Ten Words, Two Tablets

Let us set out the Ten Commandments in a rough way, as a sample of the kind of exposition one who truly knows gives. There is no need to say now that ten is a sacred number. And if the tablets that were written were God’s own work, they will be found to display the making of the physical world. For “the finger of God” is understood to mean the power of God, by which the creation of heaven and earth is carried out; and the two tablets will be understood as symbols of the two. For the writing and handiwork of God set on the tablet is the creation of the world. [a]

And the Ten, seen as an image of heaven, take in sun and moon, stars, clouds, light, wind, water, air, darkness, fire. This is the physical Ten of the heaven. And the picture of the earth holds men, cattle, creeping things, wild beasts; and among the creatures of the water, fish and the great sea creatures; and again, among the winged tribes, those that eat flesh and those that take mild food; and among plants likewise, both the fruit-bearing and the barren. This is the physical Ten of the earth. And the chest that held them will then be the knowledge of things divine and human, and wisdom.

And perhaps the two tablets themselves are a prophecy of the two covenants. That is why they were renewed, with a hidden meaning, when ignorance had increased along with sin. The commands are written twice over, then, as it appears, for the two spirits, the one that rules and the one that is ruled. “For the flesh craves against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh.”

And there is a ten in man himself: the five senses, the power of speech, and the power of reproduction; the eighth is the spirit breathed into him at his creation; the ninth is the ruling part of the soul; and the tenth is the mark of the Holy Spirit, which comes to him through faith. Besides these ten human parts, the law appears to give its commands to sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste, and to the organs that serve them, which come in pairs — the hands and the feet. For that is how a man is put together. And the soul is brought in, and before it the ruling part, by which we reason, which is not produced in procreation; so that without the ruling part the number ten is made up, of the faculties through which all human activity is carried out. For as soon as a man enters existence, his life begins, in due order, with sensations.

We hold, then, that the reasoning and ruling power is the cause of what makes the living creature what it is, and that the part without reason is given life by it and is a part of it. Now the life-force, which takes in the power of feeding and growing, and of motion generally, is assigned to the spirit of the flesh, which is highly liable to motion and travels in every direction through the senses and the rest of the body, and by way of the body is the first thing to receive sensations. But the power of choice, in which inquiry and study and knowledge live, belongs to the ruling part. And all the faculties are set in relation to that one: it is through the ruling part that a man lives, and lives in one way rather than another. Through the spirit of the body, then, a man perceives, craves, rejoices, grows angry, is fed, grows. It is through it, too, that thoughts and ideas go forward into actions. And when the ruling part masters the cravings, it reigns.

So the command “You shall not crave” says: you shall not be a slave to the spirit of the flesh, but shall rule over it. “For the flesh craves against the spirit,” and stirs a man up to behavior that is disorderly and against nature; “and the spirit against the flesh” holds the mastery, so that the man’s behavior may be according to nature. Is not man, then, rightly said to “have been made in the image of God”? Not in the shape of his body, but in this: God makes all things by the Word, and the man who has come to real knowledge does good by the faculty of reason. So the two tablets are rightly said to mean the commands given to the two spirits — the commands given before the law to what was created, and to the ruling part. And the movements of the senses are both copied in the mind and shown in the activity that comes out of the body. For apprehension is the result of the two together. Again, as sensation stands to the world we perceive, so thought stands to the world the mind alone reaches. And actions are twofold: those of thought, and those of deed.

The first of the ten commands shows that there is one God only, the Almighty, who led the people out of the land of Egypt through the desert to their homeland, so that they might grasp his power as far as they were able through his divine works, and turn away from worshiping created things, putting all their hope in the true God. The second word gave to understand that men are not to take the majestic power of God — which is his name, since that alone was as much as many were even yet able to learn — and hand it over, transferring his title to things made and empty, which human craftsmen have made, among which “He who is” has no place. For in his uncreated sameness, “He who is” is utterly alone.

And the fourth word is the one that gives us to understand that the world was created by God, and that he gave us the seventh day as a rest, because of the hardship there is in life. For God cannot grow weary, or suffer, or be in need; but we who carry flesh need rest. So the seventh day is announced as a rest — a holding off from troubles — preparing us for the First Day, our true rest, which is in fact the first making of light, in which all things are seen and possessed. From that day the first wisdom and knowledge shine on us. For the light of truth — a true light, casting no shadow — is the Spirit of God, divided to all without being divided, given to those made holy by faith, holding the place of a lamp so that the things that really are may be known. By following him, then, through our whole life, we become free of passion; and this is to rest.

