The Big Ten

Governor Landry should take these down from the wall and read them

The drunkenness of Noah, from the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493, via Wikipedia

Donald Trump:

 I LOVE THE TEN COMMANDMENTS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS, PRIVATE SCHOOLS, AND MANY OTHER PLACES, FOR THAT MATTER. READ IT — HOW CAN WE, AS A NATION, GO WRONG??? 

"Has anyone read the 'Thou shalt not steal'? I mean, has anybody read this incredible stuff? It's just incredible," Trump said at the gathering of the Faith & Freedom Coalition. "They don't want it to go up. It's a crazy world.'' (via CBS News)

Well, no, there's nothing wrong with "Thou shalt not steal," and it would be great for Donald Trump to give some thought to the 8th Commandment, as well as the 7th and 9th, and not only stop stealing stuff, but also stop committing adultery and bearing false witness. It would be pretty interesting to see Trump adopting the Ten Commandments as his own personal moral code, but he clearly hasn't done that yet.

But I think people are really missing the important issue here. It's not a bad thing that the Commandments advise them not to steal stuff. Then again, every moral code tells you not to steal stuff. That's not what makes the Commandments special. I have this feeling the conservative Christians are not really reading the thing at all, or reading it from a standpoint of such confirmation bias that they're unable to see what it is really about. 

1. I am Yahweh your Elohim the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. If you are not somebody I brought out of the land of Egypt and the house of slavery, like an Egyptian or something yourself, you can apply for an exemption from this Commandment, using form 310B from the Exceptionalism Department, for permission to have some other gods before Me, including but not limited to Ra, of course; Zeus/Iuppiter; Marduk (and sometimes Anu and Enlil); Brahman and Shiva and Vishnu/Krishna and his other avatars, whoever wins over the long run; and possibly, at some point in the next 6 or 7 centuries, the Holy Trinity of which I am considering being adopted as a board member, sharing (and oversharing!) duties with My only-begotten Son and our sometimes feminine partner the Holy Spirit. I'm already construed as plural ("I am your elohim") in both the Exodus and  Deuteronomy editions of these Commandments, so you should be prepared for this outcome; the number of God, not to mention the gender, may in the end prove to be more important than Their name. Other than that, you shall have no other gods before Me.

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2. You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below; I mean no images whatsoever, not a tree or a house or a mountain. If you want visual art you have to make it totally abstract. Or maybe it's OK to sculpt leaves and flowers, in nice repeating patterns around the base of a building or a vase, or maybe you can even draw animals, as long as you don't do any humans. No pictures of humans, no statues of humans. That's Egyptian shit. I create humans, in My image, you don't create images of My image. Or if you do, don't let Me catch you treating them like gods: you shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, Yahweh your Elohim, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments, in particular this one, in fact I think you should have them engraved on stone tablets on your lawn, or poster images of stone tablets on your walls, and bow down and worship them, by way of making sure you don't have any idols. No, I'm being sarcastic, I'm not actually telling you to do that. I'm telling you not to do that.

3. Do not use My name, Yahweh your Elohim, carelessly. You know what I'm talking about. It's probably best not to use it at all. But also see no. 9 below.

4. Remember the Sabbath day by observing it as a holy day. You have six days to do all your work. The seventh day is the day of worshiping Yahweh your Elohim. You, your sons, your daughters, your male and female slaves, your cattle, and the foreigners living in your city must never do any work on that day. In six days I made heaven, earth, and the sea, along with everything in them. I didn’t work on the seventh day. That’s why I'm ordering you to take the day off. And your slaves and your animals and your foreigners. On Saturday. When you knock off work on Friday evening, stay off for 24 hours. Light some candles, enjoy your dinner that you have already cooked, go for a nice walk, walk do not drive to shul, where they won't be working either, worshiping is not work, and at night have some relaxing sex and I'm telling you this is an official mitzvah, you have a nice time and you get credit for it. Wake up and have some previously prepared breakfast, go for another nice walk, go back to shul, play games with your children not involving the use of electricity, read a book for heaven's sake, eventually it will be sunset and you can drive someplace and use the electricity. I really need you to do this. Not on Sunday, on Saturday, I hope I'm making this clear. 

