This week’s Torah reading centers on the story, told in verses 2–14 of the twentieth chapter of Exodus, of the giving of the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai. Why is it then that Hebrew, through which this story was transmitted to the world, does not speak of Sinai’s “commandments,” its mitzvot, but rather of its “sayings,” its dibrot?

Or, to reverse the question: why, when Hebrew says there were ten “sayings” at Sinai, do English and other languages say there were ten “commandments”?

Aseret ha-dibrot, “the ten sayings,” is not a phrase found in the Bible, in which the Ten Commandments are referred to as aseret ha-d’varim. This term occurs not in Exodus 20, but further on in the biblical text, in Exodus 34 and Deuteronomy 4, both of which feature retrospective summations of Sinai’s events. As translated by Robert Alter’s The Hebrew Bible, the passage from Exodus 34 reads (the bracketed additions are mine):

And the Lord said to Moses, “Write you these words [d’varim], for according to these words I have sealed a covenant [b’rit] with you and with Israel.” And he [Moses] was there [on the mountain peak] with the Lord forty days and forty nights. Bread he did not eat, nor water did he drink. And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant [divrei ha-b’rit], the Ten Words [aseret ha-d’varim].

Alter’s “the Ten Words” (although having, as we shall see, its precedents) is problematic, since there are obviously more words than ten in Exodus 20:2–14. (By my own count, there are 172.) One can, though, understand Alter’s difficulty, because the common biblical noun davar (plural, d’varim) can mean either “word,” “utterance,” or “thing,” and sometimes all of them together. In English, too, of course, we can “say things” and utter sentences like “I heard a funny thing” or “What a thing to tell me!” Yet English “thing” is not inherently ambiguous in quite the same way as is Hebrew davar, which is connected to the verb dibber, “to speak,” and reflects the biblical belief that God created the universe by a series of speech acts, so that all that exists is also that which has been spoken.

This ambiguity made even the ancient rabbis uncomfortable, since to their ears, too, aseret ha-d’varim, “the ten utterances,” could also mean “the ten things.” And so, starting with early rabbinic literature, we find the variant of aseret ha-dibrot regularly used in place of aseret ha-d’varim. Also linked to dibber, dibrah (the singular of dibrot) is not ambiguous: it can mean only “saying” or “utterance,” never “thing,” and aseret ha-dibrot, “the ten sayings,” is how the commands of Sinai are referred to in Hebrew to this day. Nowhere are they called aseret ha-mitzvot, “the ten commandments.”

I can think of three reasons for this. The first and most obvious is that Exodus 20:1, which introduces God’s words at Sinai, states Vay’dabber elohim et kol ha-d’varim ha-eleh leymor, “And God spoke all these d’varim, saying.” It does not state Vay’tsav elohim, “And God commanded,” even though that, too, is a common biblical locution that might have been resorted to. (Indeed, Deuteronomy 4:13 does resort to it in telling us, “And he [Moses] recited His [God’s] covenant, which He commanded [tsivah] you to perform, the ten d’varim.”)

A second reason is that Exodus 20: 2-14 contains more than just commandments. Its first verse, 20:2, is the prologue, “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slaves,” only after which it goes on, in 20:3, to the commandment, “You shall have no other gods beside me.” Elsewhere, too, the passage has statements that are in the declaratory rather than the imperative mood (for example, “I am the Lord your God, a jealous God . . .” in 20:5), and although one may consider these (as the rabbis did) to be inseparable from the commands that follow or precede them, it still seems more inclusive to refer to both kinds of formulation as “sayings.”

In Christianity, on the other hand, the term “Ten Commandments” appears from an early stage. We do not, it is true, find it in the Church’s Vulgate Latin Bible, which translates Exodus 34:28 as et scripsit in tabulis verba foederis, decem (“And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant, ten”) and Deuteronomy 4:13 as et ostendit vobis . . . decem verba quae scripsit in duabus tabulis lapideis (“and he revealed to you . . . the ten words that he wrote on the two stone tablets.”) “Ten words” is also the literal meaning of the Greek dekalogos, widely used by Christian tradition too, which goes back to the Septuagint, the 2nd-century-BCE Jewish translation of the Bible into Greek, and gives us our English “Decalogue.”

Yet writing in the early 5th century, Augustine, the greatest of the Christian church fathers, speaks in several places of the decem praecepta (a praeceptum in Latin was not a “precept” but an imperial command). In his “On the Spirit and the Letter,” he asks:

I should like to be told what there is in these Ten Commandments [in illis decem praceptis], except the observance of the Sabbath, which ought not to be kept by a Christian? Whether they prohibit the making and worshipping of idols and of any other gods than the true god, or the taking of God’s name in vain, or whether they prescribe honor to parents, or give warning against fornication, murder, theft, false witness, adultery, or coveting other men’s property—which one of these commandments would anyone say that the Christian ought not to keep?

The key words here are excepta sabbati observatione, “except the observance of the [Jewish] Sabbath,” a practice of which Augustine saw only the legalistic, not the spiritual, side. It was for him part of the “old law” of Judaism, with all its numerous ritual and cultic obligations, that was nullified by the new dispensation resulting from Jesus’s atonement for the sins of mankind. On the other hand, writes Augustine, the rest of the Decalogue consists of moral imperatives that are incumbent upon Christians no less than upon Jews. Its commandments alone have survived the old law’s abrogation and must still be kept.

Augustine was expressing Christian doctrine, even if this rejected his views on the commandment “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy,” which was understood by Christianity to refer to a Sunday whose sole duties were to rest and to pray. Although the term “Ten Commandments” did not enter the Christian Bible until the first Bible translations of the Protestant Reformation (its earliest appearance there in English was in the 1560 Geneva Bible, from which it was borrowed and turned into an everyday expression by the 1611 King James Version), the notion that the only biblical commandments still in force are those of the Decalogue is practically as old as Christianity itself.

This is the last and most important reason why Judaism, while speaking routinely of the taryag mitzvot, the “613 commandments” in the Bible, shunned the expression aseret ha-mitzvot. Such an expression would have implied that only ten commandments existed, which was precisely the Christian position. What there were only ten of, Judaism maintained, were the dibrot, the sayings, of Sinai. These were spoken by a divine voice heard by all Israel. But the other 603 commandments were God’s will, too, and they also would remain valid forever.