That is why Solomon also says that before heaven and earth and all things that exist, Wisdom had arisen in the Almighty; and to share in her — to share by power, I mean, not by being — teaches a man to know by apprehension things divine and human. Having got this far, we must mention these things in passing, since the discussion has turned to the seventh and the eighth. For the eighth may well turn out to be properly the seventh, and the seventh plainly the sixth; and the sixth would then be properly the Sabbath, and the seventh a working day. For the creation of the world was finished in six days. For the sun’s movement from solstice to solstice is completed in six months, in the course of which at one time the leaves fall and at another the plants bud and the seeds ripen. And they say the embryo is completed exactly in the sixth month, that is, in a hundred and eighty days plus two and a half, as Polybus the physician relates in his book On the Eighth Month, and Aristotle the philosopher in his book On Nature. That, I think, is why the Pythagoreans reckon six the perfect number, taking it from the creation of the world as the prophet gives it, and call it Meseuthys and Marriage, since it stands in the middle of the even numbers, that is, of ten and two. For it is plainly the same distance from both. And as marriage generates from male and female, so six is generated from the odd number three, which is called the masculine number, and the even number two, which is counted the feminine. For twice three is six.

Such, again, is the number of the most general motions, by which everything comes to be: up, down, to the right, to the left, forward, backward. So they rightly reckon the number seven motherless and childless, taking it for the Sabbath and figuring in it the nature of the rest, in which “they neither marry nor are given in marriage any more.” For seven is not produced by taking from one of the numbers within ten and adding it to another; nor, added to any number within the ten, does it make up one of them. And they called eight a cube, counting the fixed sphere along with the seven that revolve, by which “the great year” is produced, a kind of period in which what has been promised is paid back.

So the Lord, who went up the mountain as the fourth, becomes the sixth, and is lit all around with spiritual light, laying bare the power that comes from him as far as those chosen to see it were able to look; and by the Seventh, the Voice, he is proclaimed to be the Son of God, so that they, once convinced about him, might have rest. And by his birth, which the sixth marked out plainly, he becomes the eighth, and appears as God in a body of flesh, displaying his power — counted, indeed, as a man, but hidden as to who he was. For six is reckoned in the order of the numbers, but the succession of the letters acknowledges a character that is not written. In the numbers themselves each unit keeps its place up to seven and eight; but in the count of the letters, zeta becomes six and eta seven. And since the character somehow slipped into the writing, if we follow it out this way, the seven became six and the eight seven. That is also why man is said to have been made on the sixth day: he came to trust in the One who is the Sign, so as to receive at once the rest of the Lord’s inheritance. Something like this is indicated too by the sixth hour in the plan of salvation, in which man was made complete. Further, of the eight the middle terms are seven, and of the seven the intervals are shown to be six. For there is another ground on which seven glorifies eight, and “the heavens declare to the heavens the glory of God.”

The things that stand for these to the senses, then, are the sounds we speak. So the Lord himself is called “Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end,” “through whom all things were made, and without whom not even one thing was made.” God’s resting, then, is not what some suppose, that God stopped working. For he is good, and if he were ever to stop doing good he would stop being God — which it is an outrage even to say. His resting is rather his arranging that the order of created things should be kept unbroken, and that each of the creatures should leave off the old disorder. For the creations of the several days followed one another in a highly significant order, so that everything brought into existence might have honor from coming first — all created together in thought, but not all of equal worth. Nor was the making of each signified by the voice, since the creative work is said to have made them all at once. For something had to be named first. So the things announced first were those from which the second came, all things originating together out of one being by one power. For the will of God was one, in one sameness. And how could creation take place in time, when time was born along with the things that exist?

And now the whole world of creatures born alive, and of things that grow, turns in sevens. The firstborn princes of the angels, who have the greatest power, are seven. The astronomers say too that the planets which run their course around the earth are seven; and by these the Chaldeans think that everything to do with mortal life is brought about through sympathy, which is why they take it upon themselves to say what is coming. And among the fixed stars, the Pleiades are seven. And the Bears, by whose help farming and sailing are carried through, are made up of seven stars. And in stretches of seven days the moon goes through her changes. In the first week she becomes a half moon; in the second, full; in the third, waning, a half moon again; and in the fourth she disappears. Further, as Seleucus the astronomer lays it down, she has seven phases: first, out of being invisible she becomes crescent-shaped, then half, then gibbous and full; and in her waning again gibbous, and in the same way half moon and crescent. “On a seven-stringed lyre we shall sing new hymns,” writes a poet of note, teaching us that the ancient lyre had seven tones. The organs of the senses set in our face are seven as well — two eyes, two passages for hearing, two nostrils, and the mouth for the seventh.

