Book Review: The Ten Commandments
The Ten Commandments: Monuments of Memory, Belief, and Interpretation
It can be disorienting to see something familiar in a new light. This is a common experience for students who stumble into courses on the Hebrew Bible and discover texts that often have more to do with the ancient Near East than the Judeo-Christian world in which they typically encounter them. For scholars, such moments of surprise are rare and wonderful.
Timothy Hogue’s recent monograph, The Ten Commandments: Monuments of Memory, Belief, and Interpretation, provided me with just such an opportunity to become unsettled. Reading Hogue’s eloquent prose is like witnessing the unveiling of a new discovery, except what is revealed is something we thought we already knew: the Ten Commandments, the very embodiment of scripture or, as Hogue argues, of God himself. According to Hogue, Yahweh, like other gods and kings of the ancient Near East, constituted his people (Israel) through the Decalogue’s participation in the tradition of ancient Near Eastern “I Am” monuments. These monuments were inscribed with texts that invariably opened with an “I Am” statement identifying an individual (usually a ruler) who spoke and manifested himself through the monument. Examples of such monuments include the Tel Dan Stele, the Zakkur inscription, and the Mesha Stele.
Previous treatments of the Decalogue have focused primarily on the literary and historical development of the accounts in Exodus (20:1–17) and Deuteronomy (5:6–21). Hogue is aware that bringing the tools of historical criticism to the literary form of the text is important for understanding the socio-historical context(s) in which the text was produced, but this is not what occupies his attention. Rather, he posits that at the center of the biblical accounts of the Decalogue is a particular type of ancient Near Eastern monument that began to change at the very time when Israel’s scribes were producing accounts of this essential material object. Hogue makes a persuasive case that the biblical scribes consciously engaged this familiar discourse, inviting their audiences into the spatial, cognitive, and geopolitical world of the “I Am” monument. The texts describing the giving of the Decalogue thus demand that we take seriously the decidedly material aspect of this iconic literary text.
In addition to his command of the Akkadian and West Semitic (Hebrew, Phoenician, Aramaic, and Moabite) written evidence, Hogue brings rare expertise in Luwian hieroglyphic to bear on his subject matter. His mastery of this material and the effectiveness with which he engages it raises the question of why the field of Hittitology has remained largely cordoned off from the study of the Bible in its ancient Near Eastern context.
In Hogue’s study, certain phrases, the meaning of which we might have taken for granted as clear, suddenly become less so. For example, in what Hogue designates “the monolatry commandment,” he offers a corrective to the common, monotheizing translation: “You shall have no other gods beside me,” translating instead, “you shall have no other god(s) above me.” In light of “I Am” monuments, Hogue interprets this as a reference to the removal of rival claimants to Yahweh’s position, a common motif in “I Am” monuments. Where translations have historically rendered, “You shall not swear falsely by (or take in vain) the name of the Lord your God,” Hogue translates, “You shall not maliciously erase the name of Yahweh your God.” Hogue defends this translation through careful study of the Hebrew idiom in the context of “I Am” monuments, where the name is a metonym for the inscribed monument itself. He demonstrates that “lifting up” a name was a technical description for name erasure in Levantine monumental discourse. These and other subtle reinterpretations of the language of the Decalogue situate it within a particular Near Eastern context that stands at a considerable conceptual difference from its reception in Judeo-Christian tradition.
Deuteronomy’s reworking of the Decalogue represents an early stage in how the text was remodeled to meet changing historical circumstances. Hogue situates this recasting in the context of shifts in the use of “I Am” monuments during the period of Assyrian domination (eighth–seventh centuries BCE), which he identifies as the “Age of Court Ceremony.” He explains Deuteronomy’s revisions in light of changing practices of monumentality as well as a “refugee crisis” created by an influx of people from Israel into Judah after the Assyrian annexation of the north.
In his chapter on the afterlife of the Decalogue, he explores the text’s inner biblical reception especially in late monarchic and post-monarchic additions to Exodus and Deuteronomy. However, he acknowledges that the interactions between text and community that are at the heart of his study technically extend to the present day. Indeed, in this moment when monumentalizing the Ten Commandments is of current import in the United States, Hogue’s work invites us to reflect on our own interactions with the Decalogue in the context of a long and always historically situated chain of tradition.