5. Honor your father and mother, so you may live for a long time in the land Yahweh your Elohim is giving you, because why? Is it because the land I'm giving you is the land of Canaan, and Canaan is the son of Ham the second or third son of Noah, depending on which verse you quote, and Ham did something unspeakable when his father was passed out drunk involving his father's nakedness, and therefore Noah cursed Canaan, not Ham, and said he would be the lowest of slaves to his brothers, Shem and Japhet, although they were Canaan's uncles, his brothers were Cush (for Nubia or Ethiopia), Egypt, and Put (for the Maghreb), so when I let you conquer Canaan I'm just following through on the curse and if you want to hang on to it you'd better not act like Ham, or Canaan, as the case may be? I don't think so! In the first place, I didn't curse Ham, or Canaan, as the case may be, Noah did. I mean, I'm really not responsible for this. And honestly, the story is such a mess editorially I'm embarrassed it's in the Torah. And the gross speculation on what might have really happened, where they say Ham might have raped his father, or his mother, or castrated the father, or Canaan gave him a vasectomy as a practical joke, by tying a rope around his junk and pulling really hard (Graves, Robert, and Raphael Patai, Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis, 2nd ed. 1964), I mean really, we're Jewish, this is ancient Greek stuff and it's repulsive. Uncivilized. If I were writing the story I'd probably have Ham bonking his father's hot concubine while the old man was drunk (somewhat the way Reuben son of Jacob did with Jacob's concubine, Bilhah, Genesis 35:22, possibly fathering Dan and Naphtali and their respective tribes), and bragging to his brothers about that ("Guess whose nakedness I just uncovered!")—as far as I know scholars haven't tried that—but it still wouldn't explain why it was Canaan who got the curse. In the end the whole story has been lifted from somewhere (please note the resemblance of Japhet, the all-white brother, with the Titan Iapetos, who stood by passively as his brother Kronos castrated their father Uranus). In the end I think you just have to accept that some of the authors did crappy work, and live with it, as we should try to do with another giant cock-up, the Second Amendment. Everybody loses the land of Canaan sooner or later, tbh, whether they honor their fathers and mothers or not. In the meantime you might as well honor your father and mother without thinking about that, it's the right thing to do, as in

6. Don't murder anybody.

7. Don't have sex with anybody when you or they or both are married to somebody else, at least try not to, I understand that's not always simple, and I'm not sure how it fits in with that whole concubine situation.

8. Don't steal things, except it's OK if you steal Canaan, according to Me ("Yahweh your Elohim will bring you into the land and give it to you, as he swore to your ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This land will have large, prosperous cities that you didn’t build. Your houses will be filled with all kinds of things that you didn’t put there. You will have cisterns that you didn’t dig and vineyards and olive trees that you didn’t plant. After you have eaten all that you want, be careful that you don’t forget Yahweh, who brought you out of slavery in Egypt," Deuteronomy 5:10-12).

9. Don't lie when you're being sued for something or tried for a crime, especially if you're under oath, and double especially if the oath mentions Me ("so help me God"). Don't involve Me in your crap or I'll really fuck you up, swear to God!

10. Don't desire to take your neighbor’s household away from him, or his wife, or his male or female slave, his ox, his ass, or anything else that belongs to him. Or her,  mutatis mutandis. This, as somebody said, takes it to a different level, where you're not merely asked not to do bad things but not to have bad thoughts.

Conservative Christians, with a really annoying conservative Christian habit, want to insist that these rules aren't even religious but purely logical or natural ethics, applying to everybody, regardless of faith, which seems true for some of them, but a good half of them, with a large majority of the discussion, are about exclusively Jewish, not Christian issues, and 10 is to my mind the only one with a really Christian feel to it. The principles they imagine ought to be part of the Ten Commandments aren't.

Jesus himself gave his followers a quite different list of commandments, edited down to just two items:

But these so-called Christians never pay him any attention. Forgive them, voters, for they know not what they do. But don't vote for them. Not only are these mooks in Louisiana violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, but they’re so dumb they’re not even establishing their own religion. It’s pathetic.

(The Bible translation I'm mostly basing my own elaborations on here is an unfamiliar but really likable plain-language version, The Names of God Bible, edited by Ann Spangler, Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2011, via the online Bible Gateway.)