Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Deuteronomy · About this commentary
Ten Words: the First Table
Deuteronomy 5:6-15
6 “I am Yahweh your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. · WEB
The commandments open with a rescue rather than a demand, and the Sabbath is given a reason that turns on who else gets to rest.
The first thing said is not a command. I am Yahweh your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage Deuteronomy 5:6.
An identification and an act, and only then the requirements. The order is never reversed anywhere in Scripture, and it settles what kind of thing the law is: the response of a people already rescued, not the price of being rescued.
You shall have no other gods before me Deuteronomy 5:7 follows from it directly. The claim is not that other gods are inferior but that this one has already acted.
The second commandment carries a clause that is often misread, and its qualifier matters. God visits the iniquity of the fathers on the children and on the third and on the fourth generation of those who hate me, and shows loving kindness to thousands of those who love me Deuteronomy 5:9–10.
The visiting falls on those who continue in the hatred — the phrase is attached to the generations, not to the fathers alone — which is why Scripture can also say flatly that a son does not bear his father's iniquity Ezekiel 18:20. And the arithmetic is deliberately lopsided: three or four against thousands.
Then the fourth commandment, and this version is introduced as a repetition: observe the Sabbath day, to keep it holy, as Yahweh your God commanded you Deuteronomy 5:12. It is not being instituted here. It is being recalled, and the phrase points back past Sinai to a day blessed and made holy at the close of creation Genesis 2:3.
What this version adds is a list and a purpose. The people who must not work are enumerated at length — son, daughter, male servant, female servant, ox, donkey, livestock, nor your stranger who is within your gates — and then the reason: that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you Deuteronomy 5:14.
And the motive clause matches: you shall remember that you were a servant in the land of Egypt, and Yahweh your God brought you out Deuteronomy 5:15.
The other account of this commandment grounds it in creation Exodus 20:11, and the two are not rivals. Creation is why the day is holy, and it was holy before there was an Israel to be told about it. Egypt is why these particular people have no excuse for withholding its rest from anyone under their authority. A nation that had worked without a day off for four centuries is handed a law guaranteeing one to its own slaves, and the argument put to them is their own memory.
So the commandment is the same and the preaching is aimed. The list of beneficiaries ends with the foreigner and the animals, and the person addressed is the one who could have made them all work.
settled What this mark means