The Ten Commandments

The Decalogue appears twice in the Bible: in Exodus 20:1-17, at Sinai, and again in Deuteronomy 5:6-21, where Moses recalls it a generation later. The text itself speaks of “ten words” (Exodus 34:28; Deuteronomy 4:13), but it never numbers them — nothing marks where one ends and the next begins. That is why the same passage gets divided into ten in three different ways, and why “the sixth commandment” does not point to the same line in all of them.

The three numberings

The differences are not in the content but in where the cuts fall. Where one tradition reads a single commandment — the one rejecting other gods and images — another reads two; where one gathers all coveting into a single line, another splits it in two. So “the sixth commandment” means murder for Jews, Orthodox and Reformed, and adultery for Catholics and Lutherans. Two caveats: the prohibition of images sits in the biblical text of every tradition — what changes is whether it is counted on its own or inside the first — and Catholics and Lutherans, who otherwise share a division, swap the last two between them, since the Catholic catechism follows the order of Deuteronomy 5:21, which names the wife first, while Luther followed Exodus 20:17, which begins with the house. The third division is also the one used by Anglicans and by most evangelical churches.