What more is there to say about the Ten Commandments? It stretches belief that a list of fairly obvious moral maxims could capture the imagination and ire of countless generations of religious observers, exegetes, politicians, legal experts, and biblical critics alike. Why has this document – of all the snatches of the Hebrew Bible that could have been extracted – had such remarkable staying power in both the ancient and modern worlds? This book will argue that the Ten Commandments – or the Decalogue – have remained relevant because they are monumental. This is not to say merely that they are important or influential. Rather, by monumental I intend a functional definition developed by art historians, archaeologists, and literary theorists over the past century. Monuments, to be monuments, must provoke a reaction on the part of communities. They are focal points of engagement and interpretation that prompt groups of people to reconstruct what they remember and believe. The Decalogue is and was such a monument. Indeed, I will argue that it was designed that way.
This book will seek to recover the ancient West Asian traditions of monuments out of which the Decalogue emerged. By contextualizing the Decalogue within the monuments of its day, we can uncover new insights into the text’s composition and reception in its original contexts. More than this, we can uncover why the Decalogue has continued to be reproduced and reinterpreted to the present day. The Decalogue was a monument from the start. Its social power derives from its monumentality – the quality that invites communities to engage with it to make special meaning for themselves.
How Communities Use Things to Make Meaning
Though perhaps unfamiliar to some readers, the word “monumentality” may readily conjure up grand mental images. “Monument” has often been used in a modern Western context to denote large, durable, significant public works intentionally constructed to awe or otherwise emotionally impress their visitors. In studies of ancient West Asia, “monumental” is often used interchangeably with “lapidary,” thus projecting a modern Western perspective on ancient material culture. When we hear the word “monument,” we might be immediately tempted to think of great public works of architecture and sculpture like the Pyramids at Giza, the Great Wall of China, Cleopatra’s Needles, or the Lincoln Memorial. It is not wrong to label such things monumental, but is it their form or rather their function that makes them so?
Expanding our search for what really makes things monumental, we might turn to classic works of art or literature: perhaps the Sistine Chapel, the Mona Lisa, The Tale of Genji, or Rumi’s Masnavi. These too might be labeled enduring, public, influential, and certainly large in a metaphorical sense, but are these features what truly make a monument? Fewer of us would jump immediately to an important legal document like the United States Constitution. And yet, according to art historians, the Constitution is more monumental than even the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, American Gothic, To Kill a Mockingbird, and any other piece of art that has become a national treasure in the United States. How can this be the case?
Theoretical work in art history over the last century has sought to redefine monuments as socially embedded things that interact with communities in culturally specific ways. These studies have postulated that a monument is only truly monumental if it successfully produces meaning for a community.Footnote 1 Wu Hung defines monuments as follows:
As scholars have repeatedly stated, a monument, no matter what shape or material, serves to preserve memory, to structure history, to immortalize a figure, event, or institution, to consolidate a community or a public, to define a center for political gatherings or ritual communication, to relate the living to the dead, and to connect the present with the future.
Monuments are thus defined by “how they oriented people both physically and mentally, how they exemplified common moral and value systems, how they supported and affected the constitution of collective identities and specific political discourses” (Reference WuWu 1995, 14). More simply, James Osborne argues that a monument should be defined as “an object, or suite of objects, that possesses … special meaning to a community of people” (Reference Osborne and OsborneOsborne 2014, 4). He then defines monumentality as “an ongoing, constantly renegotiated relationship between thing and person, between the monument(s) and the person(s) experiencing the monument” (Reference Osborne and OsborneOsborne 2014, 3).Footnote 2 In short, a monument is anything that produces special meaning for a community as they interact with it, regardless of that thing’s size, material, durability, or even its publicity.Footnote 3 The defining feature of monuments is their potential to produce communal meaning in various ways – in other words, their monumentality.
