This is a somewhat eccentric book. It is written to oppose the display of the Ten Commandments in American public spaces, but it makes little reference to American law, precedent, principle, or polity. Rather, it is an erudite and interesting tour d’horizon of modern scholarship on the Ten Commandments, contextualizing and (inevitably) relativizing them, on the assumption that dethroning their preeminence as an unchanging moral code will persuade us that they should not be elevated in public places. The scholarship is sound, but the concluding peroration is simultaneously the point of the book and its weakest chapter.
Michael Coogan is a Bible scholar who lectures at Harvard. He points out that there are multiple versions of the Decalogue in the Hebrew Bible (to the ones in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 he adds a questionable third, “the ritual Decalogue” of Exodus 34). He explains the formula, how the Ten Commandments relate to suzerain treaties (that is, ancient compacts between Semitic kings and their subjects), and reviews the Exodus story. As is inevitable in such a short summary of scholarship, conclusions that could easily be disputed are stated as givens: “The text of the Decalogue was written on two tablets because each party—in this case, God and the Israelites—was to get a copy of it.” Needless to say, although many modern scholars might agree, in the long history of Jewish exegesis no one has thought that God needed a copy just in case recordkeeping in the heavens got sloppy or the divine memory needed jogging.
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