The scene was terrifying. There was a storm: thunder and lightning. Thick cloud covered the mountain. Fire blazed. A shofar sounded. The mountain shook and the earth trembled. Something immense was about to happen. It seemed as if the world were shaking to its foundations. The event that day at Sinai when God revealed Himself to an entire people was a singularity – less an event in time than an event that transformed time. As Maimonides wrote, “We struggle to understand it and fail because there was nothing to compare it to, before or since” (Guide for the Perplexed, II:33).

Einstein taught that light – even time itself – is distorted, curved, as it travels in close proximity to the sun. Something like that can be observed in the Torah as it approaches the moment when a group of escaping slaves met God at a mountain in the desert, and there their destiny was born. Time slows almost to a standstill.

By contrast, the book of Genesis covers the whole of time past from the birth of the universe to the descent of Jacob’s children to Egypt. Deuteronomy, the book of Moses’ visions at the end of his life, charts time future from the Israelites’ entry into the Promised Land to the furthermost horizon of their not-yet-written history. The first half of Exodus and the second half of Numbers track the Israelites’ forty-year, forty-two-stage journey from Egypt to the bank of the Jordan. But their stay at Sinai takes up fifty-nine chapters, from Exodus 19 to Numbers 10, including the whole of Leviticus, despite the fact that they were there for less than a year. As an object accelerates toward the speed of light, time decelerates. So, judging by the metronome of biblical prose, it was at Sinai.

The descriptions of the Giving of the Torah in Tanakh focus largely on externalities. “You came near and stood at the foot of the mountain while it blazed with fire to the very heavens, with black clouds and deep darkness,” said Moses (Deut. 4:11). “The earth shook, the heavens poured, the clouds poured down water. The mountains quaked before the Lord,” sang Deborah (Judges 5:4–5, see also Ps. 68:8–9). Yet, when something similar happened to Elijah centuries later, standing on the same mountain (I Kings 19), the Bible makes it clear that God was not in the whirlwind or the earthquake or the fire but in a “still, small voice,” a sound on the edge of silence (v. 12). As Moses himself emphasized, at Sinai, “You saw no image; there was only a voice” (Deut. 4:12).

What was unique, transfiguring and still hard to understand was that the nation, as a nation, heard the voice of God. God spoke – not just to a prophet, not in a vision or a trance, not as a sound within the soul but as an event in public space and time. As a brilliantly ambiguous phrase in Deuteronomy (5:19) puts it, it was a kol gadol velo yasaf, a great voice that was never heard again, and that was ever heard again (Rashi, ad loc.). It happened once but it reverberated for all time.

The rabbis debated as to exactly what the Israelites heard (Song of Songs Raba 1:2:2; Pesikta Rabati 22). Some said they heard all ten commands, others that they heard only the first two, yet others that they heard all ten but as a single burst of sound that Moses had to decode, word by word. Some said that they heard not only what was eventually written on the tablets of stone and set out in the Written Torah but also what the Oral tradition would eventually infer from each word and phrase on the basis of its interpretive principles.

One thing, though, is clear from both the Exodus and Deuteronomy accounts. The sound was of almost unbearable intensity. The Israelites clamored around Moses begging him to ask God to stop: “You speak to us and we shall listen, but let God not speak to us, lest we die” (Ex. 20:16). When a voice from beyond the universe enters the universe the result is both terrifying and transformative. Yet though we cannot say what happened or how, we can at least hypothesize as to why. The voice of revelation was intimately related to the voice of creation. The God who said, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, from the slave-house,” was the God who said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. To understand this, we have to go back to the beginning of the biblical account of humankind and ask why Judaism is a religion of holy words and God-given law.

The pagan cultures of ancient times and today’s science-based atheism have one thing in common. They hold that all that exists is bounded by the physical, essentially material world of nature. The ancients spoke of the gods of the sun, the moon, the sea, the storm, the famine, the flood, the wind and the rain. Today scientists speak of the strong and weak nuclear force, cosmic antigravity, quantum fluctuations and the six mathematical constants that make the universe the size and shape it is. Where the ancients saw random, capricious fate, science sees the opposite: the ordered regularity of nature charted by cosmology, physics, chemistry and biology. But for neither is there a concept of revelation. What we know is, in the broadest sense, what we see. Reality is bounded by what we, given the current state of technology, can detect and measure.

