Did the Ten Commandments Exist Before Moses?

I wrote this article for Helium. It’s a little rambling, but I haven’t written Helium articles for a while. But writing this helped me to arrive at some clarity on this issue. It’s part of a debate, “Did the Ten Commandments Exist Before Moses?” I argue for the “No” side.
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According to the Hebrew Bible, there were certainly moral standards before the time of Moses. In Genesis 4, God punishes Cain for killing Abel. In Genesis 6:11, God disapproves of the human race on account of its violence. In Genesis 12 and 20, non-Israelite nations have some notion that adultery is wrong, and God punishes rulers when they are about to sleep unwittingly with the wife of Abraham. Indeed, there was some moral law prior to Moses, and it overlapped in many areas with the Ten Commandments that God later gave to Israel at Sinai, or Horeb.

But did the “Ten Commandments” exist before the time of Moses? The Ten Commandments were a part of God’s covenant with the nation of Israel, such that there are places in which the Torah equates the Ten Commandments with the covenant (Exodus 34:28; Deuteronomy 4:13). The Ten Commandments were the terms of God’s covenant with Israel: God would bless and preserve Israel, if she obeyed God’s voice; otherwise, God would punish Israel. Many of these commandments overlapped with the moral standards that existed before the time of Moses; the Sabbath command, however, may have originated after the Exodus. But the Ten Commandments AS Ten Commandments—a list of precepts that God gave to Israel as ten stipulations, to serve as the terms of God’s covenant with her—came to exist in the time of Moses. Consequently, in the part of the Bible that narrates the time before Moses, we see no reference to the “Ten Commandments.”

The command to keep the Sabbath is a part of the Ten Commandments, in both Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5. Did this command exist before the time of Moses? The Sabbath appears to have existed prior to Moses, for it came to be at creation, as God rested on the seventh day and sanctified it (Genesis 2:3). But, as far as I can see, there is no evidence in Scripture that the observance of the Sabbath was a COMMAND for human beings before the time of Moses; rather, we see that God rested on the seventh day, not that God told human beings to do so. God may have been saving his command to observe the Sabbath for his chosen people, Israel. Nehemiah 9:14 affirms that God made known his Sabbath to Israel through Moses, and Exodus 31:13-17 calls the Sabbath a sign between God and Israel that God sanctifies his special nation. The Sabbath, like the broader body of the Ten Commandments, is intricately connected to God’s covenant with Israel, which was established with conditons under Moses. (The covenant existed as far back as Abraham, as Genesis 15 indicates, but the conditions of the covenant occurred when Moses was Israel’s leader.)

Christian Sabbatarians (who believe that God commands all people to observe the Sabbath on Saturday) have argued that Mark 2:27 says that the Sabbath was made for man, meaning that God at creation commanded all human beings to observe it. “Notice that the Sabbath was made for MAN, not only for the JEW,” Sabbatarians have said. But Mark 2:27 occurs in the context of a controversy that Jesus had with the Pharisees over the observance of the Torah, God’s law for Israel. In such controversies, Jesus and the Pharisees often used a word for man, even though the law in question applied only to Israel. In John 7:22, for example, Jesus tells the Jewish leaders that they circumcise a man on the Sabbath day, although neither he nor the Jewish leaders believed that God required all human beings to be circumcised. Genesis 17, after all, prescribed circumcision for Abraham’s descendants. (But didn’t Judaizing Christians in Acts 15 and Galatians want Gentiles to be circumcused? Yes, as an entrance requirement for joining the community of Abraham. In Judaism, Gentiles had to be circumcised to become a part of the people of Israel. Paul’s argument was that physical circumcision was no longer a requirement for Gentiles to join God’s special people.) In Jesus’ controversies with the Jewish leaders over Torah observance, “man” means the people under the Torah, namely, Israelites.

Christian Sabbatarians also argue that Isaiah 56 and 66 present Gentiles observing the Sabbath. Isaiah 56 discusses Gentiles who join themselves to God’s covenant, which may indicate that they are converts. Gentiles keep the Sabbath after they join God’s covenant people, Israel, indicating that the Sabbath is God’s institution for Israel, not all of humanity. Isaiah 66 describes all flesh worshipping God on the Sabbaths and new moons in the new heavens and the new earth. The passage does not say that Gentiles will be required to rest, which is a key aspect of Sabbath observance; at the same time, God may very well place Gentiles under the discipline of the Torah in the new heavens and the new earth, as an educational tool. Zechariah 14 describes them keeping the Feast of Tabernacles, after all. But that does not mean that Gentiles before then are required to observe the Sabbath, or that the Sabbath was God’s creation observance for all of humanity. The Sabbath commandment (not the Sabbath itself, but the command to observe it) appears to have originated within the context of God’s relationship with the nation of Israel, under Moses.

There were moral standards before, during, and after the time of Moses, but there were also differences between God’s requirements for humanity before the Torah came into being, and after God placed Israel under it. In an article for the “Yes” side, Robert Briggs argues in qal va-homer fashion:

“Now, if the offerings seen under the Mosiac law were in operation before they were written, read and observed; would the most vital of all instructions to man (The Ten Commandments) be in literary limbo at the same time?”

Indeed, there is overlap between God’s pre-Torah and Torah standards, but there are differences as well. Leviticus 18:18 prohibits a man from marrying two women who are sisters, and yet did not Jacob do precisely that when he married Leah and Rachel? Leviticus 18:9 says that a man can’t sleep with his sister, either his father’s daughter, or his mother’s daughter. But Abraham was married to Sarah, the daughter of his father (Genesis 20:12). Although there is a strong strand within Judaism that tries to argue that the patriarchs observed the Torah, we see indications that they did not. God may not have held them to the same strict standard that he later imposed on Israel. Briggs seems to assume that God had the same standards before and after the time of Moses, and so he concludes that the Ten Commandments pre-dated Moses. But this is not a safe assumption. Prior to Moses, God very well may have had thoughts as to how things should be (i.e., a man shouldn’t marry his half-sister), but God did not enforce that standard until the Mosaic law.

Romans 5:12-21 is interesting and relevant to this debate, for Paul discusses sin before and after the law. Paul says that God’s revelation of the law under Moses multiplied trespass, for God reckons sin to people when they know his law and choose not to obey it. At the same time, death did exist from Adam to Moses, as a result of Adam’s sin. In a sense, God did have a moral standard and punish sin before the time of Moses, and yet, according to Paul, God’s revelation of the Torah under Moses brought something that did not exist before: a clear revelation of God’s righteous standard. In my opinion, that’s how God could let the sexual sins of Abraham and Jacob slide: they lacked God’s full revelation, and so they didn’t know better.
Did the Ten Commandments exist prior to Moses? God had standards for people back then. Many of them overlapped with the Ten Commandments. And yet, there’s no evidence that the Sabbath command pre-dated God’s relationship with Israel under Moses. The Ten Commandments as such were the terms of God’s covenant with Israel. At the same time, they were a fuller revelation of God’s standards, which were not fully and completely expressed prior to Moses.