Following the preface ‘I am the Lord your God’, there are ten commandments.
This site follows the Anglican and Reformed Church numbering, those from Judaism and the Orthodox Church will notice slight differences with the boundaries of 1 and 2. Catholics and Lutherans will notice numbers are generally one less, 10 becoming 9 and 10 (see detailed notes).
The Ten Commandments were given to Moses during the Exodus
(Ex
20:2-17, Deut 5:6-21) and formed the basis of a
covenant
between
Israel and their God. Hence they are of profound significance to both
Judaism and
Christianity.
They are broadly divisible into an initial group (1-4), that concern
relationship
with God, and a later group (5-10), that concern relationship between
people.
Jesus seems to have considered the first three commandments so foundational that they didn’t even need mentioning. Regarding the fourth, Sabbath observance, he claimed that he and his disciples were exempt on the grounds that they were acting as priests. The remaining six he recognised.
When a young man asks Jesus how he can inherit eternal life, Jesus tells him to obey commandments 6, 7, 8, 9, then omits the tenth before citing the fourth, just to make the omission more obvious (Matt 19:16-22, Luke 18:18-23). The parallel passage in Mark’s Gospel (Mark 10:17-22) has Jesus substitute the wrong commandment rather than omit one altogether. Whichever is closer to what really happened, the young man should still have noticed the error and queried it. That was precisely what Jesus was expecting and so when the query failed to materialise, he challenge the young man in that precise area.
Jesus also focuses on these six commandments in the Sermon on
the Mount, where after commending those who have obeyed 1-3, in the
Beatitudes (Matt
5:3-10), he affirms the significance of the
divine law and then considers what it meant for his followers to obey
5-6 in
the light of
obeying 1-3.