A Terrible Beauty (1)
Then God spoke all these words, saying, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” Exodus 20:1-2 NASB
I am the Lord your God– Were the Ten Commandments good for Israel? Well, that depends. First let’s clear up a few details. The Ten Commandments were given to Israel, not to the nations. Yes, there are hints of them in the Genesis accounts before Abraham, but the revelation at Sinai was for Israel alone. The fact that other major religions in the world have adopted them as if they were universally applicable does not detract from their exclusive disclosure. Second, the Ten Commandments imply a separation between the Jews and the rest of humanity—a separation that has not been comfortable for the nations who view this “Jewish” revelation as an affront to their own ethical absolutes. Third, the Ten Commandments contain prohibitions that can only be applied in a theocracy. As a whole, they are not designed for human forms of government. They are uniquely religious.
Now some additional considerations. Zornberg points out that the Ten Commandments cannot be treated as inflexible statements of moral absolutes. “If the terrible beauty that is born at Sinai is to be of more than historic interest, it must, the rabbis insist, be continuously reexperienced. . . [as Schiller notes]: ‘Only inasmuch as he changes, does man exist; only inasmuch as he remains unchangeable does he exist.’”[1]
“There must be a ‘cracking up,’ and experience of incoherence, of the dissemination of meanings, a ‘meditation full of questions.’”[2]
If this is true, then ethical inflexibility is opposed to the spirit of the Ten Words. Those who apply these Ten as if they were inscribed in stone for eternity not only ignore the necessity of discovering how they fit in each age, they also undermine Jeremiah’s declaration that this way of life is designed to become an act of the heart (Jeremiah 31), not a bronze plaque on the wall. We see this most clearly in the Exodus account when the original tablets are smashed.
Most of us have been taught that Moses destroyed the original tablets inscribed by the finger of God because of his dismay with the people’s return to idolatry. We think of the Golden Calf, the frenzy of pagan fertility worship, and we assume that Moses destroyed what God had given him in anger. We can thank Charlton Heston for this mistake. Zornberg corrects our error.
“Moses, therefore, smashes the tablets, not in pique, but in a tragic realization that a people so hungry for absolute possession may make a fetish of the tablets as well. The whole narrative of redemption has now been pathologically restructured for him: the tablets of revelation take on the macabre lineaments of another idol.”[3]
The terrible beauty of the Ten Commandments is this: they themselves can become an idol to a people whose hunger for certainty, for absolutes, substitutes rules for relationship. Given the ethical fixation on these Ten instructions about living, one must wonder how well civilization has done with the stone tablets rather than the living God. We must also ask, “Have we substituted the idolatry of worshipping His words for our relationship with this living God? Are our Ten Commandments the reflection of His character or are they inflexible moral principles no longer in need of an author?”
Topical Index: Ten Commandments, I am the Lord your God, Exodus 20:1-2
[1]Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus(Schocken Books, New York: 2001), p. 277.