Judaism, however, is about meaning, and meaning is something we hear, not see. It is about what makes us human, and why we behave the way we do, and why we so often destroy what is most precious. These are things that cannot be reduced to atoms, particles and forces. Judaism speaks, above all, of a monumental series of encounters between human beings and a reality beyond the quantifiable and predictable, a reality that is to the universe what the soul is to the body. The question of questions is therefore: How can we relate to something so utterly beyond us?

The biblical answer, astonishing in its beauty and simplicity, is that the meeting between us and God is like the meeting between two persons, myself and another. I can see your body but I cannot feel your pain. How then can I enter your world? Through words. You speak, I listen. I ask, you answer. We communicate. Language is the narrow bridge across the abyss between soul and human soul. So it is between us and the Soul of the universe. Revelation takes place through speech. That is what happened at Sinai. Infinity spoke and the world trembled. In the silence of the desert the Israelites heard the voice of God.

Why, if God spoke at the beginning of time, did He need to speak in the midst of time? The answer lies in what the Bible sees as the most fateful event in the history of the world. God, having created a being in His image, gave it freedom. But the being He created was physical, and thus subject to desires that conflict with those of others. So began the long, bitter, brutal story of humankind.

God created order and gave humans freedom. Humans then proceeded to create chaos. That is the story of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel and humanity before the Flood – a world of freedom without order. After the Flood, humans created empires that had social stability, but they did so by depriving others of their liberty. That is the biblical story from the Tower of Babel to the Egypt of the Pharaohs. The result was order without freedom. How then can order and freedom coexist? The whole of Judaism is an answer to that question, and all of Jewish history is a commentary to it.

The biblical answer is law: not physical, scientific law, the law of cause and effect that applies to mindless particles on a micro- or macro-scale, but moral, ethical and spiritual law: the law that speaks to human beings in full acknowledgment of their freedom. That is why God spoke at Sinai. Creating a mindless universe, implies the Torah, is easy. In ­Genesis, it takes a mere thirty-four verses. Creating a social order in which free human beings act justly and compassionately is difficult. That is why the story of Sinai takes fifty-nine chapters. At the beginning of time God spoke the laws that frame the natural universe. At Sinai He spoke the laws that shape the moral universe, inviting the Israelites to construct a society that would serve as a pilot project for humanity as a whole.

The humans God addressed in the desert were liberated slaves. They knew what it was to be treated as less than fully human. That was now behind them. God spoke – and it was essential that He did so not to an elite, but to everyone, men, women and children. He told them that though He was the God of all humanity (“the whole earth is Mine,” Ex. 19:5), He was willing to risk His own profile in history by linking His name with theirs. He was offering them a covenant that if followed would – in priestly terminology – turn them into “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Ex. 19:6). In prophetic language, He would “betroth them in righteousness and justice, loving-kindness and compassion” (Hos. 2:21). In the vocabulary of wisdom, He would give them statutes that would be their “wisdom and understanding in the eyes of the nations” (Deut. 4:6).

For it is law, voluntarily accepted, conscientiously practiced, studied, meditated on, internalized, taught by parents to children across the generations, spoken of “when you sit at home and when you travel on the way, when you lie down and when you rise,” a law transcending all earthly principalities and powers, that alone reconciles freedom and order. It is only by voluntary self-restraint, born of learned habits of law-abidingness, that we preserve our own freedom while at the same time extending it to others. That is what God spoke at Sinai.

What proof do we have that this really happened, that what the Israelites heard that day was indeed the voice of God? Religion is not science. The revelation of the One beyond space and time within space and time is not an empirical event demonstrable by experiment or describable within the normal parameters of history. Yet we are not without evidence. Among the unpublished papers found in his desk after he died in 1778, Jean-Jacques Rousseau left the following fragment:

