Thou shalt not ... underestimate impact of the Ten Commandments

There are hundreds of shalts and shalt-nots in the Hebrew Scriptures, a list that includes when to throw out leftovers and how to atone for sins. There are rules for housekeeping and peacekeeping, diet and dogma, incest and brotherly love. But it is the Ten Commandments that have become the Western world's most famous list of do's and don'ts.

More than 3,000 years after Moses walked down from Mount Sinai with a pair of stone tablets, the Ten Commandments continue to be extolled, displayed, removed, agonized over, sued over and, of course, broken.

And they continue to make headlines. For some people, they've become the symbol of everything that could be right about America but isn't — and their removal from schools, parks and courthouses a symbol of America's decline into depravity and godlessness. For others, displaying the Ten Commandments on government property is trumped by the First Amendment of another famous list, with its prohibition against laws "respecting an establishment of religion." So it's a battle that continues to be fought in Utah and elsewhere, despite two recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions attempting to make things clearer.

Our anguish about the Ten Commandments is not just about church and state but about the origins of morality itself.

Beginning next Saturday, the Deseret Morning News will explore the Ten Commandments, examining each one in the context of both a dusty desert of wandering nomads circa 1400 BCE, and a continent of multicultural, multitasking Americans in 2007.

The Ten Commandments were not the first set of laws instructing people how to behave with each other, nor the first rules about worship. Other, pagan cultures in the Middle East had similar sets of moral imperatives about how to live in community with other people (don't kill or steal from each other, honor your parents), as well as rules about how to please their gods.

But the Ten Commandments were revolutionary in two respects: The laws they prescribed applied to everyone, even the mighty; and the worshipping was to be done not to a collection of gods but to one God with a capital "G." And, unlike the other 600 commandments in the Hebrew Scriptures, the Ten Commandments were literally spoken by God to the entire people of Israel at one time, as they stood at the foot of Mount Sinai, explains Rabbi Joshua Aaronson of Temple Har Shalom in Park City.