The Seventh Commandment

Image via Wikipedia

You shall not commit adultery

First of all we need to be clear about what adultery is. You might think that is easy, but the commandments were written about three thousand years ago and things didn’t mean the same then.

People today tend define it as any act of sexual intercourse outside of marriage or, perhaps a bit more narrowly, any act of sexual intercourse between a married person and someone who is not their spouse.

The ancient Hebrews had a different understanding and limited it to just sexual intercourse between a man and a woman who was married or betrothed. The marital status of the man was irrelevant. A married man was not guilty of “adultery” for having sex with an unmarried woman.

This is because at that time women were little more than property — a slightly higher status than slaves but not full citizens like men. Because women were like property, having sex with a married or betrothed woman was regarded as misuse of someone else’s property. A married man having sex with an unmarried woman was not guilty of such a crime and thus was not committing adultery. If she also wasn’t a virgin, then the man wasn’t guilty of any crime. A man could have sex with slaves any time he liked.

Because adultery was about married or betrothed women, gay sex didn’t count. It was against other laws of Moses, but not the commandments.

Christians now tend to define adultery much more broadly, and as a consequence almost all extramarital sex acts are treated as violations of the Seventh Commandment. Many claim that adultery should include lustful thoughts, lustful words, polygamy, etc. This is justified by the words of Jesus: “You have heard that it was said by them of old time, You shall not commit adultery: But I say to you, That whoever looks on a woman to lust after her has committed adultery with her already in his heart.“ (Matthew 5:27-28). That makes life tough for a bloke and makes it fairly certain that nearly half the human race breaks the rules most days of their life.

Some Abrahamic religions still accept polygamy, so many Moslem men can have up to four wives. Much less need to commit adultery in that situation. Some parts of Shia Islam have the even more convenient concept of mutah or temporary marriage.  The temporary marriage contract is as follows: The woman says: ” I marry myself to you for the specified dowry (mention the amount) and for the specified time period (mention the time period)”. Then the man says: “I accept”.” That’ll be fifty bucks for your half hour luv. OK thanks.

The Sixth Commandment

You Shall Not Murder

 

This obviously didn’t apply to war or execution. God was always encouraging the Israelites to go to war and massacre their enemies and when you get to the laws of Moses there is plenty about people being put to death.

 

It seems then that it is OK for the state, tribe or whatever authority structure to kill people for the reasons that it decides, but individuals are not allowed to.

 

Well that seems a pretty reasonable rule on the face of it although I am against capital punishment in all circumstances (all justice systems are fallible and killing people for things they have not done is morally repulsive) and the way that the god of Abraham approved war is no guide that anybody should follow. Let us also not forget that this god would not have been a fan of the Geneva Conventions. He was entirely happy with genocide and killing prisoners.

 

Even when it comes to individual murder it seems that god himself was exempt from his rules. He was happy enough to kill poor Mrs Lot for the terrible crime of looking back. In the case of his chosen he also seems to have different standards.

 

When Moses killed the Egyptian overseer because of his cruelty there is no censure of him. Apparently the ten commandments did not apply to Moses himself. He cannot be allowed the excuse of self defence, because he was not personally under attack. The fact is that he took the law into his own hands. He killed an official of the Pharoah who was acting in accordance with the norms of his government. As is the case throughout the old testament, the life of an Egyptian did not have the value (in the eyes of god and Moses) of a Jewish life.

 

We should not be surprised that the old testament is racist, that merely reflects the times in which it was written, but it does mean that we cannot take biblical commandments as having any relevance to modern life.

 

I certainly think that you should not murder and that applies to everybody at all times. Not just to those who are alleged to be approved by god. We need universal standards not hypocritical and partial ones.

The Fifth Commandment

 

Respect your father and mother

 

We are half way through and at last god has started looking at something other than his self obsession.

 

Most people would probably agree that children should respect their father and mother. I certainly hold that view in most cases, but really this commandment is such a generalisation that it’s value is very weak.

