Ten Commandments: Form and Context

What is Meant by the “Two Tables” of the Law?

I will briefly dispense with the criticism of Meredith Kline, who argues against the traditional view that the two tables represent the religious and ethical dimensions of the moral law. He bases this rejection on the fact that these two tables are those “copies,” one for each party in the covenant agreement, universally featured in ANE Suzerain treaties.1 Even if this is exactly what was in view of the text, it would not necessarily negate the meaningfulness of speaking of the “two tables” in the traditional way. It would still beg the question as to whether or not this may be a proper systematic consideration.

Now what about that meaning? The simplest way to put it is that there are two parts of the Ten Commandments — one through four being the First Table, and five through ten being the Second Table. We realize at once that these are not divided evenly, by number, but rather by a moral principle. The First Table regards those duties which we owe God directly; that is, by our public worship. In other words they are more specifically dealing with religion. The Second Table regards those duties which we owe God indirectly; that is, through how we treat our fellow human beings.

It is not quite exact enough to say that the First Table gives us the “Godward” commandments and that the Second Table gives us the “manward” commandments, for they are all Godward. How we treat each other is something we owe principally to God.

It would be better to view the Second Table as a circle inside of the larger circle of the First Table. We will come back to why this is the case.

The Jews regard the preface as the first commandment. If anyone asks how this can be a command, the answer is that it is a command to recognize, somewhat similar to the shema of Deuteronomy 6:4. The Lord recognizes this as a commandment to “hear” and “love” and so forth (cf. Mk. 12:29). How then do they square that number ten? They do so by seeing the first and second commandment as one — their second.

In about the fifth century, the catholic tradition began to divide the tenth commandment in two, while retaining the unity of the first and second. The rationale for dividing the tenth had to do with Augustine’s doctrine of concupiscence, so that coveting the wife of one’s neighbor was significant enough to separate from coveting all other things of one’s neighbor.

At the time of the Reformation, there was a return to a third way that had become obscured. That is to see the Ten Commandments in exactly the way we do today. This was already the standard according Josephus, Philo, Origen, the Latin Fathers until Augustine, and the entire Greek Church. The argument from authority alone is therefore overwhelming.

What Does it Teach Us that There are Two Tables of the Law?

Naturally many issues emerge when we compare the two tables of the law to each other. To mention a few examples: What is the real essence of the third commandment? Is it blasphemy or swearing (as in oath-taking)? And what about that fifth commandment: does it extent to other authority-submission relationships aside from parents, as some claim? If it does, why does it not say so in plain words? And then there is coveting.

If the Second Table pertains to man’s relation to man, then it would seem that these are commandments to the civil sphere. But if that is true, then why isn’t coveting punishable in courts of law? And while we are at it, if coveting is not punished by the law of Moses, but is ultimately punished by God in the New Testament, then isn’t this evidence that there is a new law in Christ? All good questions; but all brought about by unbiblical starting points.

When we clear the fog of bad definitions away, the lesson becomes clear. Just as man is about God, so does our treatment of man speak volumes about our ultimate object of worship.

Perhaps the biggest clue may be found in the response of Jesus to the question “Which commandment is the most important of all?” (Mk. 12:28). He gives a two part answer:

Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these” (vv. 29-31).

There are two further clues in Matthew’s Gospel. At the transition between the first and second, there, Jesus says, “And a second is like it” (22:39). Applying this to the Decalogue we can see that the Second Table is like the First. Why? Because its object is man, and man is like God. Consequently how we treat the image of God says something about how we treat the essence of God. Our marriage and stewardship and speech is like our religion. Indeed it is our religion: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world” (Jam. 1:27).

Back to the words of Jesus about the Greatest Commandment, he ends by adding that, “On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (v. 40). All of the specifics of the Law — and not only the Law but the instruction given in the Prophets — is summarized in these two. In other words, all that we do in relation to God is an extension, or example, of the essence of our love for God. And all that we do in relation to the image of God is also an extension, or example, of the essence of our love for God.

The fruit of our morality will not fall far from the tree of our worship; and both will flow from the root of our understanding of the essence of God (more often than not, through the image of God). Dabney actually interprets Christ’s words as directly intending to highlight the Decalogue as the summary of the whole law — an abridging and not an abrogating — because “these two are the epitome.”2

Another clue is in John’s first letter. There he dealt with what love and hate say about God. That is, how we either love or hate our fellow man.

If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother (1 Jn. 4:20-21).

John’s statement here helps us drive home the idea. Our fellow human beings are the nearest thing to God we will see in this world. That is what God meant by making man and woman in his image.

However one divides the Ten Commandments, Hodge’s reminder is instructive: “The decalogue is not to be interpreted as the laws of men, which take cognizance only of external acts, but as the law of God, which extends to the thoughts and intents of the heart.”3 We must conclude that what we called the “spirit of the law” is not simply one way to read the law, but rather the correct way to read the law. That is because “the law is spiritual” (Rom. 7:14); and “Behold, you delight in truth in the inward being, and you teach me wisdom in the secret heart” (Ps. 51:6).

What we derive from the order of the two tables of the law is the basic maxim of biblical ethics: We do what we do because of what it says about God — not because of what it says about us (or any other lesser thing).

The Preface to the Ten Commandments

By the “preface” to the Ten Commandments, we mean the words of Exodus 20:2.

