There were supposed to be 15 commandments, but Moses accidentally dropped and broke a tablet. What are some of the five missing commandments?

Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 141 points – 10 months ago

And I know we're mostly atheists here, but please keep the theological discussion to a minimum and appreciate the lighthearted hypothetical scenario for what it is.

The 10 commandments divide into two sections. Rules for the relation between people and God and rules for the relation between people and other people. 5 more would probably setup a third section. Like rules for the relation between people and nature or rules for one’s relation to oneself.

Forgive your brother who has wronged you as you would want him to forgive your own transgressions.
Honor creation and take only what you need from the mountains, streams, woodlands, and valleys.
Respect the creatures of the earth as your brothers in creation.
Avoid excesses and live humbly
Love yourself for you were created in My image

Love yourself for you were created in My image

But not like that.
No, not like that either...
Listen you little shit, if I catch you doing that again I'll come down from this cloud and seduce your wife as a swan.

Ignore copyright laws that haven't been invented yet and don't tell Zeus...

This is really good actually

World would be a better place if these made it in...

I might as well go first:

Thou shalt seed what you download (You'll understand in a few thousand years)

Sharing is caring !

That’s why I seed my neighbour’s wife.

Thou shalt not push to prod on Fridays

And the Lord said unto Moses: If thou pushest thy change, and the site goeth down, thou shalt roll back thy push. Thou shalt roll back first, even if thou knowest not the root cause. Thus may your days be long and prosperous on the earth.

And if thine rollback causes further blackout, then thou shalt purge the caches. If further still a blackout persists to be, then yay thou shalt send an update to your customers asking thou all to tight holdeth.

Thou shalt roll back first, even if thou knowest not the root cause

and make everything so worse your angels won't dare ack the alert. Forget not about stateful systems!

git blame, the new Amen.

Ive had a few commits with the comment "forgive me for the sins I am about to commit"

I knew it was bad code, but it worked

The best commit message I ever saw was --blueText is now pink - yeah I know but they insisted, BEM my arse

Be excellent to each other
Party on, dudes

I would like to emphasize the gender neutral nature of "dudes" in this context.

Puff puff pass

Thou shalt always pass to the right. Don't fuck up the rotation.

🎶*On the left hand siiide."🎶

And, thus a schism was born.

"No slavery", "no genocide", "no slavery", "no genocide", and "seriously, no slavery or genocide".

Considering that early Jewish writings directly contain laws about the treatment of slaves, "no slavery" was probably not on the list.

As for Genocide, Yahweh commanded Saul through Samuel:

And Samuel said to Saul, "The Lord sent me to anoint you to be king over His people, over Israel; and now hearken to the voice of the words of the Lord.
...
Now, go, and you shall smite Amalek, and you shall utterly destroy all that is his, and you shall not have pity on him: and you shall slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.

And then Yahweh threw a hissy fit when Saul showed some mercy. Turns out that Yahweh was is a dick, according to his own believers' writings.

So you’re saying the Bible specifically recommends slaying ass?

“Honey, the Bible says I gotta go slay ass! I know I promised those days were behind me,, but God wants me to do it! Completely off topic, how’s your sister? She still single?”

To be fair, Samuel had tried to convince the people of Israel not to do the king thing in the first place. See 1 Samuel 8:10-22.

And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you:

He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots. [...] And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers.

And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants. And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants. And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants.

And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not hear you in that day.

Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and they said, Nay; but we will have a king over us; that we also may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles.

Only 10% taxes?
Doesn't sound like such a bad deal maybe.

Anyway, at least some of the USA founding fathers were just as down on the idea of political parties as Samuel was on kings here. I think they were right.

Slavery most definitely is allowed by the Jewish and Christian God. Genocide is much trickier, as there is still debate about certain wording and whether or not genocide actually happened at the time. Overall, the consensus is that genocide is bad at current times either because all genocide is bad or because God does not condone current genocides.

Source: I'm Christian

Tbh, genocide feels like more of a feature than a bug at this point.

"PM Netanyahu invokes ‘Amalek’ theory to justify Gaza killings."

He actually quoted this a few weeks back....

I spent an evening doing keyword searches in all the major holy texts one night just to gauge how violent they are and was definitely just thoroughly disgusted with all of them. I missed this excerpt, though. I guess I didn't think about searching the word "smite". Anyway... ugh.

Honestly, screw all religion. It's a nice thought to have a belief system of origin but humans are so stupidly violent and manipulative by nature that there's no way to create something useful and wholesome. They all condone the whole "kill those you disagree with" bullshit, amongst other awful isms. So far, Sikhism is the least violent and sexist I can find of any religion.

Yawheh is a plagiarized bitch.

"seriously, no slavery or genocide"

"So, what God is really saying is that it's ok if we do BOTH..."

get real that would never happen

god is known for doing genocide

"Thou shalt not accidentally drop and break one of these three tablets"

Choose your own adventure vibes...