 

Humans are full of failings. Not because Adam ate a fruit or Eve was a temptress or that they were lead astray by a serpent, but because some people do very bad things.

 

Should a child respect a parent who abuses them? Sadly, some children are so badly treated that they are killed by one or other of their parents. Does respect for the abusive parent extend to the point at which the child should not tell anybody about their suffering and so allow it to continue until their life is taken or irretrievably damaged? Surely not.

 

I am in favour of laws being simple enough that they can be easily understood and enforced, but simplicity can be taken too far. In this case the exhortation to respect ones parents is fine for parents who respect their children. It is wrong to suggest that children have responsibilities to parents without reference to the responsibilities of parents to their children.

 

The commandments were a set of rules put together between two and three thousand years ago by people who lived simple, often brutal, lives in tribal communities without schools or any of the institutions of the twenty first century world. Children, like wives, were seen as assets of a male head of household. This demand of respect for parents is still worthwhile, but the relationship lying behind it in which children are not seen as deserving of the same should be put behind us as a more primitive stage of human development.

 

The fifth commandment stands up better than the four going before it, but it really isn’t very much use for the modern world and it suffers from the risk of giving an excuse to poor parents who demand undeserved respect from their children.

The Fourth Commandment

 

You shall remember and keep the Sabbath day holy

 

So we have got to number four of the ten and here is god still obsessed with himself. There are an infinite number of things that this commandment could mean so what I have to say will only be a small look at it, but whatever way you look at it for god to be saying ‘keep it holy’ means set it aside for him.

 

To start off, what is the sabbath day? He claimed to have made the universe in six days and this seventh one is it. This explanation of creation in Genesis is complete nonsense that has been shown scientifically to be wrong, but for the sake of talking about the commandment I won’t deal with that here.

 

When he started there were no days of the week so we can’t say that he started on a Sunday or a Monday or whatever. That leaves a bit of leeway for when the sabbath falls. For some it is Saturday, others Sunday and yet others within the Abrahamic group it is Friday. Does it start at midnight or at sunset or when? No agreement there either I’m afraid. We are left, as with so much else of religious requirements, with a wide variety of different decisions about what and when the sabbath is. Each of the religions considers its own view to be the correct one.

 

The next issue is what you are actually commanded to do to keep the sabbath holy? Again there is no agreement at all between all the different branches and sects of the followers of Abraham and Moses.

 

At one end we have people like the ultra orthodox jews who will tear off pieces of toilet paper before the beginning of the sabbath so that they do not violate it by doing the ‘work’ of tearing the paper on the sabbath! Apparently it is OK to do the work of picking up the torn pieces of paper and wiping their backside, but not doing the tearing. Imagine the horror of incurring god’s wrath because you tore off a piece of bog roll when you should have been keeping his day holy! I wonder what the penalty for that might be? They do all kinds of other crazy things like setting lots of timers so that their lights switch on and off automatically or their curtains open and close with electric motors. You see they are not allowed to use electric switches on the sabbath, but it is OK for the electricity to be working and for devices to do the switching. Surely they are right. Their god is a complex and wonderful thing.

 

At the other end of the scale, many people who regard themselves as religious will simply say that the sabbath has some special significance for them, but they carry on most of their normal activities of life.

 

The consequence of the commandment is that the very observant are parasites and deeply hypocritical. They use hospitals and ambulances where people have to work on the sabbath. They live in a society that needs police, soldiers, firefighters and masses of other health, safety and security workers working on the sabbath but won’t take part in that work themselves. Wealthy ultra observant people will frequently employ staff to do work for them on the sabbath in order to preserve their own good standing with god while having no regard for the afterlife consequences for their employees.

 

It is surely a good thing for people to rest for some part of each week. Not to please a vain, petty and jealous god, but just because it is a good thing for themselves and their families to take a break and relax.

The Third Commandment

 

You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God.

 

Right, so on his third commandment god is still rambling on about himself and trying to demand what he sees as the proper respect he considers he deserves.