Osborne illustrates his definitions using the Guennol Lioness. This piece is probably to be identified as a work of the proto-Elamite culture dating to roughly 3,000 BCE. The original publication of the object described it – correctly, in Osborne’s opinion – as monumental. The lioness is also only 3.25 inches long. What, then, justifies its claim to the label of “monument”? Osborne suggests that the answer lies in the relationship between the object and its current cultural context. Regardless of the lioness’ original context – which is considerably difficult to reconstruct – modern scholars and laypeople alike have chosen to treat the object as a monument. It was even auctioned off in 2007 for the startling sum of $57.2 million – a monumental value to ascribe to such a minuscule object. In short, the Guennol Lioness is a monument because modern scholars, auctioneers, and its current owners – a veritable community of different people – imagine it to be so (Reference Osborne and OsborneOsborne 2014, 1–2, 13–14). The current audience may very well think the object more monumental than did the proto-Elamites.
The Guennol Lioness may admittedly be a case of moderns making a mountain out of a molehill or, in this case, a monument out of a bauble. If it seems unimpressive, compare it to the example of Stonehenge. No modern visitor to the site of Stonehenge would consider it anything but a monument, and yet debate rages as to what it may have signified to its prehistoric audience. Ultimately, these debates are immaterial to the classification of Stonehenge as a monument, however. It is monumental precisely because it produces meaning for communities, even though that meaning and those communities have changed. This, in the words of Richard Bradley, is “what visitors to Stonehenge on midsummer morning recognize and what its excavators seem to forget,” namely, that “experience is at the heart of how monuments are used” (Reference BradleyBradley 1993, 47). Stonehenge is monumental precisely because moderns imagine it to be so, and so did its prehistoric constructors – if the labor invested into its construction and layout are any indication.Footnote 4
While various cultural productions may be intended to provoke certain communal engagements, they are only monumental when a community really does engage them, interpret them, and use them to redefine itself. In light of that, Jefferson had better watch his step in his memorial, but the Constitution can rest easily as America’s premiere monument. The people of the United States – constituted as a communal “We” by the preamble of the text – are almost constantly engaged in interpreting this document. At the highest level of interpretation – the Supreme Court – this engagement can even affect the values and identity of the nation as a whole. Whether one sits to the right or left of the aisle, the Constitution is regularly trotted out as a symbol of party values and platforms. Though different groups disagree on how precisely to interpret the Constitution, they very notably agree that it should be interpreted and that this interpretation has meaning for everyone included in “We the people.” These communal acts of interpretation – even when the resultant interpretations do not agree – still create some wider social cohesion. In other words, the aptly named Constitution of the United States does in fact constitute a community of people as “We the people of the United States of America.” It is America’s monument par excellence. In recent history, one monumental text has risen in challenge to the Constitution – the Ten Commandments.
The Monumentality of Texts: The Decalogue and the Constitution
In 2005, the United States Supreme Court heard arguments concerning the display of a monument bearing an abbreviated version of the Ten Commandments in a courthouse in McCreary County, Kentucky. This was neither the first nor the last such case the Supreme Court heard. Why had a relatively short text composed in ancient Palestine caused such fanfare? What sort of power did the text have that necessitated a ruling – and a close ruling at thatFootnote 5 – from the highest court in a modern nation? Surprisingly, both the majority and the dissenting opinions were agreed on the answer to this question: they both accepted that the Ten Commandments are monumental. This did not mean that the justices observed correctly that this version of the Ten Commandments had been carved large in stone and publicly displayed, as many would misconstrue the meaning of the term “monumental.” Rather, even if they did not use the exact language of archaeologists and art historians, the Supreme Court recognized that the Ten Commandments display in McCreary County was functionally monumental. The text was produced and presented to provoke active engagement on the part of the local community. This community was intended to interact with the monument to make meaning for themselves. The nature of this meaning was the quandary that faced the court.
In order to determine the text’s meaning, the court addressed aspects of it that few in the public – and few among biblical scholars – would typically consider. Rather than addressing their form or even verbal content, the Supreme Court questioned how the surrounding community related to the Ten Commandments monument and especially what the text meant in the specific context of the courthouse. That is, in order to determine what viewers of the Ten Commandments might understand to be their purpose, the court needed to analyze not the text alone but also its context and the sequence of events surrounding its erection as a monument. In other words, this case was not so much a question about the Ten Commandments monument as it was about its monumentality. Though both accepted that the Ten Commandments were a monument, the majority and dissenting opinions provided two separate accounts of what made the Ten Commandments monumental in McCreary County.
