Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [60]
Another broader interpretation of the commandment likens “false witness against neighbors” to gossip, the malicious, destructive whispering that can destroy reputations. Imagine if breaking this commandment brought down a bolt of heavenly lightning. No more talk-show television or supermarket tabloids!
10. “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife…nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s.”
The American Heritage Dictionary says that to covet is “to feel blameworthy desire for that which is another’s” or “to wish for longingly.” This commandment is somewhat unique in that it sees sin in thought as opposed to a specific action.
The problem with the tenth commandment is that most modern consumer economies and the entire advertising industry are built on “coveting.” The whole purpose of TV and magazine commercials or billboards is to get us to “wish for longingly”—to covet that Mercedes or that cigarette. So does that make us all sinners? Rabbi Telushkin offers this wisdom: “It is not wrong to want more than you have. What is wrong is to want it at your neighbor’s expense. There’s no evil in desiring a Jaguar, only in wanting the one belonging to the person next door.”
BIBLICAL VOICES
And you are not to ascend my slaughter-site by ascending steps, that your nakedness not be laid-bare upon it. (Ex. 20:23 Five Books of Moses)
When you sell your daughter as a slave, do you have to give a warranty?
When they told you about the Ten Commandments, they didn’t mention that God didn’t want you looking under the priest’s skirt either? Moses got a great many laws from God. And more than a few of them need some explaining.
Witnessing God’s amazing sound and light show on top of Sinai—seeing the lightning and smoke, and hearing the thunder—the Israelites decided it would be better if Moses went up and talked to God one-on-one while they stood “at a distance.” So Moses drew near to the “thick darkness” where God was. Then God proceeded to give Moses a much longer list of laws. The Ten Commandments were only the beginning of the Law, the tip of a Titanic-sized iceberg at that. The commandments might be called the “Big Ten,” but the next few chapters in Exodus, referred to as the “Book of the Covenant,” along with the rest of the Torah, were devoted to an extensive set of laws that governed everything from basic morality and religious behavior to a wide array of social guidelines for almost every aspect of an Israelite’s life.
The simple notion that Moses went up once, got the tablets, and came down has no relation to the far more complex story of the giving of the laws, as laid out in in Exodus. Moses goes up and down Sinai like a yo-yo, making eight trips that take several months to complete. In some places it says God wrote the laws, and in others, Moses wrote the laws. This is one more major section of the Bible where scholars have shown convincingly that at least three separate versions of the events at Mount Sinai—back to good old J, P, and E, those authors introduced back in the first section of this book—were woven together to get the somewhat jumbled version told in Exodus.
This is also a place where the Bible gets tricky for those who still want to take the Bible and biblical law literally. Jewish tradition identifies 613 Laws in the Torah. Many of them governed sacrificial rites no longer performed by Jews or Christians. In other words, most of us no longer believe that “worship” and the forgiveness of sins require cutting up small animals.
What follows is a small sampling of some of the many laws that Moses gave to the people of Israel in Exodus. They should remind modern readers that the Bible was composed a long time ago for a very different group of people. This is where people have to determine what is law