And that the changes in the periods of life happen by sevens, the Elegies of Solon teach in this way:

Again, in illnesses the seventh day is the day of the crisis, and the fourteenth the day on which nature struggles against the causes of the illness. Countless instances of this kind are brought together by Hermippus of Berytus in his book On the Number Seven, where he treats it as holy. And the blessed David sets it out plainly, for those who know the hidden account of seven and eight, praising God this way: “Our years were spun out like a spider’s web. The days of our years in them are seventy years; but if in strength, eighty years. And that will be to reign.”

Then, so that we may be taught that the world came to be, and not suppose that God made it in time, prophecy adds: “This is the book of the generation, and of the things in them, when they were created, in the day that God made heaven and earth.” For the words “when they were created” point to a production without limit and without date. But “in the day that God made” — that is, in and by which God made “all things,” and “without which not even one thing was made” — points out the activity carried out by the Son. As David says, “This is the day the Lord has made; let us be glad and rejoice in it”; that is, because of the knowledge he has given us, let us keep the divine festival. For the Word who throws light on things hidden, and through whom each created thing came into life and being, is called day. And in short, the Ten, by the letter iota, signify the blessed name, presenting Jesus, who is the Word.

Fifth in order is the command about honoring father and mother. And it plainly announces God as Father and Lord — which is why it calls those who know him sons, and gods. The Maker of the universe is their Lord and Father. And the mother is not, as some say, the substance we sprang from, nor, as others teach, the church, but the divine knowledge and wisdom, as Solomon says when he calls wisdom “the mother of the righteous” and says that she is to be desired for her own sake. And again, the knowledge of everything that is lovely and worthy of reverence comes from God through the Son.

Then follows the command about murder. Now murder is destruction beyond recovery. So the man who wants to root out the true teaching about God and about immortality in order to bring in a lie — claiming either that the universe is not under providence, or that the world was never created, or asserting anything else against true teaching — is the most destructive of men.

This is followed by the command about adultery. Now it is adultery if a man abandons the church’s true knowledge and the settled conviction about God and goes over to a false and ill-matched opinion, either by making a god of some created thing or by making an idol of something that does not exist at all, so as to overstep knowledge — or rather to step outside it. And to the one who truly knows, a false opinion is a stranger, as the true one is his own and at home with him. That is why the noble apostle counts idolatry as one of the kinds of sexual immorality, following the prophet, who says: “My people has committed immorality with wood and stone. They have said to the wood, ‘You are my father,’ and to the stone, ‘You gave me birth.’”

And after this comes the command about theft. As the man who steals what belongs to another does a great wrong and rightly gets the trouble he deserves, so does the man who claims God’s works as his own by the sculptor’s or the painter’s art and declares himself the maker of animals and plants. In the same way, those who counterfeit the true philosophy are thieves. Whether a man is a farmer or the father of a child, he is only an agent who puts seeds in place. But it is God who supplies the growth and completion of everything, and brings what is produced to what its nature requires. Yet most people, along with the philosophers, assign growth and change to the stars as the first cause, robbing the Father of the universe, so far as they can, of his unwearied power. The elements, though, and the stars — that is, the powers that administer things — are appointed to accomplish what the administration requires, and are acted on and moved by what is commanded them, in the way the Word of the Lord leads, since it is the nature of the divine power to work everything unseen. So the man who claims that he has thought up or made anything belonging to creation will pay the penalty for his irreverent daring.

And the tenth is the command about all cravings. As a man who harbors unfitting cravings is called to account, so he is not allowed to crave what is false, or to suppose that among created things the living ones have power of themselves, or that lifeless things can save or harm at all. And if someone says that an antidote cannot heal, or hemlock kill, he is deceived without knowing it. For none of these acts unless a man makes use of the plant and the drug — just as the axe does nothing without someone to cut with it, or the saw without someone sawing. And as they do not work by themselves, but have certain natural qualities that accomplish their proper work when the craftsman exerts himself, so also, by the universal providence of God, through go-between causes, the working power is passed on in succession to individual things.