Writing for the majority, Justice Souter argued that in determining the meaning of the monument, “purpose needs to be taken seriously … and needs to be understood in light of context” (McCreary County, Kentucky, et al. v. American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky et al. 2005, 844, 874). On this basis, he concluded that this particular Ten Commandments display monumentalized ideological support for a particular religion – Christianity. He noted that the initial dedication of the display was attended by a Christian pastor, who publicly declared that religious principles were the foundation for civic ethics. The text was secondarily contextualized within a display linking it to governmental texts that affirmed the existence of God. Finally, the display was recontextualized within an exhibit dedicated to the “Foundations of American Law.” This final display was deemed incapable of erasing the monument’s prior history. It was thus a failed attempt to present the Ten Commandments in a secular light. Accordingly, the court ruled that this display still amounted to support for a particular religious outlook. The function of the text was thus determined by not only its words but also its ceremonial inauguration, its presentation to the public, its context within the courthouse, and its history. Souter thus outlined an acceptable method for determining a text’s monumentality and its socially embedded meaning. This method made almost no appeal to the actual words of the text.
Justice Scalia, on the other hand, appealed in his dissenting opinion to the broader cultural background of the text. He argued that the monument also had to be understood in light of other receptions of its discourse. On this basis, he asserted that the Ten Commandments did not appeal to any one religious tradition but rather to several through its acknowledgment of a common creator. According to Scalia, the Ten Commandments were recognized as God-given by Christians, Jews, and Muslims – the three largest religions in the United States. This display of the Ten Commandments did not monumentalize a religion so much as they monumentalized a person. Scalia concluded that “publicly honoring the Ten Commandments is thus … indistinguishable from publicly honoring God” (McCreary County, Kentucky, et al. v. American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky et al. 2005 Scalia, dissenting). Though it was entirely unintentional, Scalia’s opinion echoes that of Tiglath-pileser III in a similar case of monument display in Gaza in the eighth century BCE. In one of his annals, he wrote of this monument, “I set it up in the palace of Gaza, and I counted it as one of the gods of their land” (Reference Berlejung and MayBerlejung 2012, 155; Reference TadmorTadmor 1994, 141, 179 Summary Inscription 4:11’, 8:17’). Publicly honoring the stele was thus to be indistinguishable from publicly honoring Tiglath-pileser, even as though he were a god. While his appeal to the history of religions left something to be desired, Scalia rightly posited that monumentality must also be historically situated in a broader reception history of the same discourse. He even inadvertently appealed to the Iron Age reception of monuments akin to the Decalogue.
What was really at issue in this case, then? Whatever the precise meaning of the Ten Commandments was in the context of the McCreary County Courthouse, the problem remains that the text was being enshrined as an American monument in a civil context. Displayed alongside other “Foundations of American Law,” the Decalogue was entered into a competition with other monumental texts used to constitute American civic identity – the Constitution foremost among them (Reference WattsWatts 2004). The stakes in this case were thus much larger than simply a question of what was monumentalized by this specific iteration of the Ten Commandments. The question lurking behind this was which monumental texts should the United States government use to constitute its societal values and norms? Should the Ten Commandments be allowed onto the same field as texts like the Constitution?
This study will advance an approach to the Ten Commandments that will make this foray into Supreme Court opinions particularly relevant. Leaving its American context behind, I will argue that the text was designed as a cultural monument in each of its major appearances in the Hebrew Bible. That is, the text was composed as well as strategically edited to engage the communities within which it was embedded and to provoke them to use it to make special meaning. In the case of the Decalogue, that special meaning primarily concerned the kingship of God and his people. Put another way, the Decalogue answers the question: whom does God rule? An implicit understanding of this may underlie the great controversy the text caused in modern America. To answer this question in an ancient context, the scribes responsible for the different iterations of the Decalogue drew upon the discourse of contemporary Levantine monuments – especially a particular class of artifacts that I label “I Am” monuments. Therefore, though separated in time by some thousands of years, the Supreme Court’s approach to this issue is instructive for an analysis of the Decalogue in its original sociocultural context as well.
