14 Facts About Ten Commandments

Scholars disagree about when the Ten Commandments were written and by whom, with some modern scholars suggesting that they were likely modeled on Hittite and Mesopotamian laws and treaties.

Ten Commandments are written with room for varying interpretation, reflecting their role as a summary of fundamental principles.

Mishna records that during the period of the Second Temple, the Ten Commandments were recited daily, before the reading of the Shema Yisrael; but that this practice was abolished in the synagogues so as not to give ammunition to heretics who claimed that they were the only important part of Jewish law, or to dispel a claim by early Christians that only the Ten Commandments were handed down at Mount Sinai rather than the whole Torah.

Today, the Ten Commandments are heard in the synagogue three times a year: as they come up during the readings of Exodus and Deuteronomy, and during the festival of Shavuot.

Church teaching of the Ten Commandments is largely based on the Old and New Testaments and the writings of the early Church Fathers.

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Moral law contained in the Ten Commandments, according to the founder of the Methodist movement John Wesley, was instituted from the beginning of the world and is written on the hearts of all people.

Ten Commandments are a summary of the requirements of a works covenant, given on Mount Sinai to the nascent nation of Israel.

The Ten Commandments are considered eternal gospel principles necessary for exaltation.

Ten Commandments then said, "Whoever fulfills, then his reward will be with Allah, but whoever fell into shortcomings and Allah punishes him for it in this life, then that will be his recompense.

Goethe thus argued that the Ten Commandments revealed to Moses at Mount Sinai would have emphasized rituals, and that the "ethical" Decalogue Christians recite in their own churches was composed at a later date, when Israelite prophets had begun to prophesy the coming of the messiah.

Ten Commandments concludes that its vogue among later critical historians represents the persistence of the idea that the supersession of Judaism by Christianity is part of a longer history of progress from the ritualistic to the ethical.

Several interpretations of the Ten Commandments seem to have problems for modern people living in free societies, like capital punishment for blasphemy, idolatry, apostasy, adultery, cursing one own's parents, and Sabbath-breaking.

Images of the Ten Commandments have long been contested symbols for the relationship of religion to national law.

One result of these legal cases has been that proponents of displaying the Ten Commandments have sometimes surrounded them with other historical texts to portray them as historical, rather than religious.