and doubts about Christianity is, “Just wait until you die, you’ll find out, you’ll burn in hell,” as if relishing the prospect of “you’ll get yours.” Too often the Ten Commandments have been used as a cudgel to shame and control, as a way to decide who’s in and who’s out, when I read them as instructions on how to live in community and care for and respect one another.

“You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” — Anne Lamott

Okay, having said all of the above, let’s also remember the context. In my Oxford Annotated RSV Bible, a footnote clarifies it thus: “These laws…presupposed a settled agrarian society.” That’s why in the pages following, we begin to see an extensive legal code, which is a way to organize community toward the most just and fair resolutions. So, for example, Exodus 21:33, when a man leaves a pit open and someone else’s ox or donkey falls in, the one who dug the pit has to compensate the animal’s owner for the loss (but gets to keep the dead animal’s body, so there’s that).

These Old Testament stories were written after the fact to explain “How did we get to be people of Yahweh Elohim?” and more importantly “What does it mean to be the people of Yahweh Elohim?” These commandments, I think, speak to ancient people about how they should live as people of the one God.

And one thing I believe we can infer is, you are to live in community, and here are mandates for how to do it so that the community flourishes and everyone has what they need. ¹

As a preamble to giving the law, Yahweh Elohim offers a gentle reminder. “Remember which God I am? The one who brought you out of the land of Egypt out of the house of bondage.” (Again and again, the people will get this reminder, in addition to a mandate to show hospitality toward the stranger, because “you were once strangers, wanderers, and, by the way, certainly not people who delivered yourselves out of your own desperate situation.”)

In a way, there is really only one commandment, the first and second, which I see as combined, and that is the commitment to the one God² above all others as the source of real Life. In other words, we know there is life, and then there is Life. I believe the point with these first commandments is to call people to Life, the kind in which the ruah of The Exhale moves in and through you (like it did in ha-adam, the clay creature that had no life until the breath of Yahweh Elohim gave it).

And to have no other God but Yahweh Elohim is an alignment that leads one to the basic elements of Life in harmony and well-being — shalom — as a community. That’s essentially what the rest of the commandments and the extensive legal code derived from them are. A way of aligning with the goals of Yahweh Elohim.³

1. “So that” is an important phrase that is going to do a lot of work as we go along. Check out Genesis 12 and the blessing of Abram. Everyone having what they need is part of the understanding of what is just and right according to God. More on that later.

2. Re: other gods, sure, polytheism is still alive and well. Paul Tillich held the opinion that your Ultimate Concern is your God. In other words, whatever you believe can “save” you, give you abundant life, what you give yourself over to is your god. Money. Prestige. Beauty. Athleticism. Intelligence. Fame. Achievements. Physical strength. Weaponry.

3. Yahweh Elohim differs from the other popular and well-known gods of the time in important ways. One example — many scholars take the story of Abraham and Isaac to be an indication there is to be no child sacrifice, unlike the worship of other gods where it was a commonly required practice.