FREEDOM OF SPEECH FOR THE TEN COMMANDMENTS -- OR IS IT ELEVEN?
Alabama officials rolled a granite monument to the Ten Commandments out of the lobby of the state Supreme Court building today, hopefully bringing an end to a rather silly legal wrangle over the display on public property of a religious message.
The imbroglio raises an interesting question -- which "Ten Commandments" were on display? After all, it is a well-known fact that Protestants and Jews number and express them one way, while Catholics do it another.
The short answer is that these are the Protestant commandments, which undercuts the claim that the display represents merely the Judeo-Christian underpinning of today's civil law. The Protestant version keeps the Catholic first commandment -- " I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt not have strange gods before Me" and adds a second, "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image." The Catholic second commandment -- "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain" -- becomes the Protestant third. The Protestant version also combines the Catholic ninth and tenth commandments -- "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's goods; thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife" -- into a single ban on covetousness.
The confusion arises from the fact that while there are clearly around ten precepts in the Old Testament version, they are quite lengthy and hard to remember. So teachers long ago shortened them into ten short, memorable statements. Protestant reformers, relying on some early Christian commentators, made the revisions noted above. Many Jewish texts use the same division as used by the Protestants. Jews also note that counting everything, there are 613 commandments in the Old Testament, although all of them are based on the original ten.
People who take these things seriously use the different numbering systems to denounce Catholicism as a false religion, particularly because the Catholic system leaves out the ban on "graven images." Some Protestants feel this prohibits the displays of statues and stained-glass pictures so beloved by Catholics.
Oddly enough, the Alabama marker clearly shows eleven paragraphs, with "I am the Lord thy God" apparently serving as a sort of introduction. In Catholic teaching, it is part of the first commandment.
Thus, the Alabama display can be said to be taking sides in a religious dispute and therefore arguably constitutes a violation of the separation of Church and State.
Better to leave the Ten Commandments in church.