Depicted Monuments and Manuscripts: Building Monuments with Words
Many studies of monuments and monumentality emphasize materiality. And materiality does matter. Even in the case of texts – like the Constitution – so much of what they communicate is bound up with their material, medium, aesthetic features, the spaces they occupy, and the ways in which we physically interact with them. Almost no one would read the phrase “We the People” on a Post-it note as opposed to an aged parchment and experience the same emotional impact. But what if the materiality of the monument exists only in the world of a narrative? How are we to approach an artifact that only exists in a depiction?
Though their form still matters, monumental texts are unlike other monuments in that they are not limited to a single instantiation. The Constitution is still defined by its verbal content, and copies of the original – especially on media more significant than Post-its – retain some if not all of its social power. Similarly, the Decalogue is not a singular artifact. It is a collection of verses repeated in slightly different forms in two places in the Hebrew Bible, and it has taken various forms both within the biblical narrative and in its subsequent history. Nevertheless, it can still be analyzed as a monument, in that it provokes communal engagement and meaning-making. But it is a monument made of words rather than stone. Instantiations of it – perhaps stretching back to its original form – have been made of stone, but that is not what made it monumental. Monumental texts affect the communal imagination in the same ways as other monumental artifacts, and it is that potential to capture imagination that renders all such things monumental.
However, the ancient scribes responsible for the Decalogue did not leave its monumentality to chance. In the ancient world, one particular strategy for capturing the imagination was the literary depiction of an artifact, whether real or imagined, which could prompt audiences to engage the words of the text as though they were such an artifact. This is precisely what we will find in the narratives surrounding the Decalogue. It is always reproduced alongside depictions of various inscribed artifacts: stelae, tablets, tablet boxes, amulets, and scrolls. What’s more, we will discover over the course of this study that those depictions were periodically updated to maintain the relevance of the Decalogue as older inscribed artifacts fell out of use. This is part of what makes monumental texts so powerful. As texts, they can shapeshift into new forms to engage new communities in meaningful ways. It still matters what instantiations of textual monuments are made of – in terms of their physical materials – but they are ultimately made of words.
In Wu’s study of monumentality in ancient China, he develops his definition of monumentality by first analyzing not specific artifacts but rather literary depictions of them. His study of the Nine Tripods exemplifies how to approach materiality that exists primarily as depicted in a narrative, and so the Nine Tripods provide an essential model for approaching the Ten Commandments. The Nine Tripods were a set of bronze vessels cast to commemorate the creation of the Xia dynasty – China’s legendary first dynasty. They were utilized in rituals devoted to the imperial ancestors, and possessing them granted the holder the right to rule as emperor. These objects and the rituals they were used in were so sacred that they were kept hidden from public view, but the accounts relayed to the public about the current place of the tripods still allowed these objects to function in the communities in which they were embedded. Even hidden from view, the Nine Tripods still prompted several successive communities of Chinese citizens to reconstruct their beliefs and values as they acclimatized to new dynastic rulers.
The Nine Tripods also probably never existed. The primary evidence for this is that they appear to morph in size and shape in literary depictions over time. These changes are not simply the result of competing traditions or conflicting accounts. Rather, the changes line up with broader cultural shifts in the production of monuments. The Nine Tripods were always depicted as the most important type of bronze monument of the contemporary age. The literary description had to change in order to preserve the relevance and social power of the Nine Tripods. Wu thus chose the Nine Tripods as his paradigmatic example of a Chinese monument. These objects were monumental because they successfully produced special meaning for the communities in which they were embedded. They accomplished this solely as they were depicted and described, because there were probably never any material bronzes to be encountered otherwise. Far from diminishing the monumentality of the Nine Tripods, this imagined materiality actually enhanced it because their monumentality could be updated in each subsequent depiction as the monuments in the surrounding culture changed (Reference WuWu 1995, 6–12). We shall see that the Decalogue evolved in a similar fashion as the monuments in its sociocultural context changed.