Are they still in print? I'd hate if it if they stopped for some reason. I only read a few (and can't remember squat!) but the nostalgia is heavy

I'm not sure, but funnily enough I was thinking about them just the other day as I think my daughter would love them. The Steve Jackson/Ian Livingston ones were brilliant back in the day.

Thou shalt not fuck kids. They definitely meant for that to be in there, right? Guys...?

what was that? gay people are sinners? got it.

/s ::: spoiler disclaimer

this is about the bible verse about laying with a boy (or something). not homophobic

:::

The five missing ones are:

Acknowledge the central point.
Thou shalt not soapbox.
Thou shalt not decontextualise what others say.
Thou shalt not claim intentions to defend thine or someone else's actions.
Thou shalt not convey "I disagree" through feigned lack of understanding.

Bonus: the original version of the 8th was

Thou shalt not claim with certainty things that you do not know for certain.

The current 8th (Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour) is a forgery. Some assumer got called out over and over because of the older 8th, since he really liked to make shit up, so he restricted it into near uselessness. Source: I'm Lucifer, I know it. :^)

Your version of the 8th would literally undo all religion (and a bit of science).

Your version of the 8th would literally undo all religion

It would undo the myths, I think. Morality and religious practices might survive depending on how much they rely on said myths.

and a bit of science

It would perhaps demote a lot of theories back to hypotheses, but that's actually good IMO. A good scientist should embrace the doubt and treat it as a respectable enemy, not hide from it like a catfish in the mud.

Thou shalt not be cruel

Thou shalt not oppress your fellow man

Thou shalt not put yourself before your brethren

Thou shalt not think only of yourself

Thou shalt not live in a disordered home, nor shall you allow the cities you live in to become disorderly due to your own lack of action

Returneth thy cart.

Don't be evil.
Just do it.
Make, your dreams, come true.
[This one can't be translated usefully into any modern language.]
For everything else, there's Mastercard.

For everything else, there's Mastercard.

Finally someone taking the question seriously

Do not treat people or animals as things
Consent first from others, especially your family
The Earth and it's creatures should be shepherded and guarded, not exploited
No gods, no kings, no rulers - instead have empathy, sharing, and collaboration
It's round you nimrods, because that's how gravity works

This stuff would really have changed things... I suspect Moses intentionally dropped this one?

Would it really? Humanity never follows the other 10 so why follow these ones?

One saying slavery shouldn’t happen would be nice.

I think the 10 commandments are in Exodus which is also one of the books where God says exactly how you should own slaves. So that would be a weird one.

God really is a piece of shit.

There literally was another one if Idan Dershowitz's theory that the Shapira Scroll was legit is true.

In that document (the translation is in his book The Valediction of Moses: A Proto-Biblical Book (2021)), there's effectively an 11th commandment of "thou shalt not hate your brother in your heart."

In general, a number of the sayings found across both Deuteronomy and Leviticus would seem like good candidates, such as "love your neighbor as yourself" and "love the foreigner among you as yourself."

A lot of the modern interpretation is that the former refers to your literal personal home neighbors, but it makes more sense for an emergent pastoral community to be in reference to political neighbors like the Canaanites and Philistines.

Which we are now realizing thanks to archeology that the early Israelites cohabitated and were at peace with, in spite of the anachronistic stories in the Bible about it, such as the book of Joshua which is completely at odds with any archeological picture of history. Early Israelite theomorphic names in graveyards were even around 30% 'Baal' based. So the whole "hate and kill your neighbors that are different from you" seems like it was a later addition. To be fair, as likely was the monotheism.

In general, the story of Moses breaking the first set of tablets in response to the golden calf worship is sus as fuck. It mirrors the alleged reforms of Josiah centuries later where he destroyed the golden calves at Bethel and Dan while getting rid of the old laws and instituting new ones. So much more likely that it was a later addition to an earlier folk narrative being shaped to support contemporary major religious reforms.

My personal pick for a good candidate comes from a line in an 8th century BCE bilingual tablet from the group that the lead excavator of Tel Dan now thinks was the lost tribe of Dan up in Adana Turkey, the Denyen sea peoples. Their king, in discussing how he improved his kingdom over the past, used as a measuring stick the fact that women could now walk home alone feeling safe.

So "Thou shalt create and foster a society where women can walk home alone at night feeling safe" seems like it would do a lot of heavy lifting to improve the current set of commandments significantly.

Do you have a source for this tablet? Sounds interesting.

And during my reign, I expanded the borders of Adanawa both westward and eastward, So that women nowadays wander spindling on the isolated trails, where men in the past feared to go

Karatepe bilingual

Hey thanks, that was choice!

Thou who smelt it, thine own self dealt it.

Thou shall not attempt to make a business out of this using the medium of broadcast images and shouting.

Thou shalt not stalk thine ex's media feed and scribe words inspired by Bacchus

Don't take the Bible too literally

They're on the prop from Mel Brooks' History of the World Part I

3 more...

Thou shall not leave the toilet lid open after used.

Thou shalt rinse the xylospongium before thoust giveth it to the next user

IIRC--and its been a long time since I've bothered reading the bible--what happened is that Moses got one set of commandments from god, came down from the mountain, sand saw the Israelites worshiping a gold cow. He got mad, broke the tablets the laws were on, and then disposed of the Israelites that were engaging in idolatry. Then he went back up the mountain and got the rules we call the ten commandments.