But an astonishing and truly unique spectacle is to see an expatriated people, who have had neither place nor land for nearly two thousand years, a people mingled with foreigners, no longer perhaps having a single descendant of the early races, a scattered people, dispersed over the world, enslaved, persecuted, scorned by all nations, nonetheless preserving its characteristics, its laws, its customs, its patriotic love of the early social union, when all ties with it seem broken. The Jews provide us with an astonishing spectacle: the laws of Numa, Lycurgus, Solon are dead; the very much older laws of Moses are still alive. Athens, Sparta, Rome have perished and no longer have children left on earth; Zion, destroyed, has not lost its children. They mingle with all the nations and never merge with them; they no longer have leaders, and are still a nation; they no longer have a homeland, and are always citizens of it…. Any man whosoever he is, must acknowledge this as a unique marvel, the causes of which, divine or human, certainly deserve the study and admiration of the sages, in preference to all that Greece and Rome offer of what is admirable in the way of political institutions and human settlements.¹, no. 7843 (Neuchâtel).

footnotes: ¹ Rousseau, Cahiers de brouillons, notes et extraits

The laws the Israelites received from God that day at Sinai did indeed become their “wisdom and understanding in the eyes of the nations.” They transformed a small, fractious and otherwise undistinguished nation into a people who outlived empires and permanently enlarged the moral landscape of humankind.

I. Torah from Heaven

The revelation at Mount Sinai was not just a religious event. It was a political event of a unique kind. It was the birth of a nation. Throughout Genesis, the heirs of Abraham had been an extended family. At the beginning of Exodus we hear them for the first time described as an am, a “people.” Pharaoh says, “Look, the people of the children of Israel are too many and powerful for us” (Ex. 1:9).

What made them a people were many things. There was kinship: they were all descendants of Jacob. There was culture: they were shepherds which made them suspect to the Egyptians. There was history: they were newcomers to the land; their origins lay elsewhere. Above all, there was shared suffering. Isaiah Berlin noted that it is usually a sense of an injustice done to one’s people that is the crucible in which nations are formed. Israel became a people in Egypt, bound by brit goral, a ­covenant of shared fate.

At Sinai, however, they became an eda, a body politic. God invited them to become a “kingdom of priests…a holy nation” (Ex. 19:6) – the first mission statement of the Jewish people, perhaps the first of any nation anywhere. The covenant they agreed to then became their written constitution as citizens in the republic of faith under the sovereignty of God.

It is the last phrase that is crucial here: “under the sovereignty of God.” It is sometimes thought that the Ten Commandments were a moral revolution in humankind. This is not so in the sense usually understood. It did not take divine revelation to tell humans that they must not murder, or rob, or give false testimony in court. Humans have always known this. Cain was punished by God for killing his brother Abel, but God had not yet commanded, “Do not murder.” Every rational moral rule has been binding on humans since they first appeared on earth, said Rabbeinu Nissim (Derashot HaRan 1). It is not here that the originality of Sinai lies.

It lies in something deeper. The Torah is a sustained critique of the abuse of power. It is a response to and a reaction against the world’s first empires, those of Akkad under Sargon (c.2334 to 2279 BCE, see Gen. 10:8–10) and Egypt under the pharaohs, where whole populations could be enslaved to further the self-aggrandizing projects ordered by rulers to ensure their earthly and heavenly immortality.

In the ancient world, politics and religion were inseparably intertwined. The head of state was also head of the religion and regarded as semi-divine. Power was projected in the form of monumental buildings, ziggurats, pyramids, palaces, temples and royal tombs. Akkadian kings were identified with the god of their city-state. The pharaohs were regarded as deities in their lifetime and worshiped after their death. In Babylon, the king was the earthly equivalent of the god Marduk who had established order by his victory over Tiamat, the goddess of chaos. Among the Hittites, the king was High Priest and on his death joined the gods. Isaiah speaks caustically about an Assyrian ruler who imagines that “I will ascend to the heavens; I will raise my throne above the stars of God…. I will make myself like the Most High” (Is. 14:13–14).

What underwrote such cultures was cosmological myth. There was hierarchy in the heavens – the sun ruled the sky. There was hierarchy in the forest – the lion ruled the beasts. So there was hierarchy in society. Some were born to rule, others to be ruled. That alone is how order is sustained. The Torah is a protest against this entire view of the human condition, on two grounds: first, it turns some people into gods; second, it turns others, the majority, into slaves. The Torah’s first and most decisive statement on the subject appears in its opening chapter when it says that God created human beings in His image and likeness (Gen. 1:26–27). All humans, not just rulers, carry within them the image of God, but no human is a god. At best, we – and everyone else – are in His image. There is and must be an absolute boundary between heaven and earth, God and humankind. That, above all, applies to power.

