The Israelite Household and the Decalogue: The Social Background and Significance of Some Commandments

Abstract

The moral and legal requirements of the last six commandments are not unique to Israel, yet they were emphatically linked to the Sinai covenant tradition. The reason advanced for this in the article is that the covenant relationship, far from being a merely conceptual entity, was deeply rooted in and expressed through the socio-economic nature of Israel's life, focused primarily on the family and its land. The fifth, seventh, eighth, and tenth commandments should be seen in their Israelite social context as designed to protect, externally and internally, these household-plus-land units, whose importance within the covenant was the reason for the severity of the penalties in the first two cases.