It was this apparent lapse into idolatry (along with some Israelite partying) that caused Moses to smash the stone tablets in anger. Even after the Israelites heard the Ten Utterances from the voice of God on Mount Sinai, they fashioned a molten calf out of gold earrings and provided it burnt offerings. In Moses' time, idols were a part of personal and national life. But the punctuation also suggests that it's not the images themselves that are the problem but, rather, the bowing down to them. Taken literally, one segment at a time, the commandment seems to imply that no graven images of anything are allowed: no statues of horses, no photos of dolphins or, for that matter, any picture of anything. In its entirety, in the King James Bible, it reads: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me and showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments." The idolatry commandment is usually shortened so that it's concise and, frankly, more palatable. Most Protestants, Eastern Orthodox churches and modern-day Jews, on the other hand, separate them into two commandments. By some reckonings, the two commandments are in fact one: Roman Catholics and some Lutherans include the prohibition against idolatry as part of the First Commandment. The First and Second Commandments are the most interrelated of the ten: Don't have any gods before me, God said, and by the way don't make any other images that you worship. Obeying the Second Commandment, they say, is about making sure that nothing in your life is more important than God. And that would be true even if America's current favorite TV show didn't have the word "idol" in the title. Ditto for the words "bow down thyself."īut the second of the Ten Commandments, say leaders of a variety of religious faiths, is always timely. There's nothing like the word "graven" to make a commandment sound irrelevant to your own life.
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