The idea that one human being should exercise power over others is a profound insult to the human condition. This was the sin of Nimrod, instigator of the Tower of Babel according to the Midrash. This is how John Milton describes him in Paradise Lost:

O execrable son! so to aspire Above his brethren; to himself assuming Authority usurped, from God not given: He gave us only over beast, fish, fowl, Dominion absolute; that right we hold By his donation; but man over men He made not lord; such title to himself Reserving, human left from human free. (Book XII, lines 64–71)

No human has the right to rule over others against their will. That is what the judge and military hero Gideon meant when the people asked him to become their king. He replied, “I will not rule over you nor will my son rule over you. God will rule over you” (Judges 8:23).

That is what Sinai was about. What the people agreed to was that God alone would be their king, legislator, law-giver. This is the principle known in the rabbinic literature as kabbalat ol malkhut shamayim, “acceptance of the yoke of the kingship of heaven.” According to the sages, it is what we are doing when we say the first paragraph of the Shema. It is an oath of allegiance to God: “Listen, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone.” Or as we say in the prayer Avinu Malkeinu, “We have no king but You.” The Israelites became “one nation under God.”

This is the core meaning of the idea of Torah min hashamayim, “Torah from heaven.” Later, under the impact of Second Temple sectarianism, then of Christianity and Islam, all of which challenged the Jewish understanding of Scripture, it came to mean much else besides, but its basic meaning is simply this: all law – Torah – comes from God. He is Israel’s sole law-giver.

This is what Moses meant when he said: “See: I have taught you rules and laws as the Lord my God has commanded me…. What great nation has decrees and laws as perfect as all this Torah that I am setting before you today?” (Deut. 4:5–8). It is what the psalmist means when he says: “He has declared His word to Jacob, His statutes and laws to Israel. He has done this for no other nation; such laws they do not know” (Ps. 147:19–20). Other nations had their gods to whom they prayed, but only Israel had God, not a human being, as their head of state and sole legislative authority. Only when kingship is in heaven can there be equality of dignity on earth.

To be sure, in practical terms, this principle came under strain. For several centuries after their entry into the land, Israel was led, temporarily at times of war, by charismatic leaders known as judges, but the book of Judges ends on a negative note. The nation was sliding into social and moral decline. The people came to Samuel, asking him to appoint a king. Reluctantly and at God’s bidding, he did so.

Monarchy gave rise to two radically different schools of thought within Judaism. Some saw it as an ideal, especially in the person of David, and later after the experience of exile, in the idea of the Messiah, a Davidic king who would restore Israel’s glory and usher in an era of peace (Maimonides, Laws of Kings ch. 11). Others were deeply critical of it, precisely because in principle Israel should have no other king but God. In the midrashic work Deuteronomy Raba (5:8–11), as well as the medieval commentaries of Ibn Ezra, Rabbeinu Baĥya and ­Abrabanel, monarchy was seen as a concession to human weakness and the people’s wish to be “like all the nations around” (Deut. 17:14). The book of Samuel records God as saying, when the people first asked for a king, “It is Me they have rejected as their King” (I Sam. 8:7).

On either view, however, monarchy as portrayed in Tanakh was unique in the ancient world. First, the king had no legislative power. He could institute temporary measures in response to the needs of the time, but not make permanently binding law. Second, the king had no special status in the religious sphere. He was not even a priest, let alone chief intermediary with God. Henri Frankfort, in Kingship and the Gods, noted that “the relationship between the Hebrew monarch and his people was as nearly secular as possible in a society wherein religion is a living force.” Michael Walzer noted that even in the biblical account of David, the almost-ideal king, “there is no hint of the conventional magnifications of monarchy: no mysteries of state, no divine descent, no royal magic, no healing touch.” Third, kings could be criticized, by the prophets and by the biblical text itself. There is no parallel for any of this in the ancient world.

Israel was not the only ancient nation to have laws. They all did. Some became famous, for instance the Sumerian Code of Ur-Nammu and the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi. But these were edicts of the king. Justice was a common value in the ancient Near East, but the idea that this was the domain of the gods would have struck people as absurd. The gods were capricious, quarrelsome, and did not like human beings at all. As Shakespeare put it in King Lear, “Like flies to the wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.”

