God explains to Moses and, by proxy, the Israelites, that He is the God of everything and everyone, but that the Israelites are going to be a nation of priests. They’ll be super-blessed as long as they follow the rules that God hands down to them and God will completely destroy anyone who stands against them. The whole arrangement kind of comes off like something from Dune or some other sci-fi story. Like in Star Trek how they had to keep coming up with whole new worlds every week so some of them turned kind of simple. This is an entire planet of desert, or of snow, or jungle, and this is a race of people who all believe in the supremacy of logic, or capitalism or gymnastics. In the real world, the Israelites fail to live up to God’s requirements over and over again for centuries. So much for the race of people who all follow God.
Anyway, God prepares to appear before the whole camp, but there are a lot of really strict formalities that have to play out first. The Israelites spend three days getting all purified and not having sex, and Moses has to block off Mount Sinai so no one wanders up early. When God does arrive, it’s all smoke and fire and loud noises so everyone’s really impressed. Moses talks to God on the mountain top and God tells him to make sure that only the priests come up the mountain and that they have to be purified first. Moses replies that He had already told them that no one was supposed to come up the mountain so God commands him to just go get Aaron.
The ten commandments are split into two sections, mankind’s duties to God and their duties to each other. The first couple are about idolatry and… you know what? There’s only ten, I don’t feel the need to summarize this, here they are:
No other Gods
No idols
Don’t misuse the name of the Lord
Keep the Sabbath
Honor your parents
Don’t murder
No adultery
No stealing
No false testimony
Don’t covet your neighbor’s stuff or people
Pretty straight-forward, although not really as straight forward as we like to pretend sometimes. The exact definition of murder is open to cultural bias, as is adultery and, well pretty much everything on the list is open to a little bit of misinterpretation if you want to get really specific.
The people get freaked out by all the storming and trumpeting(?) (20:18) on the mountain so they tell Moses that they want him to act as their delegate because they’re scared to talk to God. I guess this nation of priests thing is off to a rocky start already.
What follows then are more commandments, but these are a lot more specific and mostly have to do with the punishments for injuring people and how to treat your slaves. I suppose, to be fair, if there were no rules for how to treat your slaves, then laying down some guidelines for fair treatment is pretty progressive in itself. When we read through this today though, it’s weird to hear that if we beat our slaves with a rod and they fall unconscious, but get up a couple days later, then everything’s okay, and that really we can beat slaves as much as we want because they’re our property. I guess, in context, at least it says that if you straight kill them, then you have to be punished. That’s at least better than nothing. At least slaves no longer had to fear being beaten to death on a whim.
I’m glad we’ve moved past the old covenant though. Some of these rules do not age well. But then they weren’t intended to were they? After Jesus, everyone is supposed to love everyone else as brothers. That’s why there was no more slavery after Jesus came.
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