For the Letter Killeth

Abstract

For the Letter Killeth Peter Heinegg The Ten Commandments: A Short History of an Ancient Text. By Michael Coogan, New Haven, CT: Yale U.P., 2014. xiii + 176 pp. $25 (paper). In this breezy‐but‐scholarly plaidoyer, Michael Coogan, who's the director of publications for the Harvard Semitic Museum and a lecturer on the Hebrew Bible at HDS, explores the origin, structure, age, and “original meanings” of the Decalogue, while exposing simplistic attempts to present and promote it as the divinely revealed essence of all morality. He begins in 1956, with the dedication of a Ten Commandments monument in Dunseith, North Dakota, by a group of worthies including Charlton Heston, who would shortly appear as the nation's iconic Moses in Cecil B. DeMille's blockbuster. He moves on to the Supreme Court's 2005 decision approving another such monument on the capitol grounds of Austin, Texas, which it judged to be more historical than religious (a fallacy Coogan makes short work of). Alas, he doesn't have time for the antics of Roy S. Moore, chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, who gained instant celebrity in 2003 by defying a federal appeals court order to remove the 5,400‐pound granite monument of the Ten Commandments from the rotunda of the state judicial building in Birmingham. (Moore is also the author of the ironically titled poem.”America The Beautiful,” which laments the decline of old‐time religion with couplets like, “Our children wander aimlessly poisoned by cocaine,/ Choosing to indulge their lusts, when God has said abstain.”) In any case, such slow‐moving targets (along with the millions of citizens who support them) can't escape Coogan's well‐aimed barrage. Such people literally don't know what they're talking about. For starters, which version of the Commandments are they championing, the one in Exodus 20, Deuteronomy 5, or Deuteronomy 34, all of which are to some degree incompatible with one another. (Exodus 20 lumps one's neighbor's wife together with all his other property, while Deuteronomy 5 treats her as a person.) When it comes to numbering the various Commandments, Jews disagree with Catholics and Lutherans, who in turn disagree with Anglicans, most other Protestants, and the eastern Orthodox. Is “I am the Lord thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt” (KJV) an actual commandment or just a prologue? But the grossest distortion in piously polemical citings of the “Ten Words” (as the Tanakh calls them) is the enormous cuts Decalogue enthusiasts make in the original text(s). Apart from their inconvenient length, much of the deleted “extra” material is downright embarrassing. The ban on “graven images” (which Catholics studiously ignore) also has God saying that he punishes children for the iniquity of the fathers (or parents) “to the third and fourth generation of those that hate me” (Exodus 20:5). Corporate guilt, which Jeremiah and Ezekiel—as well as Deuteronomy 24:16—later reject, is taken for granted here. And the longest commandment of all, the fourth (or third), which forbids work on the Sabbath (Orthodox Jews keep that one, but nowadays who else does?) unfortunately mentions that it's a time of rest for male and female slaves, a reminder that nowhere does the Bible condemn slavery. In any event, Sunday is the first day of the week, not the Sabbath; so Christians, except for Seventh Day Adventists, worship on the wrong day—though they conceal this by speaking of “The day of the Lord,” rather than the Sabbath. The unobjectionable‐sounding ban on adultery is actually scandalous because “adultery” in the Bible applies only to sleeping with another man's wife; a married man's having sex with an unmarried woman is not adultery, but a lesser offense punished by the payment of a fine to the woman's father‐owner and the requirement of marrying her (polygyny is o.k.). There is no doubt whatsoever that the Decalogue consigns women to permanent inferiority. As John L. McKenzie, S.J., notes in his authoritative Dictionary of the Bible, “The wife and her partner could violate the rights of her husband, but the wife had no rights which...