Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Exodus · About this commentary
The First Table
Exodus 20:1-7
1 God spoke all these words, saying, · WEB
The commandments open with a rescue rather than a demand, and the first three settle who God is, how he may be represented, and what his name is for.
God spoke all these words Exodus 20:1.
Spoken, by God, to the whole nation at once. What follows is the only body of law in Scripture delivered without an intermediary, and the narrative is careful to establish that before it begins: the people heard this themselves, and asked afterward never to hear anything like it again.
I am Yahweh your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage Exodus 20:2.
The preamble is not a commandment and it governs all of them. The law is addressed to people who are already free, by the one who freed them, and it opens by naming the deliverance rather than the authority. Nothing here is offered as a means of escaping Egypt; the escape has happened. This single sentence is the reason the Ten Commandments cannot be read as a system of earning, and it is placed first precisely so that they cannot.
You shall have no other gods before me Exodus 20:3.
The first is not an argument that other gods do not exist but a demand for exclusive allegiance from a people who had lived four centuries among them. Before conduct, loyalty.
You shall not make for yourselves an idol, nor any image of anything that is in the heavens above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth Exodus 20:4.
The second addresses a different failure. The first forbids other gods; this forbids images of the right one. The distinction is exactly what the golden calf will violate, since Aaron's crowd is not proposing to abandon Yahweh but to look at him Exodus 32:5. An image fixes God as something, and whatever it fixes him as, it is smaller than he is and easier to manage.
The reason attached is the most difficult clause in the passage: visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and on the fourth generation of those who hate me Exodus 20:5. It is not a doctrine of inherited guilt, which Scripture rejects in terms Ezekiel 18:20. It is a statement of how idolatry actually propagates — through households, over lifetimes, so that a man's choice of god shapes great-grandchildren he never meets. And the balance is not symmetrical: three or four generations of consequence against loving kindness to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments Exodus 20:6.
You shall not misuse the name of Yahweh your God Exodus 20:7.
The third is usually reduced to swearing, and that is included, but the range is wider. A name in this book stands for a character disclosed Exodus 34:6–7, and to take it up emptily is to carry it while representing nothing — which is done as easily in a prayer as in an oath. The strongest form of the offense is committed by people who use the name constantly.
Three commandments, and no conduct toward another human being has yet been mentioned. The order is deliberate; the second table rests on this one.
settled What this mark means