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About this book

Exodus

About this book

The Ten Commandments and the Covenant

Chapter 20

1 God spoke all these words: 2 “I, the Lord, am your God, who brought you from the land of Egypt,⁠ from the house of slavery.⁠ 3 “You shall have no other gods before me. 4 “You shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is on the earth beneath or that is in the water below.⁠ 5 You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I, the Lord, your God, am a jealous God, responding to the transgression of fathers by dealing with children to the third and fourth generations of those who reject me,⁠ 6 and showing covenant faithfulness to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.⁠ 7 “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold guiltless anyone who takes his name in vain. 8 “Remember the Sabbath day to set it apart as holy. 9 For six days you may labor and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; on it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, or your male servant, or your female servant, or your cattle, or the resident foreigner who is in your gates. 11 For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth and the sea and all that is in them, and he rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and set it apart as holy.⁠ 12 “Honor your father and your mother,⁠ that you may live a long time in the land the Lord your God is giving to you.⁠ 13 “You shall not murder.⁠ 14 “You shall not commit adultery.⁠ 15 “You shall not steal.⁠ 16 “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.⁠ 17 “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 belongs to your neighbor.”⁠ 18 All the people were seeing the thundering and the lightning, and heard the sound of the horn, and saw the mountain smoking—and⁠ when the people saw it they trembled with fear and kept their distance.⁠ 19 They said to Moses, “You speak to us and we will listen, but do not let God speak with us, lest we die.” 20 Moses said to the people, “Do not fear, for God has come to test you, that the fear of him may be before you so that you do not sin.” 21 The people kept their distance, but Moses drew near the thick darkness where God was. 22 The Lord said to Moses, “Thus you will tell the Israelites: ‘You yourselves have seen that I have spoken with you from heaven.⁠ 23 You must not make gods of silver alongside me,⁠ nor make gods of gold for yourselves. 24 “‘You must make for me an altar made of earth, and you will sacrifice on it your burnt offerings and your peace offerings, your sheep and your cattle. In every place where I cause my name to be honored I will come to you and I will bless you.⁠ 25 If you make me an altar of stone, you must not build it of stones shaped with tools, for if you use your tool on it you have defiled it.⁠ 26 And you must not go up by steps to my altar, so that your nakedness is not exposed.’⁠

Texts in conversation

Compare Genesis 15:7 and Exodus 20:2

Hebrew Bible

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Summary

Exodus 20 opens with God using the divine name, as the one who brought Israel from Egypt. Genesis 15 shows it was edited later by echoing this formula, applying it to Abram, and anachronistically using the divine name before it was revealed.

Passages

Genesis 15:7

Hebrew Bible
5 The Lord took him outside and said, “Gaze into the sky and count the stars—if you are able to count them!” Then he said to him, “So will your descendants be.” 6 Abram believed the Lord, and the Lord credited it as righteousness to him. 7 The Lord said to him, “I am the Lord who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess.” 8 But Abram said, “O Sovereign Lord, by what can I know that I am to possess it?”
750–400 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in Genesis

Exodus 20:2

Hebrew Bible
1 God spoke all these words: 2 “I, the Lord, am your God, who brought you from the land of Egypt, from the house of slavery. 3 “You shall have no other gods before me. 4 “You shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is on the earth beneath or that is in the water below.
750–400 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in Exodus

References

… Genesis 15:7 contains a well-known formula for divine self-revelation: “I am Yhwh.” The wording would have evoked a number of texts like Exodus 20:2 and Leviticus 25:38, which tie the revelation of the divine name to the exodus. Whatever modern historians might conclude about the advent of Yahwism, the Priestly view is clear: Abram never received a revelation of Yhwh’s name. Genesis 15, on the other hand, creates a flatly contradictory scenario: while the ancestor’s name was still Abram, he heard directly from Yhwh: “I am Yhwh, who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess.” The scope of the Yhwh story is expanded backwards in time, from the sojourn in Egypt to an origin in Babylon. It is not simply that the narrator and audience know the divine name, while it remains unknown to the characters in Genesis, as suggested by the Priestly source in Exodus 6:2–3. The secret of the name is out, and Abram can use it freely (Genesis 15:2, 8) …
Mark G. Brett, “Respectful Parody of Exodus Traditions in Genesis 15–16,” in Irony in the Bible: Between Subversion and Innovation, ed. Tobias Häner and Virginia Miller (Leiden: Brill, 2023), 17.

References are not endorsements of their contents. Read each reference in full to understand its author's intentions in using these texts.

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Genesis 15:7 and Exodus 20:2

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