What the Ten Commandments Reveal About the Men Who Wrote Them
Introduction
There is a moment in Yuval Noah Harari’s recent conversation with Ezra Klein — in the episode Harari titled, with characteristic precision, The Ruinous Story America and Israel Are Telling — where the historian makes an observation so quietly devastating that it passes almost without pause. He notes that among the Ten Commandments, the injunction against coveting your neighbor’s possessions lists, in its own words, your neighbor’s slaves. You shall not covet his house, his wife, his ox, his donkey — and his male or female servant. The chain of property. Not a word of condemnation for the institution of slavery itself. Only the reminder that the slaves belong to someone else.
For anyone who has been told, across a lifetime of Sunday schools and High Holy Days and interfaith dialogue, that these commandments represent the moral foundation of Western civilization — the direct dictation of an omniscient, all-loving God — this passage should stop the breath. But it rarely does, because we have become very skilled at not seeing what is plainly written. We have learned to read scripture the way a loyal subject reads a royal decree: looking for the grace, smoothing over the cruelty, trusting that the author, being divine, must have had reasons we are too small to understand.
This essay is an attempt to stop smoothing. Not in the spirit of contempt — the Vedantic tradition I inhabit has too much tenderness for the stumbling reach of the human soul toward the sacred to permit contempt — but in the spirit of clear seeing. Viveka. The discrimination that refuses to call darkness light, even when darkness wears vestments and carries a stone tablet down a mountain.
Harari gives us the historical tools. The contemplative traditions give us the spaciousness in which to hold what those tools reveal without either flinching or congratulating ourselves for our superior clarity. That synthesis is what I want to attempt here.
I. The Text Itself What does the Tenth Commandment actually say?
The passage in Exodus 20:17 reads, in the New International Version: You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
Harari’s observation lands here with surgical force. The commandment is not, at its core, a prohibition on desire. It is a property ordinance. It defines, with the precision of a legal document, what counts as your neighbor’s holdings: his house, his wife, his servants, his livestock. The commandment is not troubled by the fact that human beings appear in this list alongside oxen and donkeys. It is troubled only by the prospect that you might try to take them.
Biblical scholars have long noted what Sunday School tends not to teach: the coveting language in the ancient Near Eastern context was not primarily about interior feeling but about the acquisition of another’s property through social pressure, legal maneuvering, or force. The commandment is closer to a contract clause than a meditation on envy. Which makes the inclusion of slaves not incidental but structural. Slavery is not a social ill the Decalogue is working to correct. Slavery is a feature of the household economy that the Decalogue is working to protect.
This is not an anomaly. Exodus 21, just two chapters past the giving of the commandments, provides detailed regulations for the keeping of slaves — how long a Hebrew slave may be held, under what conditions he may go free, what happens if a master beats a slave to death (permissible, so long as the slave lingers a day or two before dying, because the slave is the master’s property and the loss is the master’s loss). The Levitical code is similarly explicit: you may hold foreigners as slaves permanently and pass them to your children as inheritance. The God of Leviticus calls this acceptable.
We are not, in other words, dealing with a historical blind spot that an otherwise just theology failed to notice. We are dealing with a theology that actively legislated, in God’s name and God’s voice, the ownership of human beings. The “all-loving God” who parted the Red Sea to liberate the Israelites from Egyptian bondage thought nothing of encoding their right to enslave others once they reached the other shore.
II. Harari’s Historical Frame What does the construction of this God tell us about the people who constructed Him?
Harari’s great contribution to the reading of religious history — threaded through Sapiens and made newly urgent in his conversation with Klein — is the insistence that the stories human collectives tell about the sacred are never simply about the sacred. They are instruments of social cohesion, territorial legitimation, and tribal identity formation. This is not cynicism. It is anthropology.
