The Ten Commandments in Arkansas

The forces of religion were temporarily disappointed when Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson insisted (at the behest of Walmart and other employers) on a gay-tolerant amendment to the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, but they bounced back strongly last week when the legislature overwhelmingly passed the Ten Commandments Monument Display Act.  This time there was no objection from business interests, and Gov. Hutchinson enthusiastically signed the bill.  Thus, under Arkansas law, the Secretary of State is now required to arrange for a Ten Commandments monument to “be designed, constructed, and placed on the State Capitol grounds by private entities at no expense to the State of Arkansas.”

The legislature was apparently confident that church groups would jump at the opportunity to mount the Decalogue, for reasons explained in the statute itself.   “The Ten Commandments,” says the Act, “are an important component of the moral foundation of the laws and legal system of the United States of American and of the State of Arkansas” and represent “a philosophy . . . that God has ordained civil government and has delegated limited authority to civil government.” 

Of course, the Ten Commandments say nothing at all about limited government, delegated or otherwise, but that is far from the only problem with the Arkansas law.  The real difficulty lies in determining precisely which of the commandments are supposed to be displayed.  There are actually many versions of the Ten Commandments, with different iterations venerated by different faiths.

With only slight variation, all Christians and Jews accept the same text of Exodus 20:1-17, where the commandments first appear in the Bible (they are repeated in Deuteronomy 5: 6-21), but in fact there are seventeen separate verses in the scripture.  It therefore requires an act of interpretation – not to mention significant abbreviation – to come up with only ten pithy commandments, especially if they have to be short enough to fit on a reasonably sized monument.  In religious matters, needless to say, interpretation inevitably leads to disputes.

The First Commandment in Judaism has always been, "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery." Most Christians, however, usually treat this verse as prologue, rather than as a proper commandment.  It therefore tends to be omitted from versions that are shortened to fit on a monument, plaque, or single page.  And in any case, the Jewish Second Commandment – “You shall have no other gods before me” – says more or less the same thing, so it is quite serviceable as the Christian First (the Episcopalians, in fact, use a combination of the two).

The Christian iterations, however, are not consistent between denominations.  For most Protestants, the Second Commandment is “You shall not make for yourself a carved image,” sometimes continuing, “You shall not bow down to them or serve them.”  The proscription on “graven images” is likewise found in the Jewish commandments, but it is not included at all in the standard Catholic version.  Instead, Catholics move everything else up a notch, while splitting the erstwhile Tenth Commandment in two, with separate prohibitions on coveting thy neighbor’s wife (ninth) and other property (tenth).

 These distinctions may not make much difference to the irreligious, but they are immediately obvious to the devout.  And sometimes it gets nasty.  There is an enduring streak of anti-Catholicism in American history, in which “Papists” are accused of “worshiping statues.”  The omission of the “graven images” provision of the Ten Commandments is then cited as proof of Catholic idolatry.  In response, Catholics sometimes view 'iconoclastic' criticism of visible religious symbols as offensive to their own sense of God's immanence in the world and in the life of their Church.

I don’t recommend searching for them (and I will not provide links), but virulently anti-Catholic websites are not hard to find, including those that charge the Church with apostasy and “mutilation of the Decalogue.”  Quarreling over the text of the Ten Commandments, as it turns out, feeds just the sort of religious hostility that once plagued Europe.

The problem at first seems intractable.  You simply cannot post the Ten Commandments without favoring one religion over others.  Left without guidance, there is no telling which one the Secretary of State might respect or offend. The Arkansas legislators, however, have seized upon their own solution.  Rather than leave things to chance (or providence), they dictated the language of the Ten Commandments in the statute itself.  While most states are content to have an official flower and bird, Arkansas has become the only state with an official version of the Decalogue.  It reads like this:

I AM the LORD thy God.

Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven images.

Thou shalt not take the Name of the Lord thy God in vain.

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.

Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.

Thou shalt not kill.

Thou shalt not commit adultery.

Thou shalt not steal.

Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house.

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his cattle, nor anything that is thy neighbor's.

In addition to the idiosyncratic capitalization and the archaic verbiage from the King James Bible, well-versed readers will notice that the Arkansas Decalogue has a decidedly Protestant character, with the “graven image” prohibition right there is the Third Commandment.  I cannot say whether this is likely to rankle Catholics – most of whom probably don’t care and won’t notice – but it is just the sort of governmental imprimatur on a specific religious text that the Establishment Clause was intended to prevent.

Then again, there is a certain air of gallantry about the Arkansas text, given that it begins with a nod to the Jewish First Commandment – “I Am the LORD thy God” – which both Protestants and Catholics generally leave out.  That won’t provide much cheer to Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, atheists, or others who follow their own traditions, but I suppose it’s something.

On the other hand, there is still no reference to Egypt as the “house of slavery,” even though the bill was signed into law during Passover.  That’s just as well.  Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton evidently wants to insert himself in the Middle East peace process – he has already written to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, so President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi might be next – but the world is much better off if the Razorback state legislature keeps the hell out of it.

 NOTE:  The Arkansas statute referred to its version of the Ten Commandments as having been “displayed on the monument declared Constitutional in Van Orden v. Perry,” but that case dealt with the location of the monument, not the text.