In Judaism, law comes from God alone. Torah min hashamayim: law is made in heaven. Kings, priests, prophets and sages were empowered to interpret the law and in some cases make enactments to ­safeguard it, but not to make it or annul it. All earthly authority is subject to the law: this is the basic principle of human equality and the foundation of a free society.

That is what happened at Sinai. Accepting the covenant, the ­Jewish people became a nation under the direct sovereignty of God, with no other legislative authority. All law, to be valid, must be traceable back to Sinai and the voice of God. There was nothing like this before and – as we saw in the quotation from Rousseau – it survived all vicissitudes of Jewish history. At Sinai God gave the people the gift of law, and it became their constitution of liberty.

II. Social Covenant, Social Contract

At Sinai, a new kind of politics was born.

From Plato’s Republic to modern times, political philosophy has focused on power and the state. Judaism has its own theory of the state, but it also has a political theory of society, something rare in the history of thought, and to this day a vision unsurpassed in its simplicity and humanity.

The theory of the state and the role of power is signaled in ­Deuteronomy and described in detail in the book of Samuel. It is about the appointment of a king. We saw in the previous section why Judaism is ambivalent about this. Ideally the Israelites should have no other king but God. Nonetheless, God tells Samuel not to refuse to appoint a king but rather to warn the people of the high price they will have to pay. Samuel does so. The king, he warns, will take their sons and daughters for his service, appropriate their property for his own use and much else besides. “When that day comes you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, and the Lord will not answer you in that day” (I Sam. 8:18). The people nonetheless insist: they still want a king. God grants permission, and Samuel duly anoints Saul. Israel becomes a ­monarchy. For the first time it has a unified, central government.

Commentators have long been puzzled by the biblical approach to monarchy. If it is disapproved of, why is there a command in the Torah to appoint a king (Deut. 17:14–15)? If it is approved of, why did God say that, in asking for a king, the people were rejecting Him (I Sam. 8:7)? And why does He tell Samuel to warn the people? A brilliantly simple answer, given by Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Chajes (1805–1855) in his Torat Nevi’im, is that Samuel was proposing what Hobbes and Rousseau called a social contract.

The idea behind it is this: Without a central power capable of enforcing the rule of law and the defense of the realm, a nation is at risk, internally of anarchy, externally of defeat by a foreign power. Under these circumstances, the people may seek a central power vested with the authority to achieve these ends. But this power can only be brought into being if the people are prepared to hand over certain of their rights of property and liberty so that the king can levy taxes and recruit an army. There is a transfer of rights and powers from the individual to the state. This carries with it the risk that the power thus created will become tyrannical and corrupt. That is the equation Samuel sets out. God gives the people the right to be governed this way, so long as they do so freely and in full knowledge of the price and risk. The Israelites agreed, as Hobbes thought rational individuals always would. Without a central government, which in those days meant a king, life and liberty would be difficult to defend.

It is no accident that this theory, the foundation of modern ­politics, made its first appearance in the Hebrew Bible – because it was there that the key ideas emerged of the sanctity of life, the dignity of the individual, the integrity of private property and the insistence on freedom as the basis of society. For the first time, no power of one person over another – even a king over his subjects – could be taken as part of the natural order. The biblical revolution was that no human hierarchies are self-justifying. Ideally a society should be comprised of free citizens, all equally under the sovereignty of God. All earthly power structures, therefore, are necessary evils. None is written into the fabric of the ­universe, and none is good in itself.

Yet what made the politics of the Hebrew Bible unique was not its theory of the state in the days of Samuel, but rather its conception of society, which came into existence centuries before, at Mount Sinai. The difference was fundamental. The state was created by a social ­contract among the people. The eda, the society, was created by a social covenant between the people and God. That is what God proposed and the ­people accepted at Sinai on the first Shavuot. It was an event unique in the ­religious history of humankind.

The outward form of the agreement was nothing new. Covenants or treaties were a familiar feature of the ancient Near East. Genesis records several such treaties. Abraham made one with Avimelekh, king of Gerar, at Be’er Sheva (Gen. 21:27–32). So did Isaac (Gen. 26:28–31). Jacob did so with Laban (Gen. 31:44–54). Besides, God had already made covenants with Noah (Gen. 9) and Abraham (Gen. 17).