 

The first question to be asked is what is this name that he doesn’t want misused? God, Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah? Well most of that comes down to what language you are speaking doesn’t it? It does go wider than that though. Many ancient people thought that the more names a deity had, the more important it was. This is partly why Moslems still recite the many names of god.

 

So he has lots of names, but we generally know when we are referring to god. What does it mean to misuse his name. If I called a pet goldfish god would that be breaking the commandment? God claims to be the creator of the goldfish and if I really loved it wouldn’t that be quite nice? If I were to say ‘Oh God!’ when I was shocked by something, would that be misuse? When I say that god doesn’t exist perhaps the believer might think that was misuse although it is actually a statement that does not include any value judgement at all.

 

The truth of course is that the commandment doesn’t have any meaning at all. It is just the third in the series of Moses’ insistence on his monotheistic religion and reinforcing that there was prohibition on any word being said against it.

 

For an all powerful, all present, all good god being worried that his name might be used in a way that he didn’t like is to diminish that god to an absurd level.

 

This commandment is very clearly a human invention and the invention of a not very sophisticated human at that.

The Second Commandment

 

You shall not make for yourself any idol, nor bow down to it or worship it:

 

Why?

 

I agree that it is a pretty silly waste of time to be worshipping idols, but what harm can it possibly do to an all powerful god if people bow down in front of some idols?

 

In a set of rules that are claimed to be all the god given laws that are needed for human conduct the second one is that you shouldn’t be making idols and worshipping them. That is just plain stupid.

 

What it really tells us is that the time and place of Moses was one where the ancient Egyptian society ruled by the Pharoahs was a place in which there were loads of gods. These gods were wooden statues kept in the temples and people belonged to the cult of a particular god or they chose a special god to worship when they had some issue to deal with that they associated with that god. What the followers of Abraham were trying to do was to pull everybody together into a single doctrine and they saw these competing religious factions as a fragmentation of their tribes.

 

Some Egyptians were actually trying to do the same thing around the same time. The Pharoah Amenhotep IV changed his name to Akhnaten and tried to make all Egyptians worship Aten the sun god to the exclusion of all other gods. He faced great opposition from the priests of other gods who had their own power bases. When Akhnaten was gone, his successor Tutankhaten gave up the whole one god idea, made peace with the priests of Amun and returned to the historic capital with the changed name of Tutankhamun.

 

The Semites went off and did their own thing with the one god that they had made up. This was the one god who was frightened of idols and the fragmentation that they might bring about.

 

The second commandment was all about Moses and his fellow tribal leaders worrying that they would lose authority to the followers of the golden calf Ba’al or some other similar god. There was no ‘real’ god carving out tablets of stone that might still have some relevance to us in the twenty first century. Moses and his mates just made it up to serve their own ends. That is what politicians and religious leaders do.

The First Commandment

You shall have no other gods but me.

So this god, who was supposedly talking to Moses and giving him a set of rules, is worried about competition. Followers of the Abrahamic faiths claim that there is only one god and that god is all powerful. This first commandment actually acknowledges that there are other gods, but the god of Moses’ first instruction to humans is that they must accept him as their god. It seems like a very insecure position for an all powerful god to take doesn’t it?

Some might argue that this is an inadequacy of language or translation and that god is unique and just giving the instruction for people to acknowledge that. That does raise the amusing question of what language does god speak. Is it Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Arabic? In which language were the stone tablets inscribed? A pre-hebrew desert semitic dialect?

Anyway, let’s get back to the heart of it. If there is only one god there is no possibility that anybody shall have another one so the commandment is pointless. If it is an insistence, as it is taken to be, that people should not worship false gods why doesn’t it say that? If the Abrahamic god is all powerful and the only god anyway, why does it matter if people have mistaken beliefs in non existence gods. Why doesn’t an all powerful god make his human creation undertand that there is only one god. There are a host of more realistic options for this god than to give an instruction that people shall have no other god but him.

The truth, of course, is that Moses did not talk to god. There were no tablets of stone handed down from the deity. There was no god giving such silly instructions. The commandments are human made. They are products of their time and of no relevance to twenty first century humans other than as subjects for academic study.