Wu’s study of the Nine Tripods provides an important model for integrating manuscript traditions with material and epigraphic remains. The issues of connecting archaeological evidence to the Hebrew Bible are only sometimes problematized and often elided. While this difficulty often appears unique to the field of biblical studies, other fields face the same problem and can provide some creative solutions. Wu highlights that manuscript traditions provide an essential window into the reception of material and epigraphic remains. The example of the Nine Tripods is so fascinating because their monumentality was updated to reflect the monuments of new periods. This provides significant evidence for their reception as monuments. If the communities interacting with them did not accept them as monumental, there would be no need to revise these accounts over time. In the ancient Levant, our primary evidence for monumentality is in material remains. Only a few texts exist that explicitly describe monument reception in addition to production. The Hebrew Bible and its evolving account of the Decalogue will prove to be an invaluable piece of evidence in this regard.
Broadly speaking, depicted materiality was an essential means of constructing monuments within narratives in ancient West Asia and in the Hebrew Bible. In depictions like those of the Decalogue, “the words … evoke, and in some sense create, a monument,” to quote Rebecca Reference PyatkevichPyatkevich (2009, 162). Anne Kathrine de Hemmer Gudme argues that the tabernacle account in Exodus 25–40 accomplishes a similar function, for example, based on a comparison to the Egyptian Book of the Temple. The Book of the Temple is a literary depiction of an ideal temple. Like the Nine Tripods, the Book of the Temple was thought to have originated in Egypt’s legendary past. Similarly, the tabernacle is framed within an account from Israel’s legendary past, and its architectural descriptions allow its users to reconstruct it within their minds. This is not to say that things like the Tabernacle and the Decalogue definitely did not exist in some form or other, but rather that those originals were ultimately immaterial to their monumentality. It was as texts that these monuments became truly powerful. They are monumental precisely because their imagined materiality made them meaningful to particular communities, even though they primarily existed as literary depictions (Reference Gudme and de HemmerGudme 2014, 8–9).Footnote 6
Levantine “I Am” Monuments: The Inspirations for the Depiction of the Decalogue
If the Decalogue is a depiction of a monument, what were its composers depicting? While such depictions could be of a specific artifact, it is more likely that the Decalogue’s composers were drawing from known traditions of monumental discourse – that is, the common visual styles, ritual practices, formats, and stock phrases used when making monuments. This was the standard means of creating literary monuments in Ancient West Asia and North Africa. For example, the Foundation Deposit of Amenhotep son of Hapu from Egypt existed only in a literary narrative; its depiction was not based on a specific foundation deposit but rather on the discourse common to contemporary Egyptian foundation deposits (Reference AssmannAssmann 1992, 61). Similarly, Mesopotamia’s entire corpus of “narû literature” drew broadly on the contemporary monumental discourse of narû to build new monuments within the world of the text, rather than limiting their depictions to the discourse of a single example (Reference JonkerJonker 1995, 90–99). In the case of examples like narû-literature or even the Nine Tripods, this had the added benefit of making it possible to update the depicted monument’s depiction over time to ensure that its monumentality stayed current as monuments in the surrounding culture changed. So, what stream of monumental discourse did the composers and editors of the Decalogue draw from? First and foremost, the Decalogue drew upon the discourse of Levantine “I Am” monuments.
The Decalogue opens with the pronouncement “I am Yahweh.” This “I Am” opening for a text was the telltale sign of a particular class of monuments in the ancient Levant – “I Am” monuments. These monuments were inscribed with texts that invariably opened with an “I Am” statement identifying an individual speaking through the monument who would then proceed to propose a communal perspective for his audience to accept. We will see in the course of this study that such inscriptions were only produced during certain historical periods and primarily in the Levant. Their unique “I Am” opening was a clue to their monumentality; it occurred as an opening in no other context. This opening was the key to the authority ascribed to these artifacts. As we shall see in the next chapter, this rendered “I Am” monuments ontologically equivalent to the implied speaker from an emic Levantine perspective. They thus became living reembodiments: substitutes for elites that could speak with the same authority (Reference HogueHogue 2019b).