The God of the Hebrew Bible emerges from a specific historical pressure cooker. The Israelites were a small, militarily modest, repeatedly subjugated people — conquered by Assyrians, deported by Babylonians, absorbed into the Persian empire, Hellenized under the Seleucids, and finally crushed by Rome in 70 CE when the legions of Titus destroyed the Second Temple and dispersed the Jewish population in the most consequential act of ethnic displacement the ancient world had yet seen. This is the history inside which the Hebrew scriptures were composed, edited, redacted, and theologized.
The Documentary Hypothesis — the scholarly consensus that the Pentateuch is a composite text woven from at least four distinct source traditions (the Yahwist, the Elohist, the Deuteronomist, and the Priestly code) across several centuries — reveals a text that did not fall from heaven but was assembled by human hands in response to human crises. The Priestly code, which contains much of the slave legislation, took its final form during or after the Babylonian exile, when a displaced people urgently needed to reconstruct their identity around law and text rather than land and temple. The God who permitted slavery was, in large measure, the theological creation of scribes writing in Babylon, trying to hold a shattered community together with the only mortar available to them: a portable, codified divine authority.
This is what Harari means when he argues, with a directness that his own Jewish heritage gives him the standing to offer, that the Jewish textual tradition was built for survival in minority conditions. The Talmudic elaborations of the Mosaic law represent a remarkable intellectual achievement — two thousand years of interpreting, debating, questioning, and deepening the foundational texts. The rabbis who followed the destruction of the Temple transformed a territorial religion into a portable, text-centered way of being in the world. That is genuinely extraordinary. But none of it resolves the moral problem embedded in the foundation.
Harari’s sharpest provocation in the Klein conversation concerns the present rather than the past. He argues that the post-October 7 Israeli response represents a catastrophic abandonment of what two thousand years of diaspora wisdom had actually produced. The lesson the diaspora taught, he suggests, is that it is possible to survive, even flourish, as a people without the instruments of domination — without legions, without the power to destroy cities. The lesson Netanyahu and those around him now preach is the opposite: that the only wisdom the Jewish experience has to offer is the Roman lesson, the lesson of overwhelming force. As Harari put it with characteristic brevity: If after two thousand years the Jews simply become the Romans, what was the point?
The question lands differently when you understand that the ancient Zealots — the Jewish nationalists who provoked Rome into the war that ended the Second Temple — were, in Harari’s reading, the spiritual ancestors of today’s settler movement: messianists so convinced of God’s specific territorial promises that they were willing to incinerate the actual Jewish community in service of an eschatological vision. They burned Rome’s grain stores in Jerusalem to prevent any possibility of negotiated settlement. They got their apocalypse. The Temple fell. The diaspora began. And the diaspora, paradoxically, produced the richest intellectual and ethical tradition in Jewish history.
The God who promised the land and commanded the slaughter of its prior inhabitants — the Canaanites, the Amalekites, the various peoples whose extermination the Book of Joshua narrates with the same serene legalism as the slave codes — was the God of that territorial maximalism. He was a tribal war deity who happened, in certain sublime passages, to speak the language of universal love. The contradiction was never resolved. It was managed.
III. The Moral Architecture of a Tribal God How does an all-loving God make peace with the slave ledger?
Thomas Jefferson, in a letter near the end of his life, described his practice of cutting the New Testament apart with scissors, removing all the miraculous and supernatural claims and keeping the ethical teachings. He called his residue the “diamond from the dunghill.” The metaphor is revealing. It assumes that the divine content can be separated cleanly from the human content — that there is a pure core of wisdom inside the text that the historical conditions only accidentally obscured.
The problem is that the slave codes are not accidental obscurations. They are structural. The God of Exodus and Leviticus does not merely tolerate slavery as a contemporary practice he lacks the political will to challenge. He regulates it. He codifies it. He provides the theological sanction by which slave-holding was defended for most of Christian and Jewish history — including by the architects of American slavery, who were not misreading their scripture. They were reading it quite carefully.
The theological move that Western monotheism has historically made to manage this contradiction is called progressive revelation: the idea that God’s disclosure of himself is gradual, that the Hebrew Bible represents an early, rough-hewn moral sensibility that the New Testament refines, and that both are in turn refined by ongoing theological development. This is a more sophisticated position than simple inerrancy. But it raises a question that progressive revelation cannot fully answer: Why would an omniscient, all-loving God reveal himself to his chosen people in terms that authorized the permanent hereditary enslavement of foreigners? What stage of moral development is that?
