THE FIRST WORD

I am the LORD your god, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me. (Exod. 20:2-3)

The Choosy God

Any consideration of the first or all of the Ten Commandments must begin with this prologue, this reminder that there is one who has taken initiative to bring a people out of bondage. The Exodus writer recalls the event:

The Israelites groaned under their slavery, and cried out. Out of slavery their cry for help rose up to God. God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them. (Exod. 2:236-25)

All too many imagine the God we meet in the Hebrew scriptures to be a God of wrath and judgment. The prologue to the Ten Commandments says otherwise. We take the commandments seriously, not because we are afraid not to or because we will go to hell if we do not, but because they are a proper response to a God who makes us God's own even when we have not deserved it. Surely those rag-tag slaves in Egypt, who had been buried in slavery perhaps more than four hundred years (see Exod. 12:40), had nothing to offer God. The Egyptians had reclaimed the throne for their Pharaoh in 1580 BCE (see Exod. 1:8), and it is probable that the Pharaoh who enslaved them was Rameses II, who ruled Egypt from 1291 to 1225 BCE. (See Elmer W. K. Mould, Essentials of Bible History [New York: Ronald Press, 1951], p. 96.)

God's coming to them was a story of sheer grace. Once no people, now they are made God's people. This initiative and claim by God requires obedience as their response to sheer grace. As Christians, we have heard the same word. Paul put it down for us in his letter to the Romans: "God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us" (Rom. 5:8).

This is the God who has come to a worthless people, who do not even know who he is, and has taken great risks on their behalf. The preachers of Israel remind the people that this God has made them in his image (Gen. 1:26), has given them dominion (Gen. 1:266), and has given them his name (Exod. 3:13-15).

"You shall have no other gods before me" (Exod. 20:3). If the recently freed slaves who stand at the foot of Mount Sinai are the first to hear these words, it seems clear that for them this is no call to monotheism. Here we encounter henotheism, the claim that Israel's God is to be regarded as first above all other gods. It is an admonition that (if there are other gods) this God, I AM, Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, is to be their God. Yahweh has taken possession of these people, and they are to obey the commands.

If, however, these words were penned into the story of Israel when the Torah was fashioned in Babylon, the first word is a call to monotheism. One only has to read the record of the kings of Israel and Judah to learn that they were a mixed lot so far as faithfulness to Yahweh was concerned. Many of them, Ahab the worst, led the people into the worship of foreign gods. The writer of II Kings summarizes the situation at the time of the Assyrian exile of the northern tribes and says of the people: "They worshiped the LORD but also served their own gods" (II Kings 17:33).

Exile in Babylon forever cured the Israelites of their "awhoring after other gods"; ever since, they have been incurably monotheistic. When Ezra and Nehemiah bring the people back home, it is for the purpose of establishing a single-hearted people on the basis of religious purity. "You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy" (Lev. 19:26).

It does not matter to which time you assign these words because in Israel the people saw themselves as sharing the experiences of those who had come before them. If God had addressed their ancestors, they too had been addressed. If their ancestors had undergone an experience, that experience was also theirs. Listen to the pronouns in the creedal form of the response that the people are commanded to make when they come into their new land: "The Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the LORD, the God of our ancestors; the LORD heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression" (Deut. 26:6-7, italics added).

There are those among us who imagine this command to have been proper for a primitive and superstitious people of long ago. We have heard that they lived among a people who worshiped many gods. They saw the splendor and majesty of Egypt and were impressed with their gods. They saw the success of those who worshiped the baals when they came to Canaan and were convinced that these nature gods could assure agricultural success. They were no doubt influenced by the worship of the golden calf that was current among the Canaanites. They were dazzled by the processionals of the worshipers of Marduk in Babylon; some converted and never looked back.

We can understand their temptations. But us? We are monotheists, and this is not our problem. Perhaps we need to take another look at ourselves. Just a cursory glimpse will reveal that all the old gods still prowl among us and win our favor. One does not identify the gods of a people by those they call by name but by those they serve. Who would deny that we are a people who bow at other altars, that, like the people of the eighth century BCE, we too fear the Lord and worship our own gods?

The baals of Canaan, fertility gods of the past, still claim their devotees in those who revere sex and intercourse as the pivotal forces in life. Who can watch television for more than a moment and not be confronted by some modern baal promising youth and beauty and the gift of a life force and virility that will make us admired by all?

Who would deny that we are a people who have listened to the promises of the god Mars, god of war. We pour out our treasure, and then lay the lives of our young upon the altar of Mars. We build machines of destruction and name them with peaceful names—and we know all the time that, while we may escape war, we may fall victim to a depletion of our resources brought on by our fears, anxieties, and greed. When someone suggests that we can close a military base, not build one more submarine, let one rocket go unfinished, mark off one squadron of planes, we are reminded that even though we do not need them for war, we need them to keep the wheels of our economic system turning. What promised peace has, instead, become a bondage.

Whether taken from a bottle or as a pill or in a snort of powder, many still seek the comforts, reassurances, and thrills promised by Bacchus, god of the vine. On the one hand, there are those in our society who struggle to reveal the fabric of individual...