What was new at Sinai has become clearer in the light of the discovery in the mid-twentieth century of engraved records of ancient Mesopotamian treaties, among them the “Stele of the Vultures” commemorating the victory of Eannatum, ruler of Lagash in southern Mesopotamia, over the people of Umma, and that of Naram-Sin, king of Kish and Akkad, with the ruler of Elam. Both date from the third ­millennium BCE, that is to say, before the time of Abraham.

These treaties are of two kinds: between parties of roughly equal power (“parity treaties”) and those between a strong one – what today we would call a superpower – and a weak one. These latter are known as “suzerainty treaties,” suzerain meaning the dominant power in a ­particular region. The Sinai covenant between God and the Israelites was a suzerainty treaty. Three features, though, made it unique.

First is the fact that one of the parties was God Himself. This would have been unintelligible to Israel’s neighbors, and remains extraordinary even today. The idea that God might bind Himself to human beings, linking their destiny to His, making them His ambassadors – His ­“witnesses” – to the world, is still radical and challenging.

Second, the other party to the covenant was not, as it invariably was in the ancient world, a king or ruler, but the people as a whole. Their collective participation was essential. It is a point the Torah repeatedly emphasizes: “All the people responded as one” (Ex. 19:8); “All the people responded with one voice” (24:3). In the Hebrew text, the phrase “the people” appears seventeen times in Exodus 19 (the covenant proposed), and five times in Exodus 24 (the covenant accepted). This is not democracy in the modern sense, but it is the basis of what Michael Walzer calls “Israel’s almost-democracy,” and it had lasting implications.

It meant that every Israelite, as party to the covenant, was co-responsible with the people as a whole for its being kept. From this flowed the rabbinic idea of Kol Yisrael arevin zeh lazeh, “All Jews are responsible for one another” (Rashi, Lev. 26:37 following Shevuot 39a), as well as the much later American idea of “We, the people.” It meant that the basis of social order in Judaism is not power but collective responsibility. Power belongs to God. Responsibility belongs to us.

This meant that every Jew had to know the law and teach it to his or her children. Each had to know the story of his or her people, reciting it at key religious moments in the year. This is covenant politics, based not on hierarchical power but on a shared sense of history and destiny. It is a moral politics, dedicated to creating a just and gracious society honoring the dignity of all, especially the down­trodden, the poor, the powerless and the marginal: the widow, the orphan and the stranger.

The third key feature was God’s insistence that Moses had first to secure the people’s assent before the revelation could take place. This was essential, for the Bible portrays God not as an overwhelming force but as a constitutional monarch. The supreme power makes space for human freedom. There is no justified government without the consent of the governed, even if the Governor is Creator of heaven and earth. The people agree three times (Ex. 19:8; 24:3, 7). Thus the Judaic basis of a free society is not democracy as such. The rule of the majority can lead, as it has many times, to tyranny and the persecution of minorities. Freedom, in Judaism, is based on the consent of the governed and the overarching authority of God-given rules of justice. These establish the moral limits of power.

What happened at Sinai was a covenant, not a contract. Contracts are made between individuals on the basis of self-interest. A contract creates a limited partnership for mutual gain. A covenant creates a more enduring bond of mutual commitment and loyalty. Partners to a covenant have more than self-interest at stake. They have shared interests. A covenant relationship is one in which the parties come together, each respecting the freedom and dignity of the other, to create together something that neither could achieve alone – love, friendship, loyalty, communication, trust. Covenants create not personal gain but the common good, meaning things that only exist in virtue of being shared.

For the Bible, the key example of a covenant is marriage, understood as a bond of identity between husband and wife. A marriage is held together not by power or mutual advantage but by a moral bond of love and fidelity. Virtually all the prophets compare the bond between God and Israel to a marriage. The significance of Sinai is that, long before the Israelites had a state, they had a society, and they did so because they had a social covenant before they had a social contract. That is why, uniquely, Jews remained a nation even in exile and dispersion. Though they had lost their state, they still had their eda, their community of faith. Though they had lost the land, they still had the law.

III. The Ten Utterances

What the Israelites heard at Sinai has become known as the “Ten ­Commandments.” But this description raises obvious problems. First, neither the Torah nor Jewish tradition calls them the Ten Commandments. The Torah calls them aseret hadevarim (Ex. 34:28), and tradition terms them aseret hadibrot, meaning “the ten utterances.” Second, there was much debate, especially between Maimonides and Nahmanides, as to whether the first verse, “I am the Lord your God…,” is a command or a preface to the commands. Third, there are not ten commandments in Judaism but 613. Why, then, these but not those?