“But,” the reader may wonder, “could the opening of the Decalogue simply be the consequence of relating the direct speech of God? How else was Yahweh to introduce himself?” As it so happens, this is not the only indication that the Decalogue was adapting Levantine monumental discourse. It also contains violation clauses typical of Levantine “I Am” monuments – restrictions concerning engagement with images, the inscribed name, and associated ritual practice. The socially oriented commandments – such as “Thou shalt not murder!” or “Thou shalt not covet!” – are also encountered in other “I Am” inscriptions. Two “I Am” inscriptions in Hieroglyphic Luwian – CEKKE and BULGARMADEN – even contain longer social contracts incumbent on their target communities. Furthermore, the Hebrew Bible explicitly imagines the Decalogue as inscribed on a monumental object, though we must leave for later the question of whether this was always a set of stone tablets or perhaps something else. Most notably, the Decalogue contains the one and only instance in the Hebrew Bible of Yahweh collectively addressing the people of Israel without mediation. We will see that the primary purpose of Levantine “I Am” monuments was to permit an important individual – usually a king – to directly address a populace and reshape them. Viewing these parallels in concert suggests that the Decalogue really is imitating the monumental discourse of Levantine “I Am” monuments (Reference HogueHogue 2019c).
No previous research has outright labeled the Decalogue a monument nor analyzed it with a model based on monumentality. However, the connection between the Decalogue and Levantine monumental inscriptions is not a new one. Arno Poebel first noted this in 1932 as a part of Das Appositionell Bestimmte Pronomen Der 1. Pers. Sing. in den Westsemitischen Inschriften und im Alten Testament (Reference PoebelPoebel 1932, 53–57). In 1951, Umberto Cassuto noted the same in his commentary on the book of Exodus (Reference CassutoCassuto 1951, 76, 241). Nahum Sarna later expanded on this observation by suggesting that the Decalogue’s similarity to monumental inscriptions – especially royal inscriptions – was a means of imbuing the text with authority (Reference SarnaSarna 1991, 15, 109). Apart from making these conclusions very briefly – and mostly in his endnotes – Sarna made no attempt to further develop the connection and neither did his predecessors.
Part of the reluctance to search for parallels to the Decalogue in monumental discourse may stem from the overemphasis on cultic or religious contexts for the text’s use and origin as opposed to political ones (cf. Reference MowinckelMowinckel 1927; Reference AltAlt 1934; Reference MendenhallMendenhall 1954; Reference BeyerlinBeyerlin 1961; Reference GerstenbergerGerstenberger 1965). For its own part, the Hebrew Bible regularly conceives of Yahweh as a king, so we should be unsurprised to discover adaptations of royal rhetoric in the divine sphere. Such a conception of a deity as a monarch was not unique to ancient Israel, but it may have been unique in its intense application. So strong was the identification of Yahweh as king that he even received some typical trappings of ancient West Asian monarchs that were denied to the kings of Israel and Judah (Reference BrettlerBrettler 1989, 165). In the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy in particular, Yahweh is shown defeating his enemies and rescuing his people much as an ancient West Asian king would do with the support of the gods. Yahweh here combines the royal role of conqueror and the divine role of patron. The story of Sinai is then not simply about a theophany or a covenant. Rather, it is about the enthronement of Yahweh as king of Israel (Reference SmithSmith 2016, 18–19). It should come as no surprise that monuments would be erected to commemorate such an enthronement, or that the biblical writers would utilize known monumental discourse in order to depict those monuments. The Decalogue utilized the discourse of “I Am” monuments to develop the Israelite conception of a divine king.
Analyzing the Decalogue as a monument necessitates a broader approach than has yet been advanced by biblical scholarship. The meaning of the text and its purpose must be determined not on the basis of verbal content alone, but also in light of its context – how it was depicted, how it was integrated into the Hebrew Bible’s narrative world, and how the community was depicted as engaging with it. Additionally, these elements of the text must be analyzed in historical sequence, both in terms of the revisions of the text preserved in the Hebrew Bible and in terms of a history of monumental discourse in the neighboring cultures contemporary with ancient Israel. Only then can we fully understand the monumentality of the Decalogue – that is, its social power in its original context and the quality that has allowed it to continue capturing communities’ imaginations ever since.