The more honest answer — the one that emerges from the historical-critical tradition that Harari represents — is that the God of the early Hebrew Bible is not an all-loving deity who temporarily accommodated his eternal standards to a primitive cultural moment. He is a deity constructed by and for a specific tribal community, encoding that community’s actual social arrangements as divine will. The slave-holder’s God is not a distortion of the original. He is the original. The all-loving God came later, and came only partially, and was always in tension with the tribal war deity whose voice runs through the same text.
The prophets felt this tension acutely. Amos, Isaiah, Micah — the great eighth-century prophets who insisted that God was more interested in justice than in burnt offerings — were pushing against the cultic, legalistic, property-protecting God of the Priestly code. They were, in a sense, doing theology from below, from the perspective of the poor, the dispossessed, the widow and the orphan whom the legal codes nominally protected and structurally failed. They represent the genuine moral conscience of the Hebrew tradition. But they did not expunge the slave codes. No one did. The canon preserved both the prophetic fire and the property ordinances, and the tradition has been negotiating between them ever since.
IV. What the Vedantic Eye Sees How does nondual awareness hold this without contempt and without collusion?
The Vedantic tradition has its own complicated relationship with social hierarchy. The caste system — which the Bhagavad Gita arguably naturalizes, whatever its more transcendent passages say about the equality of all souls in Brahman — is the Indian counterpart to the slave codes: a social arrangement encoded as cosmic order, the contingent made to appear eternal, the man-made given the authority of the divine. I hold no tradition exempt from this critique, including my own.
What the nondual perspective offers is not superiority. It is a particular kind of clear seeing — what the tradition calls viveka — that can recognize the shape of avidya, of spiritual ignorance, without being destroyed by the recognition. Avidya is not simply personal delusion. It operates collectively, historically, through the very texts and institutions that a people uses to orient itself in the world. A tribe under existential threat reaching for divine sanction of its social arrangements is not doing something uniquely wicked. It is doing something deeply, recognizably human. The tragedy is not that it happened. The tragedy is the cost — measured in generations of enslaved human beings — that was paid for it, and the ongoing cost paid when these same texts are treated as the inerrant word of an all-loving God.
Harari’s question — if after two thousand years the Jews simply become the Romans, what was the point? — is not only a question about contemporary Israeli politics. It is a question about the nature of collective spiritual learning. Two thousand years of diaspora produced something genuinely rare: a civilization that learned, through catastrophic loss, to hold its identity through text and interpretation and ethical argument rather than through territory and force. That achievement is real, and it produced some of the most extraordinary moral thinking in human history. That it was built, at its foundation, on texts that included slave codes and tribal genocide does not negate the achievement. But it means the achievement was always partial, always requiring the deeper discriminative faculty to separate the living water from the contaminated vessel that carried it.
The Sufi masters speak of the zahir and the batin — the outer and the inner, the exoteric and the esoteric face of any sacred tradition. The slave codes are zahir. The prophetic insistence that the widows and orphans of your society are the measure of your proximity to God — that is closer to batin. The Commandments as property law are zahir. The Shema — Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One — whispered toward an absolute nondual ground that dissolves all tribal boundary, that is batin. The tragedy of religious history, in every tradition, is that the zahir consolidates institutional power while the batin remains the province of mystics and prophets who are routinely persecuted by the institutional forms their own tradition built.
An all-loving God does not own slaves. Full stop. The God who authorized the slave codes of Exodus and Leviticus was a tribal deity, shaped by human hands and human fears, encoding human social arrangements as divine ordinance. That does not mean the Hebrew tradition contains nothing sacred. It means the sacred in that tradition — as in every tradition — had to be wrested, generation by generation, from the very texts that also contained its betrayal. The prophets did this wresting. The rabbis of the Talmud did it, often brilliantly. The liberationist theologians of the twentieth century did it. And Harari, in his secular, historian’s way, is doing it now — by insisting that the most precious thing the Jewish experience produced was not a territorial mandate but a two-thousand-year demonstration that you can hold your humanity, your intellectual vitality, and your ethical commitment even when the Romans have your city and your temple and your land.
