Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Exodus · About this commentary
The Second Table
Exodus 20:12-17
12 “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which Yahweh your God gives you. · WEB
Six commandments protect the family, life, marriage, property and reputation, and the last of them reaches behind conduct into the wanting.
Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which Yahweh your God gives you Exodus 20:12.
The second table opens where a society is actually built. The command carries a promise, which no other in the list does, and the promise is national as much as personal: a people who dishonor the generation above them do not keep a country long. It is also the bridge between the two tables, since the first authority a person meets is a parent, and the word used is honor rather than obey — which is why it continues to apply when the child is fifty and the parent is failing.
You shall not murder Exodus 20:13.
The verb is specific and is not the general word for killing; the same law code that gives this commandment prescribes capital penalties and regulates warfare, so it cannot be read as forbidding all taking of life. What it forbids is the unlawful taking of it, and the ground was laid long before Sinai: life is not to be taken because the human being carries God's image Genesis 9:6.
You shall not commit adultery Exodus 20:14.
Marriage is placed under protection immediately after life, which is a statement about how much damage its betrayal does.
You shall not steal Exodus 20:15.
Four words that assume private property, and therefore assume that a person may own something another may not simply take.
You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor Exodus 20:16.
The wording is judicial. What is guarded first is not conversation but the courtroom, because a legal system runs on the assumption that witnesses tell the truth, and a lie told under oath can kill a man the speaker never touched.
You shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor's Exodus 20:17.
The tenth is different in kind from the nine before it, and its position at the end is the key to the whole. Every other commandment can be kept by a person who does nothing; this one cannot be kept by anyone who merely refrains. It legislates desire, and in doing so it exposes what the other nine were always about — murder begins in anger, adultery in the look, theft in the wanting. No human court could enforce it, and it is included anyway, which tells the reader who the law's audience is.
This is the commandment Paul names when he explains how the law taught him what he was: he had thought himself blameless until he met you shall not covet Romans 7:7. A code that ended at the ninth could be kept well enough to be proud of. Ending at the tenth, it cannot be kept at all, and the person who takes it seriously arrives exactly where the rest of Scripture wants him — needing the deliverance the preamble already described Exodus 20:2.
settled What this mark means