Approaching the Decalogue’s Monumentality
To analyze the Decalogue’s monumentality, we must first understand how communities interact with monuments more broadly. The examples of the Guennol Lioness and Stonehenge discussed earlier are important reminders that monuments primarily function by capturing the collective imagination (Reference Kahn and KirchKahn and Kirch 2014, 223). Monuments do not contain meaning but rather provoke its imaginative construction. Because such acts of imagination undergird the function of monuments, Timothy Pauketat suggests that prompting imagination is really the defining feature of monuments. He argues:
They inspire, motivate, and actively engage people by disproportionately articulating social relationships to other places, substances, moving celestial objects, and the great beyond … Indeed, I also suggest that such qualities are the defining elements of monuments worldwide to varying degrees. Monuments, to be monuments, must be more than big memorials. They must possess the qualities of monumentality, the foremost of which is the imaginary. We do not merely see them and remember. We feel them and imagine.
Monuments are artifacts that prompt communities of people to imaginatively construct meaning in ways particular to their historical and cultural context. Monumentality is the potential of such objects to provoke community-scale imagination that results in the construction, experience, or maintenance of special communal meaning.
By connecting monumentality to imagination, we may also highlight that monumentality is not strictly related to a monument’s meaning but rather its affordance of meaning. Monuments do not have definitive meanings. Instead, they make certain meanings possible to construct as communities engage them. As stated earlier, monumentality is the potential to provoke collective imagination that results in meaning-making. The meanings assigned to monuments are thus primarily possibilities. They are entirely dependent upon the interpretation of those visiting the monument. Nevertheless, because “people’s encounter with [a monument] will be constrained or enabled in distinctive and definite ways,” these meanings can be safely reconstructed at least in part (Reference Pauketat and OsbornePauketat 2014, 432). They depend on both the specific parameters of the monument – whether its discourse, physical attributes, setting, or associated performances – and the reception of those parameters in a given sociohistorical context.
A caveat of analyzing monuments in light of their affordances is that their monumentality is not determined solely by their creators. Things can be intentionally fashioned to promote the kinds of interactions that monumentalize, but many such productions fail, and some things that were never meant to be monuments are made into monuments by their local communities. Demonstrating monumentality in an ancient context must therefore center on an analysis of the interactions prompted by the form, but that form alone cannot be taken as evidence for an intent that would monumentalize. Thus, in the case of literary monuments like the Decalogue, we should of course consider the scribe’s agenda, as much as it is accessible. But this alone is insufficient to label the Decalogue a monumental text. It must be paired with a broader study of the monumental discourse being adapted by the scribe, as well as the evidence for later editing and reception that suggests continued engagement with the text. These show that a community actually used the Decalogue as a monument in addition to its composers and editors intending that it function as one.
The monuments I address in this study primarily prompted communal engagement that resulted in social formation. Social formation “refers broadly to the construction and configuration of social relations” and is a “dynamic, constructive, relational process” (Reference LevtowLevtow 2008, 33).Footnote 7 Concerning Levantine monuments in particular, Seth Sanders argues that “the inscriptions propose new kinds of political order, and they do it in a form designed to help create them” (Reference SandersSanders 2009, 118). Such artifacts could configure social relations even if their users disagreed concerning their specific meanings. Catherine Bell argues that “the most symbolic action, even the basic symbols of a community’s ritual life, can be very unclear to participants or interpreted by them in very dissimilar ways.” Nevertheless, such symbols “still promote ‘social’ solidarity,” and this “social consensus does not depend upon shared information and beliefs” but is rather “promoted because they rarely make any interpretation explicit” (Reference BellBell 1992, 183). Much like the Constitution, the act of interpretation is most important in social formation, rather than the content of those interpretations. Even if they bring people together to dispute, monuments are still thereby producing social relations.
