Old Testament scholar Sara M. Koenig offers a fascinating survey of Christian, Jewish, and pop culture engagement with Scripture in The Ten Commandments through the Ages (2025). From sources as wildly diverse as Bono and Bonaventure, Martin Luther and Les Miserables, George Carlin and John Calvin, even Philo and Pokemon, Koenig skillfully shows the pervasive influence and staying power of the Ten Commandments through time and across traditions. Though expressed in just a few brief verses, knowledge of them, as Luther asserts, is knowledge of “the entire scriptures” (30). Reading Koenig, one might almost assume that knowledge of their reception history is knowledge of the entire world.
Beyond their ubiquity, however, there is not much left to agree upon when canvassing such a broad and disparate range of sources. For example, there is vast disagreement when it comes to numbering the Ten: perhaps unsurprisingly, there are differences between Jewish and Christian authorities on the matter, as well as Catholic and Protestant authorities within Christianity. But even within Protestantism, Lutherans and Reformed Christians cannot agree: e.g., is the fourth commandment to “remember the sabbath” or is it to “honor thy father and thy mother”? There were two tablets, but which commandments were on which tablet? Augustine favored three on one and seven on the other, so that “the mystery of the Trinity more clearly shines”; John Calvin argued for “four commandments on the first tablet, and six on the second one”; many other interpreters preferred the symmetry of five commandments on each (14).
While these disagreements might seem pedantic, the answers matters when Christians are making arguments about the ongoing relevance of the second table of the Law for civil society (e.g., out of respect for the Sabbath, should Christians support “blue laws” closing commerce on Sundays). Perhaps recognizing that no government can police covetousness and other private habits of the heart, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks suggests conceptualizing them altogether differently: “the first three… are about God… The second set are about createdness… The third three… are about the basic institutions of society” (15). Even our manuscripts of the Old Testament disagree about how to organize the commandments, Koenig observes: “Hebrew Bibles have the commandments against murder, stealing, adultery, and testifying falsely against a neighbor in a single verse… By contrast, the LXX [Septuagint] gives each commandment its own verse, as do English Bibles” (16).
One feature of the Ten Commandments often neglected today is that they begin by identifying God as the one “who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery” (Exodus 20:2). That statement, as Koenig notes, “is repeated almost one hundred times throughout the Old Testament” (38). In our rush to universalize these commandments, we might miss that these are “responsibilities given to God’s people in order to preserve the rights and freedoms gained by the exodus. For example, because God freed them from unremitting forced labor under Pharaoh, they must preserve the right of regular Sabbath rest for everyone in their society… Because God freed them from the infanticide practiced by the Egyptians, they must respect life” (41). Koenig also suggests that “negative commandments would allow more self-determination and more freedom to semi-nomads recently freed from slavery than positive commands would,” while also acknowledging that “many receptions… understand that the negative implies something positive” (19-20).
Koenig’s book feels like a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! of the Judeo-Christian tradition, making it difficult not to get bogged down with all of the interesting curiosities along the way, like John Winthrop’s rejection of rank democracy as “‘the meanest and worst of all forms of government’ and specifically as a violation of the commandment to honor father and mother” (131) or Lancelot Andrewes’ suggestion that “David’s idleness–rising from his bed late in the day, which is when he saw Bathsheba–led to David’s adultery with her” (163). Passages like these mark the book at its best, far more interesting than many books on the same subject.
Towards the end of the book, Koenig says that her goal is to collect “various, even competing, perspectives on each of the Ten Commandments in one place… wanting to encourage interpretative flexibility without it sounding utterly relative” (243-244). While the book succeeds in its goal in many respects, the chapter on adultery demonstrates the limits of this approach. The historic Christian ethos of an Andrewes or a Basil of Caesarea (who “writes about how an adulterer would be excluded from the sacraments for fifteen years”) is not enriched by the perspective of the modern liberal theologian included in Koenig’s book who argues that “it cannot be claimed that this commandment should become an absolutistic and unbreakable norm, issuing in a commitment never to have sexual relations with anyone other than the marriage partner” (170, 178).
Here, different interpretations do not complement one another but instead engage in mutual interrogations, forcing the reader to choose between rival interpretations: must we “forsake all others” in marriage (as the 14th century Sarum Rite worded the ancient Christian consensus) or is this an outdated and repressive code that is keeping us back from self-fulfillment? Both cannot be true, and living with integrity will require us to decide which rival claims that we will live by. Unfortunately, Koenig’s book will give us no help at this critical crossroads.
A Ripley’s Believe it or Not of the Ten Commandments can be an interesting diversion, it can even aid one’s faith in coming to a more perfect understanding of Scripture. As C. S. Lewis once said, old books and older ways of seeing things aren’t guaranteed to be correct, but they can at least “keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds.” In the end, however, Christians must learn to live the Ten Commandments, not just find intellectual stimulation in them. For that, guides other than Koenig will be necessary.
