Jon Collins

We're talking the 10 words.

We're talking 10.

10 commandments, 10 words, 10 things that God said to the people of ancient Israel as they stood at Mount Sinai entering into a covenant.

They got married.

Israel got married to a God that day.

Okay.

There's a Hebrew Bible scholar, Joshua Berman, who...

who was trying to draw attention to how odd the story of God making a covenant with Israel at Mount Sinai would sound in the ancient world.

Did it?

This wasn't a thing you would do?

Yeah, he said in the ancient world, a story about a God getting married in a covenant with a human would sound as strange as a story to us would sound about a human getting married to a cat.

That's his analogy.

Yeah.

Now, he's not saying there was no precedent for gods entering into some kind of partnership with humans.

The idea of gods enlisting humans to do stuff for them and serve them, that's not new.

But what's truly new is the mutuality.

about a God making God's self vulnerable to a human community to partner with and represent him, to be his kingdom of priests, and attaching God's name, thinking of our last conversation about carrying the name of Yahweh, your God, for a futile purpose or in vain.

That's what's unique, that I am your Elohim, and you are my people,

And the reciprocity of partnership is truly unique, something unique that the Hebrew Bible is contributing to the history of human thought.

And so what these 10 words represent are the first 10 terms of that covenant marriage partnership between Yahweh, the one who is, and the people of ancient Israel.