That is worth more than all the stone tablets. And it was learned — as almost everything worth learning is learned — through suffering that a more honest reading of those same tablets might have helped prevent.
Addendum: On Coveting and the Shape of Property
The Tenth Commandment is worth one final look, because its structure is a kind of compressed anthropology. The list runs: house, wife, manservant, maidservant, ox, donkey, anything that belongs to your neighbor. The wife appears between the house and the servants. She is flanked by property on both sides. The commandment does not intend to demean her. It intends to protect the household’s integrity as an economic unit. But in doing so it reveals, with accidental precision, the exact social ontology of the ancient Near Eastern world: women and slaves occupied adjacent rungs on the ladder of possession, both essential to the functioning of the patriarchal household, both defined primarily by their relationship to the male head of house.
To call this the word of an all-loving God, dictated on a mountain to a people uniquely chosen for moral instruction, requires a degree of interpretive acrobatics that no honest reading of the text can sustain. What it actually represents is something less mythic and more interesting: a snapshot of a specific Bronze Age tribal community’s moral self-understanding, preserved in writing, canonized under political pressure, and then handed down across millennia as eternal revelation. The wonder is not that the text contains these arrangements. The wonder is that it also contains Amos, and the Shema, and the injunction to love the stranger — because you were once strangers in Egypt.
The tradition held both. It still holds both. The question, as it has always been, is which voice we are willing to hear.
Epilogue
The slave stands in the list between the ox and the donkey. God, apparently, had no objection. Or rather: the men who wrote God had no objection, because the men who wrote God were men who owned slaves, and the first function of a deity is to make the world as it is feel like the world as it must be.
The prophets knew better. The mystics always know better. But the stone tablets outlast both.
What outlasts the tablets is harder to name, and cannot be legislated, and does not appear in any canon — only in the sudden, inexplicable movement toward the suffering stranger that no commandment required.
Sources & References
Primary Texts
- Exodus 20–21 (New International Version) — the Ten Commandments and the slave codes
- Leviticus 25:44–46 — the permanent enslavement of foreigners
- Deuteronomy 5 — the Deuteronomic version of the Decalogue
Harari and the Klein Conversation
- Yuval Noah Harari, Yuval Noah Harari on the Ruinous Story America and Israel Are Telling, The Ezra Klein Show (New York Times), May 2026… YouTube Video: https://youtu.be/9NCxS_
- Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Harper, 2015)
- Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI (Penguin Random House, 2024)
Biblical Scholarship and Historical Criticism
- Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (Harper & Row, 1987) — the Documentary Hypothesis in accessible form
- John Collins, Introduction to the Hebrew Bible (Fortress Press, 2004) — standard academic survey
- Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Fortress Press, 1978) — the prophets as counter-voice to royal/cultic theology
- Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology (Harper & Row, 1962) — magisterial treatment of Yahwist tradition
Jewish History and the Diaspora
- Salo Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews — the monumental scholarly treatment
- Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews — the classic nineteenth-century account; useful for the evolution of Jewish self-understanding
- Yaron Z. Eliav, A Jew in the Roman Bathhouse: Cultural Interaction in the Ancient Mediterranean (Princeton, 2023) — on Jewish-Roman cultural negotiation
Slavery in the Ancient Near East
- Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Harvard, 1982) — the definitive comparative study; essential for understanding ancient slavery
- David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Cornell, 1966) — traces biblical sanction of slavery into Western history
Contemplative and Philosophical Frameworks
- Swami Vivekananda, Jnana Yoga — viveka as discriminative intelligence
- Henry Corbin, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi (Princeton, 1969) — zahir and batin
- Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (Yale, 1952) — God beyond the God of theism; relevant to the critique of tribal deity projection
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