Deuteronomy

How could the exact words of God in the Ten Commandments (Exod. 20:2-17) be
altered in any way by Moses in Deuteronomy 5:6-21?

It should be understood that the purpose of Deuteronomy was to furnish a selective

paraphrase of the law of God revealed to Moses in the earlier three books: Exodus,
Leviticus, and Numbers. It was not intended to be a word-for-word repetition of the text
of those book but rather a homiletical, hortatory application of their teaching to the new
generation that had reached their majority during the forty years of the wilderness
wandering. Those precepts and aspects of the law that would be most useful for the non-
Levitical congregation were culled out and set before them in a hard-hitting yet
encouraging fashion so that they would be ideologically prepared for the conquest and
occupation of Canaan. Consequently it would be quite exceptional for the identical words
to occur on a given subject, as between Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5. There are
variations in phraseology, but never in sense or essential teaching, as between those two
books (or between Deuteronomy and Leviticus or Numbers, for that matter).

In the case of the Decalogue, it was only to be expected that the wording of Exodus 20
should be very closely followed by Deuteronomy 5, since this was originally a text
directly composed by God Himself. However, it should be remembered that Moses was
free to follow the guidance of the Holy Spirit as he omitted or inserted a clause or two in
the Deuteronomic restatement. While it is true that Moses quoted the Decalogue as being
the very words of God ("He said" [Deut. 5:5]), this committed him only to insertions that
quoted from God's own revealed word, whether in Exodus 20 or elsewhere in the book.
Thus, in connection with the Sabbath commandment (v.14), he omits mention of the
Creation in six days as a basis for the sanction (contained in Exod. 20:11), but adds at the
end of this commandment (Deut. 5:15) the words of Exodus 13:3: "Remember this day in
which you went out from Egypt, from the house of slavery; for by a powerful hand the
LORD brought you out from this place." Those words also had been spoken by divine
inspiration and authority, and they furnished Moses' people with an additional ground for
showing kindness and consideration for the servile class in their society. The Lord had
shown them great love and kindness when they had been a nation of slaves down in
Egypt. It may not be quite clear as to the reason for omitting the Creation days basis for
the Sabbath sanction; but the failure to include it constitutes no actual discrepancy--any
more than pertains to quotations we may discuss, taken from the text appearing in some
other book, but streamlined by the use of a succession of dots when we are leaving out a
few of the words in the original passage.

As for the variation in word order occurring in the tenth commandment ("house" is
mentioned before "wife" in Exod. 20:17, but "wife" before "house" in Deut. 5:21), the
words and the meaning are both the same, despite the slight difference in sequence. There
is also a different Hebrew word for "covet" used before "house" in Deuteronomy 5:21
(tit'awweh instead of tahmod), but the meaning is virtually identical as between the two
verbs; and the variation may simply have furnished a variant for the sake of a more

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