A recent OP talking about a troubling new Louisiana law requiring “the ten commandments” to be displayed in classrooms got me to thinking. I’m going to post this other OP on basically the same topic, but I’d like this version to focus more on the religious accuracy, rather than, say, the question of whether the state law is technically unconstitutional (which seems the main thrust of the comments in that first OP).
At first, I thought that this story was likely overstated, but I’ve checked the law and it’s for real.
If you’re interested, you can read the law here.
The law includes the state-required text as follows:
The Ten Commandments
I AM the LORD thy God.
Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven images.
Thou shalt not take the Name of the Lord thy God in vain.
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.
Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord
thy God giveth thee.
Thou shalt not kill.
Thou shalt not commit adultery.
Thou shalt not steal.
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house.
There are some serious problems with this translation of what the Christian Bible states. I’m particularly concerned with what they have for the tenth commandment:
“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house”
Do you see the problem? Well, I mean, apart from the silly spelling of “neighbour” (I suppose I’ll forgive them that mistake; they are American, after all)
The commandment as found in ancient texts reads thusly:
לֹא תַחְמֹד בִּית רֵעֶךָ לֹא תַחְמֹד אֵשֶׁת רֵעֶךָ וְעַבְדּוֹ וַאֲמָתוֹ שׁוֹרוֹ וַחֲמוֹרוֹ וְכָל אֲשֶׁר לְרֵעֶךָ
(Lo tachmod beit re’echa lo tachmod eshet re’echa veavdo va’amato shoro va’chamomro vechol asher l’re’echa)
This translates to:
You shall not covet your neighbour’s house; you shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, or his male slave, or his female slave, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything [else] that belongs to your neighbour.
Now, one could debate whether the word “else” should or should not be in any English translation – but the implication is absolutely there in the original… and we really ought to consider the context. So, what’s the context?
The ox and the male slave and the donkey and the female slave are clearly your neighbour’s possession (and the context is absolutely clear that slaves were property since it explicitly states that in the Pentateuch – see Exodus 21:21 “…but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property.”).
The only contention regarding the inclusion of “else”, then, is whether a wife is seen by the Lord God Almighty (according to the Bible) as her lord’s property…
Now… as it happens, all the other verses dealing with marriage are pretty clear. Pretty much all women (with the possible exception of a widow in some circumstances) were considered virtual property (if not outright property)… a little girl was the [virtual] property of her father until her father sold her to a master. Wait, a master? Yeah, that’s just about the right word to use… in the ancient Hebrew there was not a term that could reasonably be translated as “husband” in anything like the modern sense… the word most commonly used was “בַּעַל (ba’al)”, which translates to owner/lord/master.
And lest anybody forget, remember that the Christian New Testament affirms that a wife should obey her husband in all things.
Questions for discussion about this breaking religious news:
- Is this sort of thing going with or against the trend for religiosity around the World?
- Is anybody who edits the original text (such as American legislators seem to have, when cutting the better half out of the tenth commandment) hypocritical? I mean in the sense of basically saying “what the Lord God meant to say was…”
- Do you think (independent of current legislation) that such texts have any place as permanent fixtures in state-run schools?
- Is Christianity inherently misogynistic?
- Should any human being ever be considered the property of any other human being?