Most “Christians” are also unaware of the extra ones, despite them being listed in black and white in the bible.
In Exodus 20, Moses is given the tablets containing the ten commandments, which are listed off in the text of the bible in that chapter and are the ten that “everyone knows.”
Then, in Exodus 32:19, Moses gets so pissed off at witnessing his people worshiping the golden calf that he breaks the tablets that have the commandments carved on them. In Exodus 33 he goes back up the mountain to ask god what to do about it. In Exodus 34, god goes as far as to say unto Moses, “Hew thee two tables of stone like unto the first: and I will write upon these tables the words that were in the first tables, which thou brakest.” Throughout the chapter he does so, listing off a screed that contains a couple of the original commandments (no other gods before me, and remember the sabbath) but the rest of his directions are quite different from the first list.
Further, there is a recitation of the first ten commandments in Deuteronomy 5, where a different explanation for the sabbath day is given. In Exodus god claims the sabbath is holy because he created the world in six days and the seventh day is a day of rest, but in Deuteronomy he says the sabbath actually holy because the people of Israel were slaves in Egypt and god gave them rest in the form of their freedom. Moses further goes on to say after this recitation that these were the words god spoke and he “added no more,” which as we saw in Exodus 34 is bogus.
I guess actually it’s 18 in total, then. We can treat it as a trick question for Mike Johnson.
There’s an interesting detail to the whole “Moses breaking the original tablets in response to the golden calf worship.”
This parallels the alleged reforms of Josiah.
Josiah “finds a new book of laws” and then suddenly carries out major religious reforms. He performed human sacrifice slaughtering the priests of the high places on their altars to defile them. He hides away the Ark, the anointing oil, the manna jar. He gets rid of the Asherah worship.
And he gets rid of the golden calves in Bethel and Dan while getting rid of the old laws and bringing new ones.
Oh, and he institutes the Passover narrative.
So suddenly in the events around Moses, the central part of that Passover narrative, is a scene that has old laws being destroyed in response to golden calf worship and new laws taking their place.
Very sus.
Even more sus is that Josiah’s reforms appear to be anachronistic given the correspondence over a century later between Elephantine and Jerusalem.
We should really be taking Hecataeus of Adbera’s claim that the scriptures of the Jews had recently been significantly altered around the Exodus narrative under the Persian and Macedonian conquests more seriously.
Edit: Also if the Shapira scroll is legit, there was originally an 11th commandment.
SMH. I can’t stand when fantasy authors have such shoddy and inconsistent worldbuilding. Doesn’t anyone proofread and run the manuscript by beta readers anymore?
Fun fact, the King James version (which wingnuts love to swear adherence to, maybe because of all the flowery language) was supposed to be the edit that fixed many of these worldbuilding gaffes. Obviously, it categorically failed to do so – it even still includes both mildly contradictory accounts of the creation of the world in Genesis, which another poster here already mentioned.
No one reads the KJV except people seeking a doctrine in biblical studies. Everyone reads the revised KJV. The original version was plagiarized off an earlier English Bible instead of going directly to the source material. So even when it was first published it sounded like an old time way of speaking. Also it contained non-canon books that publishers would later take out to save on costs.
Well to be fair none of these people knew they were writing the Bible. You are some ancient scribe. The local king/warlord wants you to take some old story or scroll and revamp it to argue how great he is. Can’t really refuse a guy with a throne of human bones especially since a. He is paying you b. This is your chance to write a fanfic, maybe it won’t suck this time.
Over and over the translations and copies were altered. As each group tried to prove that they had it right and everyone before them had it wrong.
Which is part of the reason why it is thought that the final editors, prior to the 3rd century, were fusing two different narratives together. Same thing happens in Genesis and to a lesser extent in Mark.
Most “Christians” are also unaware of the extra ones, despite them being listed in black and white in the bible.
In Exodus 20, Moses is given the tablets containing the ten commandments, which are listed off in the text of the bible in that chapter and are the ten that “everyone knows.”
Then, in Exodus 32:19, Moses gets so pissed off at witnessing his people worshiping the golden calf that he breaks the tablets that have the commandments carved on them. In Exodus 33 he goes back up the mountain to ask god what to do about it. In Exodus 34, god goes as far as to say unto Moses, “Hew thee two tables of stone like unto the first: and I will write upon these tables the words that were in the first tables, which thou brakest.” Throughout the chapter he does so, listing off a screed that contains a couple of the original commandments (no other gods before me, and remember the sabbath) but the rest of his directions are quite different from the first list.
Further, there is a recitation of the first ten commandments in Deuteronomy 5, where a different explanation for the sabbath day is given. In Exodus god claims the sabbath is holy because he created the world in six days and the seventh day is a day of rest, but in Deuteronomy he says the sabbath actually holy because the people of Israel were slaves in Egypt and god gave them rest in the form of their freedom. Moses further goes on to say after this recitation that these were the words god spoke and he “added no more,” which as we saw in Exodus 34 is bogus.
I guess actually it’s 18 in total, then. We can treat it as a trick question for Mike Johnson.
There’s an interesting detail to the whole “Moses breaking the original tablets in response to the golden calf worship.”
This parallels the alleged reforms of Josiah.
Josiah “finds a new book of laws” and then suddenly carries out major religious reforms. He performed human sacrifice slaughtering the priests of the high places on their altars to defile them. He hides away the Ark, the anointing oil, the manna jar. He gets rid of the Asherah worship.
And he gets rid of the golden calves in Bethel and Dan while getting rid of the old laws and bringing new ones.
Oh, and he institutes the Passover narrative.
So suddenly in the events around Moses, the central part of that Passover narrative, is a scene that has old laws being destroyed in response to golden calf worship and new laws taking their place.
Very sus.
Even more sus is that Josiah’s reforms appear to be anachronistic given the correspondence over a century later between Elephantine and Jerusalem.
We should really be taking Hecataeus of Adbera’s claim that the scriptures of the Jews had recently been significantly altered around the Exodus narrative under the Persian and Macedonian conquests more seriously.
Edit: Also if the Shapira scroll is legit, there was originally an 11th commandment.
SMH. I can’t stand when fantasy authors have such shoddy and inconsistent worldbuilding. Doesn’t anyone proofread and run the manuscript by beta readers anymore?
Fun fact, the King James version (which wingnuts love to swear adherence to, maybe because of all the flowery language) was supposed to be the edit that fixed many of these worldbuilding gaffes. Obviously, it categorically failed to do so – it even still includes both mildly contradictory accounts of the creation of the world in Genesis, which another poster here already mentioned.
No one reads the KJV except people seeking a doctrine in biblical studies. Everyone reads the revised KJV. The original version was plagiarized off an earlier English Bible instead of going directly to the source material. So even when it was first published it sounded like an old time way of speaking. Also it contained non-canon books that publishers would later take out to save on costs.
Well to be fair none of these people knew they were writing the Bible. You are some ancient scribe. The local king/warlord wants you to take some old story or scroll and revamp it to argue how great he is. Can’t really refuse a guy with a throne of human bones especially since a. He is paying you b. This is your chance to write a fanfic, maybe it won’t suck this time.
Over and over the translations and copies were altered. As each group tried to prove that they had it right and everyone before them had it wrong.
Which is part of the reason why it is thought that the final editors, prior to the 3rd century, were fusing two different narratives together. Same thing happens in Genesis and to a lesser extent in Mark.