I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

This kind of introduction was typical of covenant treaties in the Ancient Near East. A great king would remind those lesser chiefs and their tribes who he was. And he would also tell them the great thing he had done for them. In such documents there were usually five main parts: 1. Name of the great king; 2. historical prologue; 3. stipulations (commandments); 4. sanctions (blessings or curses); 5. administration (covenant continuity).

Note that the Decalogue has the first four, though not the fifth. The book of Deuteronomy actually contains all five in that order.4 One last thing should be said about the similarity between these ancient documents and the form of this covenant in the Bible. First the great king wins his battle, and then a covenant is made with those now in his debt.

The Covenant Ground of the Commandments

As our Creator, God already has full authority to tell us to do whatever he pleases. But there is a different kind of ground that the world knows nothing of. Only the people specially called by God to the mountain know this. This ground forms the kind of obedience that is motivated by grace. To the people of God, it is not only the Creator who gives law but our Covenant Lord. Here we see the transcendence and immanence of God at once. He is over us, but he is also with us. God speaks to his people as a Person — as “I” — which harkens back to his first meeting on the mountain with Moses. There God revealed himself with a name that had not been previously known to the fathers,

Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” God also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘The LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations. (Ex. 3:13-15).

So back on the mountain, out of the burning bush, there is this same transcendence and immanence of God. He is both the self-existent One, who makes time and space; and the One who binds himself to his people in history. Now in this preface God says only that he is their LORD. That is the unspeakable Name in Hebrew, which is sometimes signified as YHWH, or spelled out as “Yahweh,” so that when our English Bibles use all capital letters, as in “LORD,” the meaning is the Covenant Lord of Israel. Since God had already linked both names together, this preface is meant to give his people utter confidence in him as the one, true God. He had proven all that is in his names by the deliverance he had performed.

An important point of theology confronts us here. Frame points out that his “makes Israel part of God’s own name.”5 This notion of binding himself to the people may seem problematic. God is sovereign. More than that, he is transcendent. And we are saying that he is sovereignly binding himself — is this not a contradiction? Actually, no. It is not: not as far as the words themselves go. But the same problem gets thicker. Is God defining himself in relation to the creature? This too must be rejected.

Now whether Frame's own theology proper can resolve this is another matter. For him it is Lordship that is the fundamental category of divine predication in the Bible. From a classical perspective, this is a mistake. That is because the idea of Lord, just like Creator, Savior, Gift, and so forth, imply the existence of a creature. Relation to these do not belong to the eternal essence of God, but rather in relation to God’s works ad extra. Better resolutions to this may be found in consulting Lombard's Sentences, Volume 1, or the relevant sections of Turretin’ Institutes (Vol. I) or Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics (Vol. 2).

But getting back to the covenantal context of the law, Moses’ first meeting with God, on “Mount Horeb” (which is only another name for Mount Sinai), was really the preface before the preface, except there it was the preface to redemption. Here the preface assumes redemption. God has already saved. There is nothing left to be done to finish the work of salvation. If there was, Israel would surely fail at it!

The Commandments Weren’t Given Back in Egypt

It is a remarkable fact that God gives his law to Israel within the context of having already saved them. A chapter earlier the LORD had told his people what they meant to him, or what he was going to make of them. The commandments come after that.

You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation (Ex. 19:4-6).

The Catechism says that “because God is the Lord, and our God, and redeemer, therefore we are bound to keep all his commandments.”6 Just as God freely binds himself to the people, taking upon himself the ultimate conditions of the covenant, so the people now respond to grace in being bound to obey. Here people see a contradiction between obedience and grace, or more broadly, between law and grace. We may look carefully at Exodus 19:4-6 and ask, “But if he has already saved Israel, and if the commandments are going to be a guide to life after salvation, then why does he use such conditional language? Why the ‘IF’? If they obey his voice, then they will be his people? But I thought he already made them his people by his grace.”

Hodge solves this in a rather ingenious way. He stands in the mainstream of the Reformed tradition by holding to one covenant of grace, in which the “special covenant which God formed with Abraham” is being “renewed at Mount Sinai,” and yet he distinguishes between “the spiritual children of Abraham” and the merely physical children. He could base this upon passages like Romans 9:6-8. Stated in this way, there is still one covenant of grace, but that the promise to Israel that they would inherit the land was conditioned upon obedience.

In other words, it was never the eternal salvation of any soul that was achieved by their own obedience. This conditionality refers to the temporal dimensions of the covenant promises. No one is saved by our performance, but there are all sorts of things in this world that are effected by our performance.

Grace does not eliminate moral cause and effect. And we will see, most clearly about the second and fifth commandments, that this is still true today. This idea of conditionality within the gracious covenant does not go away in the New Covenant age.

But at least this does resolve our dilemma about law and grace. It is actually a false dilemma. When the Apostle says “you are not under law but under grace” (Rom. 6:14), he is speaking specifically about the ground of our relationship to God, not the totality of our relationship to God. He is not declaring Christians to be lawless people! It is not that we will have no law in our lives. It is that we will live by faith.

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1. Meredith Kline, Treaty of the Great King (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1963), 19.

2. Dabney. Systematic Theology. 355

3. Hodge, Systematic Theology, III.19.1

4. cf. John Frame. The Doctrine of the Christian Life. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2008. 401

5. Frame. The Doctrine of the Christian Life. 402

6. Answer to WSC, Question 44.