I was very interested to read that (for the first time since I read Joseph Smith's writings), someone else made reference to Shem being Melchizedek, the high priest of Salem:
The Ten WHAT?!!: The Truth About the "Ten Commandments"
Gershon Winkler
The Ten Commandments comprise a sadly misunderstood and misinterpreted body
of ancient Jewish rules-to-live-by, twisted out of context by religious
cultures unfamiliar with the original Hebraic language and cosmology that
originally inspired it.
Ever since the Hebrew scriptures were translated from Hebrew to Greek to
Latin and finally into English, the ancient Decalogue of the Hebrews has
been a household word across the western cultural map. More recently, the
media have given The Ten Commandments further exposure when Cecil B.
DeMille titled his biblical epic "The Ten Commandments", and, when of late,
they aroused controversy surrounding the issue of separation of Church and
State in the case of a county judge who refused to remove them from the
front lawn of his court house. Ironically, the Ten Commandments remained
the stalwart of a European Christian culture that in all other respects was
founded upon an agenda of superceding the very scriptures that contained the
Ten Commandments: the Hebrew Scriptures, otherwise derogatorily known as the
"Old" Testament.
I would like to discuss here some of the original meaning and intent of
this popularly known but sorely misunderstood body of ancient Jewish laws.
For example, nowhere in the Decalogue does it state "Thou shalt not kill".
Rather, the Hebrew writ reads: "You will not murder" (Exodus 20:13). The
"thou shalt not", or "you may not", is an incorrect rendering of what more
accurately reads "you will not", implying that if one observes the
instructions of the first five "commandments" one will not be prone to
committing murder, sexual abuse, theft, slander, etc. After all, the Hebrew
ancestors did not need to be commanded not to murder or steal or slander as
if they were a nation of idiots oblivious to simple, basic morality. It
would otherwise be akin to an American law prohibiting the wanton slaughter
of fellow humans or the random trashing of parked vehicles. The laws in the
Ten Commandments were mostly duplicates of laws already in force and
articulated earlier in the Torah. They were laws long ago transmitted
to Abraham from his teacher Eber who received them from his father Shem
(a/k/a Malkitzedek) who in turn received them from his father Noah, the
famed hero of the Great Flood. They are repeated here in the new context
of relationship with the Creator as opposed to their original context of
mortal legal injunction. Thus, the first several "commandments" are about
the relationship between humans and God, while the last five are about
the relationship between humans and each other. The intention here is to
predicate one upon the other, rather than foster a sense of morality
shadowed by societal legislation alone.
"Noachian Law had been secured by the external safeguard of severe
punishment (Talmud, Baba Kama 38a), which nevertheless proved insufficient
(Talmud, Avot 3:5). Now these external safeguards were to be replaced by
the internal restraints provided by the chuqim of the Torah, laws which
make awareness of God a reality in human life [and a determinant factor in
wholesome human behavior]." - Philip Biberfeld: Universal Jewish History
[Feldheim, 1980], Vol. 4, p. 79
The first of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:3) is another example of a
misreading. It does not read: "Thou shalt have no other gods besides Me
[or before Me]", as it is usually translated; rather it reads: "You shall
have no other gods upon My face", meaning we ought to appropriate onto God
neither definition nor image, presuming to know what God is all about. As
God is described as saying in the Hebraic scriptural book of Isaiah the
Prophet: "'My thoughts are not like your thoughts, and My ways are not like
your ways', declares Infinite One. 'For as high as heavens are from earth,
so high are My ways from your ways, and My thoughts from your thoughts"
(Isaiah 55:8-9). Even the word God is a mistranslation of the Hebrew term
used: elo'heem, which is a plural word meaning literally All Powers
(Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chayyim 5:1), and is used also to describe humans
who wield powers such as mortal judges (Exodus 21:6) and persons of high
spiritual standing, or angels (Psalm 82:6).
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