Wrestling with the “Shall Knots”: Commandments

“Morality by commandment is fine for children of a certain age, but if their parents abuse them, isn’t honor bestowed on the undeserving perverted? Perhaps right and wrong are more nuanced than Yahweh understood, for if the god who sent the Flood forbade murder, how seriously should we take his precepts?” Skip Eisiminger

Skip the B.S.

By Skip Eisiminger

“By articulating general ethical principles, the Commandments provide a rather meager guide to right behavior….”—Randy Cohen

“Keep thy religion to thyself.”—George Carlin

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—10/1/2012—Shortly after arriving in this country, my German wife was hired at a bank in Columbus, Georgia. She was shown the ropes by a devout Baptist woman just a few years older than she.

“Baptists,” the co-worker told my multi-colored wife one day, “wear no makeup.”

“But, you’re wearing makeup.”

“Yes, but it’s flesh tone, Honey, so it’s OK.”

The same woman said it was a sin to do any work on “God’s day of rest,” yet she drove through Wash Upon a Car most Sundays before church. It was acceptable, she said, because, “It don’t take but a minute.”

One night, my wife checked her Lutheran Bible against mine to see if there were some differences; there weren’t. Her fourth commandment and mine read: “Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.” On that, King James and Luther were in agreement, but does keeping the Sabbath exclude all work? Indeed, Jesus lectured and healed on the Jewish day of rest. In fact, he argued that the blizzard of commandments in the Old Testament really boils down to two: respect your neighbor and love the Creator.

Morality by commandment is fine for children of a certain age, but if their parents abuse them, isn’t honor bestowed on the undeserving perverted? Perhaps right and wrong are more nuanced than Yahweh understood, for if the god who sent the Flood forbade murder, how seriously should we take his precepts?

Given theology’s numerous knotty strictures, it’s no wonder that Rudyard Kipling would have a lovelorn soldier in Victorian England say, “Ship me somewhere east of Suez where the best is like the worst,/where there aren’t no Ten Commandments . . ./it’s there that I would be.” But since when have our eastern neighbors been free of moral constraints? The commandments of Islam, for example, include, “Thou shall not strut about the land with insolence,” and, “Slay no one except for the requirements of justice.”

Jews abbreviate the latter to, “Don’t commit murder,” but to the Jains of India, killing a disease-bearing mosquito is prohibited since capital punishment is itself a crime. For reasons unknown, King James’s sixth commandment reads, “Thou shall not kill” which prohibits Christians from taking life in self-defense. To rectify the Jamesian oversight, at least 17 English Bible translations now use “murder” instead of “kill.”

Further east of Suez, Buddha commanded, “Use no intoxicants.” But in some English translations, this is rendered, “Don’t get intoxicated.” Apparently, one can acquire a thirst in equatorial India, but the extent to which it is slaked depends on the translation in hand.

As mentioned above, King James’s committee of translators had their own troubles moving a text from one language to another. Some contemporary Hebrew scholars have argued that “Thou shall not steal” should be translated as “Thou shall not kidnap.” Had that final word been in place in 1300 BC, who knows what the history of slavery might have been.

Still further east, the priests of Shinto commanded, “Don’t be carried away by foreign teaching,” and, “Don’t forget that the world is one great family.” But if Zen Buddhism or Islam appeals to a Japanese student of religion, why should an adherent of Shinto oppose the study if no one is harmed?

Guidance based on religious “maps” drawn centuries ago is often perilous. The second commandment in Orthodox bibles reads, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.” And the Jewish Torah reads, “Thou shall not make unto thee any images.” Period.

In the 16th century, Roman Catholics eliminated that restriction and split the first, so that they still had a marketable ten. The justification for the change is that with the coming of Jesus, the invisible had materialized so, clearly, heavenly images both sculpted and painted were no longer blasphemies. Without this change, Michelangelo might have been reduced to decorating the Sistine ceiling with colorful geometries à la Islam.

Because of the tangled syntax and archaic diction, some have anonymously recast Yahweh’s directives to make comprehension and memorization easier.

In an undated Southern-dialect edition, the third commandment warns, “Watch yer mouth”; the fifth urges readers to, “Honor yer ma and pa,” and the tenth states, “Don’t be hankerin’ for yer buddy’s stuff.”

The same three commandments in the Cajun dialect read, “Don’t cuss nobody, ‘specially the good Lord”; “Yo’ mama and yo’ daddy dun did it all; lissen to dem,” and, “Don’t go wantin’ somebody’s stuff.”

Finally, in the Black Bible Chronicles (1993), these three are recast as, “You shouldn’t dis the Almighty’s name…”; “Give honor to your mom and dad, and you’ll live a long time,” and, “Don’t want what . . . your homebuddy has. It ain’t cool.”

Running in the opposite direction are several literary variations on Jehovah’s rules.

In “The New Decalogue,” Ambrose Bierce explains why revenge killings are counter-productive: “death liberates thy foe/from persecution’s constant woe.”

In similar discursive fashion, Paul Many enlarges on the tenth commandment, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, even if her name is Ursula and she sunbathes with her bra straps undone.”

Last is Willis Barnstone’s memorable adaptation of the seventh, “Do not sleep with the spouse of another. There are many to sleep with, including your solitude, which may delight you with never imagined feasts . . . .” Who would have guessed that buried in the prohibition of adultery there’s a justification for masturbation?

One reason I suspect that many have a hard time regarding the Ten Commandments as inviolate is that the man who carried the tablets down Mt. Sinai broke the divine order not to murder. In Numbers 31, Moses chided his soldiers for not killing the Midianite children and sent them back to complete the grisly job.

In a similar relativistic fashion, Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount that though he did not come to change the Mosaic Law, he did intend to modify what the Jews understood by “adultery” to include lustful glances. Thanks to the celibate Jesus, intercourse is no longer the defining factor.

Then you have Paul in Ephesians saying that Jesus abolished all 613 commandments of “the Jewish Law.” It’s all very complicated especially given the polytheistic overtones of the first commandment.

As the former New York Times ethicist Randy Cohen points out, the commandment “does not ban other gods [like Mammon], just assigns them a secondary rank . . . .”

Is there any wonder that cartoonists continue to have a field day with the “Ten Rules for Dummies”?

Robert Mankoff has Moses on Mt. Sinai asking Jehovah, “Mind if I tweak them?” Zachary Kanin imagines Moses’s wife saying to her husband as he writes in bed, “They ignored your first ten. What makes you think you’ll do any better with these?” And Aaron Bacall draws Moses receiving the tablets and asking, “Are you sure you don’t want to add something about smoking?”

But, of course, tobacco was unknown in the Old World before the 16th century. Smoking was the New World’s revenge on those who tied the “knots” in the first place.