Light has been shed on all these issues by the discovery, already mentioned, of ancient Near-Eastern suzerainty treaties, most of which share certain features and forms. They begin with a preamble stating who is initiating the covenant. That is why the revelation opened with the words, “I am the Lord your God.” Then comes a historical review stating the background and context of the covenant, in this case, “who brought you out of the land of Egypt, from the slave-house.”

Next come the stipulations, first in general outline, then in specific detail. That is precisely the relationship between the “ten utterances” and the detailed commands set out in later chapters and books of the Torah. The former are the general outline; the latter, the details. So the “ten utterances” are not commandments as such but an articulation of basic principles. What makes them special is that they are simple and easy to memorize. That is because in Judaism, law is not intended for judges alone. The covenant at Sinai was made by God with an entire people. Hence the need for a brief statement of basic principles that everyone could remember and recite.

Usually they are portrayed as two sets of five, the first dealing with relationships between us and God (including honoring our parents since they, like God, brought us into being), the second with the relations between us and our fellow humans. However, it also makes sense to see them as three groups of three.

The first three – no other gods besides Me, no sculptured images and no taking of God’s name in vain – are about God, the Author and Authority of the laws. The first states that divine sovereignty transcends all other loyalties (No other gods besides Me). The second tells us that God is a living force, not an abstract power (No sculptured images). The third states that sovereignty presupposes reverence (Do not take My name in vain).

The second three – the Sabbath, honoring parents and the prohibition of murder – are all about the principle of the createdness of life. Shabbat is the day dedicated to seeing God as Creator, and the universe as His creation. Honoring parents acknowledges our human createdness. “Do not murder” restates the central principle of the Noahide covenant that murder is not just a crime against man but a sin against God in whose image we are created. So the fourth, fifth and sixth commands form the basic jurisprudential principles of Jewish life. They tell us to remember where we came from if we seek to know how to live.

The third three – against adultery, theft and bearing false witness – establish the basic institutions on which society depends. Marriage is sacred because it is the human bond closest in approximation to the covenant between us and God. The prohibition against theft establishes the integrity of property, which John Locke saw as one of the bases of a free society. Tyrants abuse property rights. The prohibition of false testimony is the precondition of justice. A just society needs more than a structure of laws, courts and enforcement agencies. It also needs basic honesty on the part of us all. There is no freedom without justice, and no justice without each of us accepting individual and collective responsibility for truth-telling.

Finally comes the stand-alone prohibition against envying your neighbor’s house, wife, slave, maid, ox, donkey or anything else belonging to him or her. This seems odd if we think of the “ten words” as commands, but not if we think of them as the basic principles of a free society.

The greatest challenge of any society is how to contain the universal phenomenon of envy: the desire to have what belongs to someone else. Rene Girard, in Violence and the Sacred, argued that the primary driver of human violence is mimetic desire, that is, the desire to have what someone else has, which is ultimately the desire to be what someone else is. Envy can lead to breaking many of the other commands: it can move people to adultery, theft, false testimony and even murder. It led Cain to murder Abel, made Abraham and Isaac fear for their lives because they were married to beautiful women, and led Joseph’s brothers to hate him and sell him into slavery. It was envy of their neighbors that led the Israelites often to imitate their religious practices and ­worship their gods.

So the prohibition of envy is not odd at all. It is the most basic force undermining the social harmony and order that are the aim of the Ten Commandments as a whole. Not only though do they forbid it; they also help us rise above it. It is precisely the first three commands, reminding us of God’s presence in history and our lives, and the second three, reminding us of our createdness, that help us rise above envy.

We are here because God wanted us to be. We have what God wanted us to have. Why then should we seek what others have? If what matters most in our lives is how we appear in the eyes of God, why should we seek anything else merely because someone else has it? It is when we stop defining ourselves in relation to God and start defining ourselves in relation to other people that competition, strife, covetousness and envy enter our minds, and they lead only to unhappiness.

Thirty-three centuries after they were first given, the Ten Command­ments remain the simplest, shortest guide to the creation of a good society.