How many commandments and how to count them

What the text gives and what it withholds

Exodus 20:2-17 contains roughly fifteen distinct sentences or clauses, depending on how the Hebrew is parsed. The opening 'I am the LORD your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt' (Exod 20:2) is the prologue. Then come the prohibitions on other gods (v. 3), on images (vv. 4-6), on misusing the name (v. 7), the Sabbath command (vv. 8-11), honor of parents (v. 12), and the prohibitions on murder, adultery, theft, false witness, and coveting (vv. 13-17). The verse breaks themselves are medieval and do not settle the count. Where each tradition draws its lines is the question.

Deuteronomy 5:6-21 repeats the list with two small but significant changes. The Sabbath rationale shifts from creation (Exod 20:11) to the exodus (Deut 5:15). And the coveting clause changes order. Exodus 20:17 lists 'thy neighbour's house' first, then wife, manservant, maidservant, ox, ass. Deuteronomy 5:21 reverses the first two: 'thy neighbour's wife' first, then house, field, manservant, maidservant, ox, ass. Deuteronomy also uses two different Hebrew verbs (taḥmod for the wife, titʾavveh for the house) where Exodus uses the same verb twice. The Catholic and Lutheran counting tradition takes those Deuteronomic differences as warrant for splitting coveting into two commandments. The Reformed tradition reads them as stylistic variation inside a single prohibition.

The three positions

The three counts side by side

Where the two seams come from

The first seam is at the head of the list. Is 'I am the LORD your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt' a separate commandment, a preamble, or a clause that belongs with no-other-gods. And is the image prohibition a separate commandment or a gloss on no-other-gods. Different traditions answer differently. The Jewish reading treats the declaration as its own 'word' and joins no-other-gods with no-images. The Augustinian reading treats the declaration as preamble and joins no-other-gods with no-images. The Reformed reading treats the declaration as preamble and splits no-other-gods from no-images. Each combination produces a different #1 and #2.

The second seam is at the foot of the list. Exodus 20:17 lists the objects of coveting in one order (house first, then wife). Deuteronomy 5:21 reverses the first two (wife first, then house) and uses two different verbs. The Jewish and Reformed traditions read the variation as stylistic and treat the prohibition as a single command. The Augustinian tradition reads the variation as structural and splits the prohibition into two commands. The split was particularly useful in medieval Western moral theology, which distinguished disordered sexual desire from disordered material desire as separate categories of sin.

The Deuteronomy 5 doublet and why Augustine relies on it

Deut 5:6-21 retells the Decalogue with Moses as the speaker. The two list differences are the rationale for Sabbath (creation in Exod 20:11, exodus in Deut 5:15) and the order and verb choice in the coveting prohibition. The Augustinian count rests heavily on the Deuteronomic version of the coveting clause. 'You shall not desire (lo taḥmod) your neighbor's wife. You shall not crave (lo titʾavveh) your neighbor's house, field, manservant, maidservant, ox, ass, or anything that is your neighbor's' (Deut 5:21). Two verbs. Two clauses. Two commands, on the Augustinian reading.

The Jewish and Reformed counts answer that Hebrew prose regularly uses synonym pairs (taḥmod and titʾavveh) for stylistic variation, not for substantive distinction. The same root pair appears in poetic parallelism elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible without anyone treating the parallel members as separate commands. The Reformed reading also notes that Exodus 20:17 uses a single verb (ḥamad) across the entire list of objects, so the underlying Sinai command is unified even if the Deuteronomic retelling restates it with synonyms.

Augustine answers that Deuteronomy is the Pentateuch's own commentary on Exodus. The Deuteronomic retelling clarifies what the Sinai command actually was. The Augustinian count therefore takes Deut 5:21 as the controlling text and Exod 20:17 as preserving the form Moses heard at Sinai. The Reformed and Jewish counts give Exodus structural priority and read Deuteronomy as expansion.

The Nash Papyrus and what the earliest physical witnesses show

The Nash Papyrus is a small Hebrew text discovered in Egypt in 1898 by W. L. Nash and now held at Cambridge University Library (MS Or. 233). It is dated paleographically to roughly 150-100 BCE, which made it the earliest Hebrew text of the Decalogue and the Shema until the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. It combines the Ten Commandments and Deut 6:4-5 (the Shema) on a single sheet, which is what a Jewish liturgical or teaching text would do.

The Nash Papyrus presents the Decalogue in a distinctive form. The commandments on adultery and murder are reversed (adultery first, murder second), matching the Septuagint reading of Exod 20:13-14 and the New Testament citations at Luke 18:20 and Romans 13:9. The Sabbath rationale is the Exodus version (creation). The text combines features from Exod 20 and Deut 5, which suggests it is a teaching or recitation text rather than a copy of either canonical version.

What the Nash Papyrus does not do is number its commandments. The dividing lines that produce the three medieval counts are still ahead. The papyrus is evidence that the Decalogue circulated as a list before the numbering question was settled, and that the order of the commands themselves was not as fixed in the Second Temple period as the medieval traditions later made it.

What each count is trading off

The Jewish count makes the prologue load-bearing. The covenantal foundation ('I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt') becomes the first command, and every subsequent prohibition rests on that grounding declaration. The trade-off is that the no-images material gets compressed into the no-other-gods item, which the Reformed tradition reads as obscuring a distinct prohibition.

The Augustinian (Catholic and Lutheran) count produces a 3+7 structure, which Augustine argues mirrors the structure of love (three duties to God, seven duties to neighbor). The trade-off is that the image prohibition does not stand on its own, and that the coveting prohibition is split in a way the Hebrew text does not clearly require. Reformed critics historically argued the combined first commandment opened the door to religious imagery; Catholic and Lutheran responses argued that the prohibition is on idolatry, not on representational art.

The Reformed (and Eastern Orthodox and Anglican) count gives the image prohibition its own slot, which becomes the basis for the Reformed regulative principle of worship and (in different form) for the Eastern Orthodox theological framing of icons via Nicaea II (787). The trade-off is that the Deuteronomic variation in the coveting clause is read as stylistic, which the Augustinian tradition argues underweights the Deuteronomic evidence.

What the Decalogue is for

Whatever the count, the Decalogue functions in each tradition as a summary of covenantal obligation, a teaching text for catechesis, and a frame for reading the rest of the Pentateuch's law. Exodus 20 stands at the head of the Sinai legislation. Deuteronomy 5 stands at the head of Moses's farewell address. The Talmud (b. Berakhot 12a) records that the Decalogue was once recited daily in the Temple before the Shema, and many traditional siddurim keep it as part of optional morning recitation. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, the Heidelberg Catechism, the Westminster Catechisms, and Luther's catechisms all use the Ten Commandments as the structuring backbone of their treatment of moral theology.

The numbering debate is not about content. It is about how the content is divided, which becomes the question of which features of the text are structurally load-bearing. Is the prologue a command. Is the image prohibition a separate item. Does the Deuteronomic restatement reveal two prohibitions inside what Exodus presents as one. Three traditions answer differently. The Hebrew text sits underneath all three, unnumbered, leaving the dividing lines to the readers who came after.