Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Deuteronomy · About this commentary
Ten Words: the Second Table
Deuteronomy 5:16-21
16 “Honor your father and your mother, as Yahweh your God commanded you, that your days may be long and that it may go well with you in the land which Yahweh your God gives you. · WEB
Six commandments about neighbors, four of them two words long, and the last one reaches behind every action to the wanting.
The second table opens with the one commandment that carries a promise, and this version adds a clause the other does not. Honor your father and your mother, as Yahweh your God commanded you, that your days may be long and that it may go well with you Deuteronomy 5:16.
The other account promises length of days Exodus 20:12. Here it also promises that things will go well, which is the phrase this book uses throughout for the good the law is aiming at.
It is worth noticing where the commandment sits. Honoring parents is the hinge between the commandments about God and those about neighbors, and the family is the first place a person meets an authority that is not his own.
Then four commandments of two or three words each Deuteronomy 5:17–20. No qualifications, no penalties, no exceptions listed. Murder, adultery, theft, false testimony — the shortest sentences in the law, and the whole of the case law in chapters 12 to 26 is the working out of them.
The fourth of them is about speech, and it names the setting: false testimony against your neighbor. It is a courtroom offense, which is why the book returns to witnesses at length later Deuteronomy 19:15–21. A community's justice can survive bad judges more easily than it can survive lying witnesses.
And then the tenth, which is unlike all the others because nothing happens.
You shall not covet your neighbor's wife. Neither shall you desire your neighbor's house, his field, or his male servant, or his female servant, his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor's Deuteronomy 5:21.
No court could try it. Every other commandment on this table describes an act with a victim who knows about it; this one describes a state of mind, and it reaches behind the adultery, the theft and the false witness to the thing that produces them.
Two small differences from the other account are worth marking, because they show the same law being preached rather than copied. There the list begins with the house Exodus 20:17; here the wife is put first and given her own clause, so that a person is not listed among a man's property. And a field is added, which is what mattered in a country they were about to divide by lot.
The repeated phrase throughout is your neighbor's. Six times in one verse the point is ownership by somebody else, and the commandment is finally about accepting that another person's life is theirs.
settled What this mark means