From memory: correct.

From vaguer memory the second set were different.

So we already have commandments 11-20.

That was my understanding too; god gave one set of commandments to Moses at first, because I guess s/he couldn't see what the Israelites were doing while he was talking to Moses? Then he gets pissed when Moses tells him, and gives the dumbed-down version. Supposedly that's where you get Jesus saying that he fulfills the law, e.g., the laws of strict observances in Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy were because the Jews weren't ready for a 'higher' law that used more personal judgement.

tit for tat plus 10% extra forgiveness is the most successful strategy in life and politics of every kind

god is found in higher furnace temperatures filled with colorful rocks

always separate how you feel from what you can prove with evidence that is accepted as truth by 100 persons from a dozen foreign lands

without exception, only con artists use unclear and indirect language that is subject to interpretation

a metal screw can be used in a device to make a more accurate metal screw, repeat this process many times

Final line:

Now remember, these are just guidelines, you don't have to take them too seriously, have some fun with them, that's why I made you.

Thou shalt not be a poo poo head

Thou shalt not hold unbelievers to the moral standards thou agreedest to and that only applyeth to thee

Thou shalt not giveth a shitteth about shitteth that is not thine own

Thou shall not leave a shitstreak in the bowl, if you do so use the brush before leaving.

Nah, I leave it to assert dominance

"Thou shalt boil water before drinking it" would probably have saved a staggering number of lives. That and a handwashing commandment together would've been a home run for pre-industrial survival rates. "Thou shalt not trust a fearmonger" would also be a good, if perhaps self-defeating commandment.

Pick any three of the above.

Thou shalt not steal if there is a direct victim.
Thou shalt not worship Pop Idols or follow Lostprophets.
Thou shalt not take the names of Johnny Cash, Joe Strummer, Johnny Hartman, Desmond Dekker, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix or Syd Barrett in vain.
Thou shalt not think any male over the age of 30 that plays with a child that is not their own is a paedophile. Some people are just nice.
Thou shalt not read NME.
Thou shalt not stop liking a band just because they've become popular.
Thou shalt not question Stephen Fry.
Thou shalt not judge a book by its cover.
Thou shalt not judge Lethal Weapon by Danny Glover.
Thou shalt not buy Coca-Cola products.
Thou shalt not buy Nestlé products.
Thou shalt not go into the woods with your boyfriend's best friend, take drugs and cheat on him.
Thou shalt not fall in love so easily.
Thou shalt not use poetry, art or music to get into girls' pants. Use it to get into their heads.
Thou shalt not watch Hollyoaks.
Thou shalt not attend an open mic and leave as soon as you've done your shitty little poem or song you self-righteous prick.
Thou shalt not return to the same club or bar week in, week out just 'cause you once saw a girl there that you fancied that you're never gonna fucking talk to.

There's a second verse, but I think I'll leave it at that.

4 more...

You shall not establish theocracies or institutionalize beliefs.

[my actual name here] is your lord, savior, and 4th form of god, and shall be treated as such.
Sinning is the 12th form of liberalism
Join an org (mine, preferrably)
There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
Thou shalt seed more than thou downloads, unless thou ist [my actual name here].

The other tablet only had one commandment, chiseled extra large for emphasis:

Above all else, do no harm.

Thou shalt not complain of thy neighbor whilst leaving the identity of thy neighbor ambiguous.

Thou shalt not partake of decaf

Thou shalt not have no idea

Thou shalt always go for greatness

Thou shalt not commit adulthood

Thou shalt not suppress flatulence

ALL

Thou shalt not suppress flatulence

Even in public transportation? 🤔

1 more...

Thou Shalt Not Tolerate Prejudice ( "Satan", oft translated by scholars as "Accuser", which is how everyone can know that it means prejudice: prejudice's WHOLE action is accusing! ) instead of considered-reason.

Thou Shalt Not Tolerate Ideology-Addiction, but will displace it with considered-reason, breaking it from authority.

Thou Shalt Not Forget Silliness, who is the proper antidote to self-importance.

Thou Shalt Not Ever Mistake Propaganda for Journalism, nor tolerate propaganda's establishment.

Thou Shalt Not Tolerate Lobbying/Bribery or any other corruption of governing.

_ /\ _

Thou really believed me, idiot? Do whatever the fuck you want. I don't care

The ones that make the most sense to me as stuff Moses might say.

Thou shalt trust honest people, for why would one be honest if nothing comes from it
Thou shalt not assume things, to assume is often more destructive than lying
Thou shalt not cheat in games and anything with a justified set list of rules
Thou shalt not intentionally cause mental illness, for it is equal to murder
Thou shalt not gatekeep or deny another person's rightful union

Wow, those really sound like they could have been from the Bible (also bonuses point to you for coming up with a serious suggestion). Here, you win the Nobel prize in Prophetry*! Your basically the new Moses, and we shall follow you!

Nobel medal