How Many Versions of "The Ten Commandments" Would You Write...If You Were God?

You'd write ONE set of Ten Commandments, right? Then how come the Bible claims God wrote two contradictory versions, and he couldn't even remember what was on each?

You think that stone tablet down on the courthouse lawn that reads, "Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not kill" represents God's Ten Commandments? Think again. You're about to be educated...

The Bible books attributed to Moses' authorship list over 600 commandments (the Mosaic laws). Ten of these laws are routinely renowned as the central moral code of western civilization, known also as The Decalogue. (Bet you can't recite more than four of those Ten Commandments can you? Fret not, brethren, most people can't.)

But now, here are The Other Ten Commandments, the Decalogue they never taught you in Sunday School, kids:

1. Do not make cast idols.
2. Celebrate the Feast of Unleavened Bread.
3. The first offspring of every womb belongs to me, including all the firstborn males of your livestock.
4. No one is to appear before me empty-handed.
5. Six days you shall labor, but on the seventh day you shall rest.
6. Celebrate the Feast of Weeks with the firstfruits of the wheat harvest, and the Feast of Ingathering at the turn of the year.
7. Three times a year all your men are to appear before the Sovereign LORD, the God of Israel.
8. Do not offer the blood of a sacrifice to me along with anything containing yeast.
9. Bring the best of the firstfruits of your soil to the house of the LORD your God.
10. Do not cook a young goat in its mother's milk.

You doubt that these are in fact the Ten Commandments of The Bible? They appear in Exodus, Chapter 34. Read it. And try to explain away the following verse, which comes at the end of what you've just read: "Then the LORD said to Moses, "Write down these words, for in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel." Moses was there with the LORD forty days and forty nights without eating bread or drinking water. And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant—the Ten Commandments."


But in Exodus Chapter 20, Moses claims God gave him an entirely different Decalogue. (note that Moses also claims he survived without water for 40 days; no human on record has ever survived more than 19 days without water. And a signature symptom of severe dehydration is delirium; was Moses delirious...?)

Very strange, this: the "familiar" Ten Commandments that so many good clean Americans demand be carved on every courthouse wall are never actually called The Ten Commandments by God in the Bible. The ten I listed above, including the ban on boiling goats in milk, are...

So what happened to Thou shalt not steal, kill, covet thy neighbor's wife, servants or donkeys, etc? Don't ask me, I didn't write the stuff, Moses did.

If you were God, would you allow such confusion?