NOTES for Exo 20:1-26

The great Decalogue (the Ten Commandments) is also the Old Testament description of the love that God offers people. Love for God is unique, the first commandment; it cannot be replaced by anything, the second; it cannot be used for one's own interests, the third. It seeks the fulfillment of God's will, not one's own, the fourth. Love for God illumines, sanctifies, our relationships with other people, because they are dear to God. And in this, God is revealed as the source of fatherhood, the fifth commandment; life, the sixth; faithfulness, the seventh; possession, the eighth; justice, the ninth; and the ordering of the world, the tenth. In the New Testament the same thing was formulated in the Hymn to Love in chapter 13 of the First Letter to the Corinthians.

The famous Ten Commandments, which became the symbol and foundation of Jewish and Christian ethics, actually serve as an introduction to a large body of laws and rules for life. Most of them are laws of social, clan, and family law, regulating relations between people at every level. It is entirely natural to call this biblical ethics, since the conduct of a member of God's people must be based on these rules.

But what is unusual and uncharacteristic of other peoples and cultures is that "human ethics" here is intertwined with ethics toward God. These are not ritual instructions, not lofty words about God, but precisely instructions about how to relate to God. He is the first subject and object of this ethics.

Therefore first look at God's faithfulness, then be faithful to God yourself, and then apply this faithfulness, for example, to your parents and to your wife. First remember how God delivered your people from slavery, and then do not create that slavery and oppression yourself: do not kill, do not steal, do not claim what belongs to another. Religion here becomes not simply the "ideological basis" of ethics, but its key, source, and model.

The Decalogue is known to everyone who has read the Bible even once in life, and many who have never read it know or at least have heard something about the Ten Commandments. It is the only part of the Torah that for the overwhelming majority of Christians today is truly relevant: most Christians today look at Old Testament law, whether civil law or cultic law, as something that has no direct relation to them. This perception is explained in large part by the fact that these laws appear irrelevant to Christians today, first because, as people usually say in such cases, "Christ fulfilled everything for us," and second because the laws we find in the Torah, whether in the book of Exodus, the book of Leviticus, or the book of Deuteronomy, were given by God for another age and today seem completely inapplicable.

Meanwhile, much here depends on how we perceive the Torah as a whole and the Decalogue in particular. The Decalogue is not simply a moral code in which the order of prescriptions and prohibitions has no significance; it is an integral literary composition in which each commandment occupies its own strictly defined place, outside of which it loses, if not all its meaning, then a significant part of it. Indeed, if we look at the first part of the Decalogue, the first five commandments, it is not hard to see that the first commandment is the main one here, not because it forbids paganism, but because it speaks of God, before whom a person stands and who can and must become the center and meaning of that person's life. The other commandments among the first five are given as means for solving this spiritual task. To exclude from life everything that blocks God from view by claiming His place in a person's soul and heart (the second commandment); to make prayer not a formality, but real, full communion with God (the third commandment); to learn to spend time with God (the fourth commandment); finally, to add to communion with God full and respectful communion with neighbors, while avoiding every form of worship of human beings and human traditions (the fifth commandment): this is the path offered by the first part of the Decalogue.

Its second part describes another path, a path leading away from God, a path by which a person spiritually and practically destroys himself, his relationship with God, and his relationship with neighbors. Here, in the second set of five commandments, the fifth is the main one, or the tenth if we take the whole Decalogue together: it forbids envy, forbids desiring "your neighbor's house," desiring his world, his spiritual space, which God gives him and from which the envious person wants to push him out. The violation of each following commandment, leading to lying and slander, theft, sexual immorality, and finally murder, is only the logic of this displacement carried through to the end.

Thus the Decalogue already marks out two paths: the path of life and the path of death, between which a person must make his choice. And the whole Torah also places a person before this choice, because one must choose not "in principle" and not "in general," but in concrete situations; and the laws we find in the Old Testament books describe the typical situations in which each of us, one way or another, finds himself in life. Understood in this way, the Torah can become for us, in the words of the apostle Paul, a "guardian leading us to Christ," to whom we think we have come and no longer need guides, but after whom we will have to keep reaching and whom we will have to keep catching up to until His return in glory.

