Tag Archives: Ten Commandments

No Adultery? No Killing?

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A contemporary icon of Moses receiving the 10 Commandments on Mt. Sinai. Moses looks surprisingly spry and young, unlike the bushy-bearded, white-haired Charlton Heston in the movie depiction of this event! Moses is typically depicted as a young or middle-aged man with a very trim beard in icons, rather than as an unkempt senior citizen. This makes it easier to distinguish him from the prophets, who are usually depicted as older man with longer beards, like Elijah in the Transfiguration icon.

Don’t kill (or “murder”). Don’t commit adultery. Don’t steal.


These commandments in Exodus 20 are terse. Direct. To the point.
οὐ φονεύσεις
οὐ μοιχεύσεις
οὐ κλέψεις

Aren’t these obvious? We think we know what these mean. We all know about murder from watching police shows like “Law and Order.” Adultery means an unsanctioned sexual relationship with a married person. Don’t take what belongs to someone else. But these forbidden actions are not really as straightforward as we like to think.

For instance, “adultery” ( μοιχεύσεις ) is a very complicated concept. Nowadays, we think this means an affair between married people. But in classic biblical and canon law, when a married woman has an affair with someone, it is called “adultery.” When an unmarried woman has an affair, it is called “fornication.” The marital status of the man is never considered by biblical or canon law; when a man has an affair, he is guilty of fornication–whether he is married or not. That doesn’t sound fair to our modern ears but that’s the way biblical and canon law developed.

A second marriage can also be considered “adultery”–even if the first spouse is dead. It depends on whether the marriage is considered a contract (which expires when one partner dies) or a covenant (which never expires, even if one partner dies). Canon law in the Greek and Russian churches consider marriage a covenant; western Christians have generally considered marriage a contract. But not always.

If a first marriage ends in divorce, the second marriage can also be considered adultery unless one of the former partners asks a bishop to declare the first marriage “dead”–the relationship has died–or “null.” If the first marriage is declared null, that means the proper conditions for making the contract or the covenant were never fulfilled so there was no marriage in the first place and the first marriage is deemed to have been simply “legal fornication.”

Understanding who has–or has not–committed adultery can be a long, torturous process that can cause a lot of heartache. Israel’s worship of pagan gods is always called adultery by the prophets because Israel was said to be married to God. The worship of foreign gods also caused a lot of heartache among the Chosen People and resulted in wars, civil wars, exiles, and famines when God called the people back to fidelity with him. The Church is also considered the Bride of Christ and when we turn our backs on him and worship anything else–including our own opinions!–we are also committing a kind of adultery. But how many of us admit that?

What about murder or killing? Aren’t those straightforward legal concepts? Let’s look at those next week!

Commandments #1-3

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A contemporary icon showing the prophet and God-seer Moses at the Burning Bush and receiving the Ten Commandments, both of which happened at Mt. Sinai.


Moses goes up into the smoke and fire and receives the Ten Commandments from God on Mt. Sinai. He has set a human barricade around the base of the mountain to insure that no “tourists” or sightseeing thrill seekers climb up the rocky heights behind him, hoping to see and hear what is intended only for Moses to see and hear. Even his brother Aaron, who goes partway up the mountain with his brother Moses, turns around and goes back to the bottom before Moses reaches his destination.

The first three or four commandments are commonly considered to describe our duty towards God; the following commandments are commonly thought to reveal our duty to our neighbors. It is these Ten altogether that the Early Church thought were eternal; the other commandments of the Old Testament—according to the Apostolic Constitutions, a 4th century Syrian handbook for how to run a parish church—says that the other Old Testament commandments were all given after the idolatry of the Golden Calf and all have to do with regulating the worship of Israel (how to worship, who can worship, what is worshipped, behavior that can get a person banned from participating in worship).

The most famous and controversial of these first three commandments is the commandment condemning idolatry. Most people think idolatry means worshipping statues but idolatry is really about letting anything be more important than God. Family, ideas, food, sex, drugs (alcohol included) can become idols if any of them are more important to us than God.

People often also think idolatry means worshipping devils and demons. St. Paul doesn’t think idolatry is about worshipping demons; he thinks idolatry is a waste of time because the “god” the statue represents doesn’t exist. According to St. Paul in First Corinthians, idolatry is the worship of a thing that isn’t real whereas worship of the true God is worshipping what really exists. That’s why he thinks it’s safe for a Christian to eat meat that was sacrificed to an idol; the meat wasn’t sacrificed to a devil but it was offered to something that doesn’t exist so it wasn’t really offered to anyone or anything.

That doesn’t mean that devils and demons don’t exist. The NYTimes had a fascinating article this weekend about the differences in religious power wielded by a Christianity that takes demonic power seriously vs. a Christianity that does not take demonic power seriously.