Ten Commandments

The Ten Commandments, or Decalogue, is a list of religious and moral imperatives which, according to the Bible, was spoken by YHWH to Moses on Mount Sinai and engraved on two stone tablets. They feature prominently in Judaism and Christianity. In Biblical Hebrew they are termed Aseret ha-Dvarîm עשרת הדברים, and in Rabbinical Hebrew Aseret ha-Dibrot עשרת הדברות both translatable as "The Ten Utterances". The name decalogue is derived from the Greek name δέκα λόγοι or dekalogoi ("Ten Speeches") found in the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Hebrew name.

Written in Stone

According to the Bible, God inscribed the Ten Commandments into stone: "God said to Moses, 'Come up to Me, to the mountain, and remain there. I will give you the stone tablets, the Torah and the commandment that I have written for instruction.'" http://bible.ort.org/books/pentd2.asp?ACTION=displaypage&BOOK=2&CHAPTER=24 (Exodus 24:12) also referred to as "tables of testimony" (Exodus 24:12, 31:18, 32:16) or "tables of the covenant" (Deuteronomy 9:9, 11, 15), which he gave to Moses. Traditional belief is that the commandments were inscribed on two stone tablets, with five commandments on each tablet. The Talmud (tractate Shabbat 104a) states that there were miracles involved with the carving on the tablets. One was that the carving went the full thickness of the tablets. There is a letter in the Hebrew alphabet called a samech that looks similar to the letter "O" in the English alphabet. The stone in the center part of the letter should have fallen out, as it was not connected to the rest of the tablet, but it did not; it miraculously remained in place. Secondly, the writing was miraculously legible from both the front and the back, even though logic would dictate that something carved through and through would show the writing in mirror image on the back.

Related Topics:
Talmud - Through and through - Mirror image

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