The Ten Commandments
The ten rules — no other gods, no idols, no taking the Lord's name in vain, keep the Sabbath, honor your parents, no murder, adultery, theft, false witness, or coveting — given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai.
Origin
In Exodus 20 (and again in Deuteronomy 5), Moses ascends Mount Sinai and returns with two stone tablets inscribed by God. The Israelites, having just been led out of Egypt, are given the terms of their covenant: ten short imperatives that became the moral skeleton of Judaism, Christianity, and (through them) Western law and ethics. The list was already being treated as a foundational legal text in late antiquity and was carved into church walls, courthouse lobbies, and schoolroom posters for most of the next two thousand years. The numbering differs between Jewish, Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed traditions — they group the prohibitions differently — but the content is the same. The original tablets, according to the story, ended up in the Ark of the Covenant, whose later fate Indiana Jones has not in fact established.
Modern usage
Even outside religious contexts, 'the ten commandments of X' is a standard format for any list of ten supposedly inviolable rules — for writers, for managers, for dieters. 'Thou shalt not' is the default tone for any half-joking prohibition. In the US, public displays of the Ten Commandments on government property are a recurring First Amendment fight; the 1956 Cecil B. DeMille film with Charlton Heston as Moses is the version most people picture.
In the wild
The first commandment of startup life is: thou shalt not run out of cash.— tech-press cliché
Tags