LOS ANGELES, Calif. — A 17-foot-tall modernist statue stands in the atrium of Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles. Shards of broken metal lie at the figure’s feet, and he raises a rectangular slab over his head, about to dash it against the ground. This is a statue of Moses.

“It’s trying to capture the moment when he goes down and sees the Golden Calf and gets so angry that he smashes the first set of the tablets,” says professor of Bible Kristine Henriksen Garroway.

The tablets represent the 10 Commandments. For some, what the Commandments are seems straightforward. But those who study and teach the text say context and nuance are everything.

Garroway explains that for Jews, the 10 Commandments — listed in both the biblical books of Exodus and Deuteronomy — are just the beginning.

“That’s a stand-in for the entire Torah,” she says, “for the entire revelation and covenant that was given to the Jewish people.”

It’s a covenant that includes 613 laws about which ancient rabbis loved to argue.

“The one they really hone in on is Shabbat,” she explains, pointing out the two variations of the commandment governing a day of rest. “So the commandment to keep the Shabbat versus the commitment to remember the Shabbat. And different wording appears in Exodus and Deuteronomy.”

Much ink has been spilled about the nuances between the words keep and remember – just one example of multiple understandings of the text.

Evangelicals push for the Bible in the classroom

That millennia-old tradition of arguing over the exact text of the 10 Commandments has now moved to some U.S. public schools.

In Louisiana, a new law mandates that the 10 Commandments be displayed in all public school classrooms, and Oklahoma’s top education official hasordered that the Bible – including the 10 Commandments – be taught starting in the 5th grade.

Evangelical Christians are the main proponents of both these measures, and their understanding of the Commandments is somewhat different from those of Jews and many other Christians.

“It is a very important part of a covenantal relationship,” says Professor Kyong-Jin Lee, who teaches the Bible at Fuller Seminary, an evangelical school in Pasadena, California.

She says the 10 Commandments are crucial because they are “about how you relate with divinity vertically, and how you relate with your fellow human beings horizontally.”

Lee elaborates that the first five Commandments – including prohibitions against graven images and taking the Lord’s name in vain – are about the human relationship to God.

“God has delivered you from slavery in Egypt and he has walked with you all this time,” she explains. “You are going to become a nation. You’re going to have an identity.”

The second five Commandments are about people’s relationships to each other – don’t lie, don’t covet.

“There are these basic guidelines,” Lee says, “and they will teach you how you can make major decisions in terms of the basic ethics.”

Those who pushed for the Louisiana law say the 10 Commandments were and continue to be an important, foundational, and influential document in American history.

Those who oppose the posting of the Commandments on legal grounds object, generally, to the fact that they are taken from specific Jewish and Christian religious scripture and insist on a specific relationship with the divine.

There are also religious objections to posting the Commandments. A federal lawsuit filed against Louisiana for its new law includes plaintiffs who are Jewish, Christian and Unitarian, as well as non-religious. The people of faith bringing that lawsuit say they object to it because they don’t want the state involved in their children’s religious education.

Public displays diminish context and nuance

The 10 Commandments are not meant to be understood out of context, says Marvin Sweeney, professor of Hebrew Bible at Claremont School of Theology in Los Angeles, a Methodist seminary. The language of the Commandments, he explains, comes from ancient treaty formulas that begin by stating the names of the parties and then go on to include the terms of the relationship going forward.

Teaching them as part of a world history or a world religions class is one thing, Sweeney says, but understanding the Commandments cannot be accomplished by simply displaying a specific version of them, even if Louisiana’s law also requires a brief description of how the Commandments influenced thought during the country’s founding.

They are complicated, he says. And they’re not even easy to count.

“When you look at the Ten Commandments, there are more than ten,” he says.

For example, in Judaism “I am the Lord Your God” is the First Commandment. But in the Roman Catholic tradition, that sentence is part of the First Commandment, which includes what Judaism lists as the second commandment: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”

Some traditions, Sweeney says, separate the commandments about coveting into multiple commandments, while others group the prohibition against coveting your neighbor’s wife and maidservant along with their house and their cattle.