The first of the Ten Commandments hardly resembles a commandment at all: it is not an order or a request, but simply a sentence in the indicative rather than the imperative: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” Only then comes the rule of conduct: “You shall have no other gods before Me.” But these are not merely words; this is a covenant, and relationships are embedded within it. “Your God” presupposes a relationship. He brought us out of the house of slavery, which means that He restored the freedom God originally gave humanity, but which human beings used so poorly when they broke God’s commandments and were driven out of Paradise. The fact that the Lord gives this freedom again means that God trusts us. He believes that if we are given freedom, we will use it not only to sin, but also to love. Freedom exists precisely so that we may love, for if God had created us to love automatically, by nature, it would no longer be love. Love is bound up with choice; we can always cease to love. We are called in freedom to love God and our neighbor, and for this the Lord brought us out of the house of slavery. For this Christ freed us through the Cross from slavery to sin.

This is the very first commandment of the Decalogue (the Ten Commandments of Moses). The sages of Israel said that the whole Law is contained in it, because all the other commandments are only a commentary, an explanation of how to fulfill this first commandment.

It may not be clear at once why this is so. In what way do the commandments "make yourself no idol," "do not kill," not to mention the prohibition against "boiling a kid in its mother's milk" (Ex. 23:19), explain the meaning and significance of the commandment of monotheism? There is a connection here, but it is not very direct.

What must first be understood is what it means for us that God exists at all. If He does not exist, then the only creator and being determining the paths of this world turns out to be man. Then man is his own authority and his own criterion of rightness. One may recall the King from Schwartz's An Ordinary Miracle: he is his own king, honorary Pope, honorary saint, and so on. Or, more seriously, Dostoevsky: "If there is no God, then everything is permitted."

Now let us see what happens if God is not one, but there are many gods. Then they inevitably turn out to be "particular," functional gods, having only a certain sphere of influence (god of the sea, god of the sun, god of rain, god of a specific tribe, and the like). And man, being a creature with universal needs, begins to "maneuver" among different gods, using their strengths and weaknesses for his own interests, thereby placing himself one step above each of these gods. But if God is one, that does not work: a universal God has no strong and weak sides between which one could "slip through." If God is one, then He is inevitably higher than man.

Why is the Exodus from Egypt mentioned in this commandment? Even if God exists and He is one, a person has two possible ways to behave, depending on whether this God is good to man or not. If He is not, then one must run as far away from such a God as possible. And if He is good (and God gives an example of His good deed for people), then one must draw near to Him, seek what He wants for us, what He considers good. And who can reveal to us what He considers good except He Himself? And then the other commandments appear, by which God describes His idea of human righteousness. We see that without accepting the first commandment, all the rest simply make no sense!

"You shall have no other gods besides Me" - what does this mean? And is it easy to avoid paganism for us, living in a country that presents itself partly as Orthodox, partly as Islamic, but certainly not as pagan? At first glance, everything is simple. Pagan cults like those that filled the ancient world and still permeate the life of some pagan countries are exotic for our country. Therefore, it would seem, there is no problem.

There probably really would be no problem if pagan worship necessarily required outward expression. But it, like every kind of worship, is born first of all in the soul, not in the stone, wood, or metal from which images of pagan gods are made. And the soul does not tolerate emptiness: abstaining from participation in pagan religious rites and ceremonies is not enough. An empty soul will still find an object of worship for itself, and that object will become its god. The only way to avoid this is to fill the soul, not with theology, morality, or even religion, but with that direct and immediate communion with God for which God intended it. Only then will there be no place for paganism in our life.

What are the "idols" forbidden to us by the second commandment? And should every image be considered sacred? The original meaning of the prohibition is connected with the sacred images that filled pagan antiquity and are still found in countries where that ancient paganism is still alive. But an image did not become sacred by itself; it was made sacred by the attitude of those who worshiped the deity represented in the image. And always, in all times and countries, those who prayed transferred to the image of the gods to whom they prayed their own ideas about those gods. Regardless of what spiritual reality stood behind the object of worship. And this, when the God of Abraham and Moses was at issue, had to be avoided at any cost.

And not because nothing created by Him could remind one of God, but because He cannot be fully identified with anything He created. Otherwise there will be too much of the human in God, and the One will be hidden from view behind the veil of a new paganism, now formally monotheistic.

After all, even the golden calf was identified by its creators not with some Egyptian deity, but with Yahweh, the God of Moses. Only in the image of Apis, which the calf symbolized, there was originally nothing that recalled the God of Moses. And in the end it was not Apis who rose to Yahweh, but Yahweh who was lowered to Apis.

And so it will inevitably be with all our "human, all too human" ideas about God. Therefore it is better that He not be associated for us with anything created. And if He needs images in order to reveal something important to us, He will find them Himself.