Which Ten Commandments Do We Use?

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Read the Source Document First.

Ask a room full of people to recite the Ten Commandments, and you will hear a confident chorus. Ask them which one is the sixth, and the room splits three ways.

A Catholic will tell you the Sixth forbids adultery. A Baptist or a Presbyterian will say murder. An observant Jew will also say murder but will start counting from a sentence neither Christian list treats as a commandment at all.

Twenty years in police work taught me to read the source document before trusting anyone’s summary. The source here sits in two places, Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5, and neither passage numbers a single line. Scripture calls them the “ten words” and leaves the dividing to the reader.

Three traditions divide them three different ways. Each believes its count is the faithful one.

Three Counts, Side by Side

The content barely changes from list to list. The lines between the commandments move.

No.	Jewish	Catholic and Lutheran	Most Protestant (Reformed, Anglican, Baptist, Methodist)
1	I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt	You shall have no other gods before me	You shall have no other gods before me
2	No other gods; no idols	Do not take the Lord’s name in vain	You shall not make a graven image
3	Do not take the Lord’s name in vain	Keep holy the Lord’s Day	Do not take the Lord’s name in vain
4	Remember the Sabbath	Honor your father and mother	Remember the Sabbath
5	Honor your father and mother	You shall not kill	Honor your father and mother
6	You shall not murder	You shall not commit adultery	You shall not kill (or murder)
7	You shall not commit adultery	You shall not steal	You shall not commit adultery
8	You shall not steal	You shall not bear false witness	You shall not steal
9	You shall not bear false witness	Do not covet your neighbor’s wife	You shall not bear false witness
10	Do not covet anything of your neighbor’s	Do not covet your neighbor’s goods	Do not covet anything of your neighbor’s

Eastern Orthodox churches count the way the fourth column does. Wording follows common modern renderings; the King James Bible reads “kill,” whereas Jewish translations read “murder.”

Where the Lines Move, and Why

Three seams account for nearly all the difference.

The opening sentence. Jewish tradition counts “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” as the First Word. Grammatically, it commands nothing. It states who is speaking and what He already did. The rules arrive only after the rescue, and the order carries the theology: the God who freed you now asks something of you. Most Christian lists treat the same sentence as a preface and begin counting at “no other gods.”

The graven image. Catholics and Lutherans, following Augustine, fold the ban on carved images into the First Commandment. The short form most Catholic children memorize leaves the image clause out entirely, and the catechism takes it up under the First. Reformed Protestants, shaped by Calvin and Zwingli, gave the image ban its own number. Those Reformers stripped statues and stained glass out of churches, and their numbering preserves the argument. Count the commandments in a Presbyterian church, and you are counting a sixteenth-century fight over art.

Coveting. Fold two commands into one, and you need a tenth from somewhere. Catholics and Lutherans split the final command in two: one against coveting a neighbor’s wife, one against coveting his goods, or ass, as the original wording offered great humor to us in Catechism.

Deuteronomy supports the split, since it lists the wife first and uses a different verb for the rest. The result puts a person in a separate category from the house, the ox, and the donkey. Jews and Reformed Protestants keep one commandment against coveting anything at all.

Smaller differences ride along. The Sabbath means Saturday in a synagogue, the Lord’s Day in a Catholic parish, and Sunday in most Protestant churches, with Seventh-day Adventists the notable Saturday exception. The Talmud reads the Jewish Eighth, “You shall not steal,” as a ban on kidnapping, because Leviticus already covers ordinary theft.

Then there is the Hebrew verb in the Sixth. Lo tirtzach means “you shall not murder,” and Jewish translations say so. The King James Bible renders it “Thou shalt not kill,” and Catholic lists traditionally follow suit. Every homicide detective knows the gap between a killing and a murder. That gap is the whole case. It also shapes centuries of argument over war, self-defense, and the death penalty.

A Legislature Had to Pick One

None of this discussion would take place outside a seminary classroom if states hadn’t started hanging the commandments in public ones.

Texas Senate Bill 10, signed in June 2025, requires a poster at least 16 by 20 inches in every public school classroom, carrying the text of the Ten Commandments and nothing else.

Lawmakers wrote the text into the statute themselves, drawn from the King James Bible. On April 21, the full Fifth Circuit upheld the law 9 to 8. Two months earlier, the same court voted 12 to 6 to let Louisiana enforce its own version.

