Why the Ten Commandments in Texas classrooms could become a dozen

The Texas legislature has passed a bill requiring the Ten Commandments to be posted in every public school classroom in the state. With Gov. Greg Abbott (R) poised to sign it, the law’s Republican backers are ecstatic. 

"Nothing is more deep-rooted in the fabric of our American tradition of education than the Ten Commandments,” said  State Rep. Candy Noble (R), a lead sponsor of the bill.  

She should have devoted more attention to arithmetic. 

Although titled “An Act relating to the display of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms,” the law’s mandatory language, with no changes or additions permitted, actually includes 11 commandments (or even 12, depending on what counts), without numbering them. 

I believe I know why. 

The Ten Commandments are found twice in the Bible, first in Exodus and later in Deuteronomy. Both describe Moses’s receipt of the covenant at Mt. Sinai. The Exodus version comprises 17 verses; it is a bit shorter in Deuteronomy, at 16 verses. 

Neither iteration provides directions for organizing the text into 10 laws, abridged to fit on a 16” by 20” poster, as commanded by the Texas statute. 

There is no universally accepted set of Ten Commandments, because different religious traditions use different renderings. The Texas legislature evidently attempted to avoid this difficulty by expanding the Ten Commandments to please everyone. 

The result is 11 imperatives, plus an ambiguous additional line. 

They still ended up with an essentially Protestant version, different from those of most Catholics and Jews, which excludes Texas’s many Hindus, Buddhists and others. Islam’s holy books, in which Moses is revered as a prophet, do not include the Ten Commandments in the texts. 

For Jews, the first commandment is “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” This passage is not found in Christian versions, perhaps because it is not phrased as a command. The Hebrew scripture speaks of 10 devarim, meaning words or statements, rather than commandments. 

The Texas law finesses the discrepancy by adding “I AM the LORD thy God” at the top of the plaque, immediately under the title, apparently intended as either an introduction or an additional commandment. 

In either case, the capitalization, which is required by the statute itself, makes it obvious that the Texas law imposes a religious display in every classroom. It is not, as proponents have claimed, a historical document reflecting the origin of American law. 

“You shall have no other gods before me” is the second commandment for Jews, but it is the first commandment for Christians. That is also where Texas begins, lifting the Protestant King James Bible’s antiquarian “thou” and “shalt,” which would never appear in a synagogue or Catholic church. 

After that, the Christian versions quickly diverge. The second commandment for Protestants, and for Texas, is “Thou shalt not make to thyself a graven image.”  

That prohibition, however, is not a separate commandment by Catholics' reckoning, but part of the first commandment, and only implicit in the version of the Ten Commandments that most Catholics memorize. Thus, the Protestant third commandment is the Catholic second commandment and so forth. The inconsistent numbering continues until the end, where Protestants combine into one commandment what Catholics render as two separate ones against coveting the wife and then the goods of one's neighbor.

The differences are not trivial. The omission of the prohibition on graven images as its own commandment has inspired generations of bigots to level accusations of idolatry against Catholicism, often using vulgarisms and smears that I will not link to or repeat.

Thus, the merger of distinctively Jewish, Protestant and Catholic texts led to a required plaque with at least 11 commandments. They are un-numbered, which obscures the unorthodox total.

Although that may seem ecumenical, it again underscores the religiously restrictive nature of the display. Favored faiths are included, even at the cost of innumeracy; all others are not.

As Catholic theologian Richard Clifford explained, in his objection to schoolroom posting, “the Ten Commandments lay the foundation for the relationship of Jews and Christians to their Lord, but not for adherents of other religions or of no religion.”  

The framers of the Bill of Rights recognized that entanglement of government and religion can disrupt communities and alienate minorities. That is why the First Amendment provides there shall be “no law respecting an establishment of religion.” The purpose was not to diminish religion, but rather to insulate it from temptations of government power. 

A federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction against a nearly identical Louisiana statute, ruling that it violates the First Amendment. Telling schoolchildren “to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate” the Ten Commandments, the court held, “is not a permissible state objective under the Establishment Clause.” That decision is on appeal. 

The ACLU is ready to file a similar lawsuit against the Texas law. 

Texas State Rep. James Talarico (D), who is a seminary student, put it succinctly. "Once the government can start dictating something like the true text of the Ten Commandments,” he asked, “what is to stop the government from dictating the true meaning of the gospel or the true meaning of the sacraments?"  

Everything might be bigger in Texas, but that does not justify legislating an unmistakably religious schoolroom display of 11 or 12 commandments. 

Steven Lubet is the Williams Memorial Professor at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law.