He points out that “different traditions number them differently. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine different orders of the Ten Commandments.” And specific translations are laden with interpretation.

“Thou shalt not murder is sometimes rendered as thou shalt not kill,” Sweeney says. “The Hebrew means, specifically, ‘murder.’”

But Louisiana mandates the word “kill.” In fact, the wording of the 10 Commandments specified in the law isn’t a direct quote from either Exodus or Deuteronomy. The heavily edited lines are from the 17th-century King James Bible.

Hebrew Union College professor Kristine Henriksen Garroway opposes both the posting of the 10 Commandments in public schools and this playing fast and loose with the text, because doing so dishonors the very tradition from which the Commandments come.

“As a scholar of the ancient world,” she says, “this drives me nuts.”

Copyright 2024 NPR

South Carolina Gamecock Dante Reno was ranked as a top 25 freshman quarterback in college football by expert.

The South Carolina Gamecocks will have some changes on offense this season with quarterback Spencer Rattler now in the NFL with the New Orleans Saints. He was a key factor in the Gamecock’s success in 2023, but now they will have to search for answers elsewhere. LaNorris Sellers has already been tabbed as the likely starter for the 2024 season, but they have another option in the room who could play a big role in the future.

College football expert Phil Steele released his rankings for the top 25 freshmen quarterbacks leading into the 2024 season and South Carolina’s Dante Reno came in at 25th on the list. Reno was a three-star prospect, a borderline top 500 player and a 33rd-ranked quarterback in the 2024 class, according to 247 sports composite rankings.

The poise and accuracy Dante consistently displays on the field should also be noted, especially when the pocket collapses around him. The 5th best player in Connecticut finished his senior season throwing for 2358 yards (64% completion rate) and 20 TD, averaging 262 passing yards per game. Reno, who played for Cheshire Academy High School, finished his senior year as an Under Armour All-American and made it to the Elite 11 finals.

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The only three Republican women in the South Carolina Senate took on their party and stopped a total abortion ban from passing in their state last year. In return, they lost their jobs. Voters removed Sens. Sandy Senn, Penry Gustafson, and Katrina Shealy from office during primaries with sparse turnout in June, and by doing so completely vacated the Republican wing of the five-member “Sister Senators,” a female contingent that included two Democrats and was united in their opposition to the abortion ban.

For Republicans, the departure of Senn, Gustafson, and Shealy likely means there will be no women in the majority party of the state Senate when the next session starts in 2025. It could also mean that women will not wield power for decades in the fiercely conservative state where they have long struggled to gain entry into the Legislature.

• How scant has political influence historically been for women in South Carolina? Small portraits of every woman who has ever served in the 170-seat General Assembly in the 250 years it has met fit on a poster framed just outside the governor’s office.
• The sudden departure of the Republican women presents a potential power issue because the Senate doles out clout and responsibility to the majority party based on seniority. Half the members in the GOP-dominated state were elected in 2012 or before, so it will likely be the 2040s before any Republican woman elected in the future can rise to leadership or a committee chairmanship.

• Barring a woman winning a race in November in a district dominated by the other party, there will be only two women in the 46-member South Carolina Senate when the 126th session starts in January. No other state in the country would have fewer women in its upper chamber, according to the Center of American Women in Politics.
• That gap should be alarming to anyone in South Carolina, says Sen. Tameika Isaac Devine, who took her seat this year in a special election and became the sixth member of the Sister Senators. Next year Devine and fellow Democrat Sen. Margie Bright Matthews will likely be the only women in the chamber. “No matter how much empathy men can have, they have not had babies. They have not had hysterectomies. They haven’t had some of the heath care issues or the community issues we deal with every day,” Devine says.
• Historically, it’s been worse in the South Carolina Senate for women. There were no women there from 2009 to 2013, when Shealy was first elected. Her goals were protecting veterans, women, families, children, and other vulnerable groups.

(More South Carolina stories.)