The families challenging the Texas law, led by Rabbi Mara Nathan, asked the Supreme Court to take the case in August. Their petition calls the mandated text a Protestant version, and the counting bears them out: the image ban stands alone, coveting stays whole, and the verb is “kill.” The justices have not yet said whether they will hear it.

The law’s defenders make a serious argument, and it deserves a fair hearing. The Fifth Circuit majority noted that the posters require no prayer, recitation, or belief and punish no one who rejects them.

Defenders point to Moses on the frieze of the Supreme Court’s own courtroom and argue the commandments carry a second, secular meaning as a foundation of Western law. They also argue Stone v. Graham, the 1980 decision striking down Kentucky’s classroom posters, rested on a legal test the Court discarded in 2022.

Grant all of it. The State of Texas still had to choose a list.

When a legislature writes “the Ten Commandments” into law, it must decide whether the First Commandment is a statement about who God is or an order about other gods. Which begs the question, if they don’t exist, why does the one true god need to warn the faithful not to worship other gods?

It has to decide whether a graven image is its own offense, whether a wife belongs in the same sentence as an ox, and whether the Sixth forbids killing or murder. Those are not historical questions. Synagogues and churches have argued them for nearly two thousand years, and the government settled them by statute.

A Catholic second grader in Houston will read a numbering sequence her parish does not teach. A Jewish child will read her tradition’s text re-divided by a Christian translation. Nobody forces either child to believe it. The wall simply tells both of them every school day which church the state consulted.

It leaves open the question why.

Ten Words, Three Counts

Step back from the numbering, and the agreement is striking. All three traditions forbid murder, adultery, theft, and lying under oath. All three honor parents and set aside a day of rest.

On conduct, the lists are nearly identical.

The differences record history instead. The Jewish count remembers Egypt and opens with liberation. The Catholic count reflects Augustine’s attention to the inner life, giving desire two commandments of its own. The Reformed count keeps the scars of the Reformation’s war on images. Each tradition earned its list honestly, over centuries, and each can defend it.

That is exactly why rabbis, priests, pastors, and parents count. A faith strong enough to have survived two millennia of argument over its own text doesn’t need a state legislature to settle the matter.

Ten words. Three counts. Before anyone hangs a poster on a classroom wall, one question deserves an answer: whose list do we use?

A Different Poster

Suppose we taught children this?

1. Know what you believe. Say it plainly, and let it shape everything you do.
2. Several times a day, stop what you are doing, step away from the noise, and turn your attention to something greater than yourself.
3. Every year, give away a fixed share of what you have to people who need it. Think of it less as charity and more as a debt you owe.
4. Once a year, go hungry on purpose for a while, so you never forget what hunger means for those who have no choice.
5. Once in your life, travel with strangers from every corner of the world, and stand among them as an equal.

These are the Five Pillars of Islam, distilled into the plain language of their fundamental meaning. Nothing on the list is cruel, and much of it is admirable: devotion, discipline, generosity, humility.

Muslims could make the same historical case for their tradition’s influence on law, science, and mathematics.

Picture that poster, 16 by 20 inches, in every classroom in Texas. Most parents who want the commandments on the wall would object, and they would be right to. The principle that protects their children from that poster is the same one that protects everyone else’s children from theirs.

And here’s another question: why post an edited one when the original is available? Oh, wait. It is not. All we have are copies of copies of copies. But here is the latest from one of the many versions. This is Deuteronomy 5 NIV (New International Version.)

“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.
⁷ “You shall have no other gods before me.
⁸ “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. ⁹ You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, ¹⁰ but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.
¹¹ “You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.
¹² “Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy, as the Lord your God has commanded you. ¹³ Six days you shall labor and do all your work, ¹⁴ but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your ox, your donkey or any of your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns, so that your male and female servants may rest, as you do. ¹⁵ Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.
¹⁶ “Honor your father and your mother, as the Lord your God has commanded you, so that you may live long and that it may go well with you in the land the Lord your God is giving you.
¹⁷ “You shall not murder.
¹⁸ “You shall not commit adultery.
¹⁹ “You shall not steal.
²⁰ “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.
²¹ “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife. You shall not set your desire on your neighbor’s house or land, his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”

Sources

• Fifth Circuit en banc opinion, Nathan v. Alamo Heights ISD (April 21, 2026)
• Texas families petition the Supreme Court (ACLU of Texas)
• Supreme Court asked to review Texas law (PBS NewsHour)
• Court clears way for Louisiana law (NPR)
• The Ten Commandments, classroom walls, and the establishment clause (SCOTUSblog, Oct. 23, 2026)