History of Monuments and Monumentalities
If the foregoing definitions seem vague to the reader, this is intentional on the part of the theorists developing them. According to Wu, monumentality is never transcultural or transhistorical, so any attempt at a general definition will result in “empty words until they are historically defined” (Reference WuWu 1995, 4). Monumentality is thus an historical property; it cannot be applied synchronically or ahistorically. Zainab Bahrani, for instance, argues that “monuments are temporal things. They belong to a specific time, and they are legible within that specific time” (Reference BahraniBahrani 2014, 234). Osborne similarly emphasizes that monumentality can only be understood “in the context of its relationship to the community of which it forms a part” (Reference Osborne and OsborneOsborne 2014, 4). In other words, we can only develop specific definitions of “monument” and “monumentality” within specific sociohistorical contexts. To accomplish this, Wu suggests a method of producing a history of monumentality alongside a history of monuments.
A history of monuments attempts to document diachronic shifts in the discourse of monuments, while a history of monumentality focuses on the evolution of the processes involved in a community’s construction of meaning through monuments. Wu argues that combining these approaches makes it possible to address questions of how forms were selected and employed in ritual and religious contexts, how they oriented people both physically and mentally, how they supported and affected social formation, and how they suited individual ambitions and needs (Reference WuWu 1995, 14). The peoples of ancient West Asia used different types of monuments for different purposes. New eras saw the invention of new types of monuments, but also the repurposing of preexisting monuments to fulfill new functions. A history of monuments and a history of monumentality seek to periodize such changes.
We cannot proceed with an analysis of the Decalogue in light of the foregoing if we presume a general definition of ancient West Asian “monument” or “monumentality.” In addition to relating to a particular community within a particular time and place, to truly label an object monumental we must also demonstrate that it related to its community, utilizing recognizable monumental discourse from that time and place. To do this, we must construct a history of monuments from the surrounding region in order to determine how monuments and their monumentalities changed over time. Against this backdrop we may begin a study of the history of the Decalogue’s monumentality, which also shifted over time. It is not enough to say that the Decalogue is a monument simply because it affords meaning for various communities. We can only analyze its monumentality by comparing its discourse with that of other monuments from ancient West Asia.
This is also why this study cannot escape the thorny issue of dating, though I fully recognize not every reader will agree with my own approach. A history of monuments and history of monumentality provide a sophisticated means for connecting epigraphic remains to manuscript traditions, but it also implies a close historical proximity. Apart from careful art historical records, monumental discourse cannot survive past the period when it is actually in use. Recall that the Nine Tripods transformed in depictions as the monuments in the broader culture changed. This was in part because these new forms were more meaningful to contemporary audiences. But this was also because the older monuments and especially communal interactions with them were inaccessible to contemporary writers. While monuments are expected to last longer in cultural memory than other artifacts, this is not in fact the case. Osborne argues that “monuments’ invocations of past individuals and events is counterintuitively frail and vulnerable to modification” (Reference OsborneOsborne 2017, 19). Instead of preserving the same message over time, monuments are used by new generations with new social conventions and assumptions to produce new meanings. In fact, unless this process is regularly repeated, the object can and likely will cease to function as a monument (Reference GilibertGilibert 2011, 114).
All cultural memory is produced via creative acts of imagination rather than accurate reconstructions of the past. Bradley argues that monuments “required a greater act of the imagination: a process of recreating a past that was really beyond recall and making it play an unrehearsed part in the present” (Reference BradleyBradley 1993, 129). In her study of the monuments of Deir el Medina, Lynn Meskell reaches a similar conclusion, arguing: “Remembering entails evoking a concrete image within the mind, fostered by the imagination: memory and imagination are to some degree interchangeable” (Reference Meskell, Van Dyke and AlcockMeskell 2003, 48). More broadly, Patrick Hutton has described cultural memory in general as “a process of imaginative reconstruction, in which we integrate specific images formulated in the present into particular contexts identified with the past” (Reference HuttonHutton 1993, 78). If engagement with monuments persists over generations, their “original meaning” is not truly remembered but rather reconstructed by each successive generation in light of contemporary concerns. Unless some other account is preserved, only the monument itself remains as witness to its meaning, but that meaning may be interpreted in radically different ways by subsequent audiences.
How then could the monumental discourse of the Decalogue – which I will argue originates in some cases in the Iron Age – have survived? Two vectors of transmission are most often considered – oral and textual tradition. The first is spoken of within the Hebrew Bible itself. For example, in Josh 4:6–7, after having a monument erected, Joshua commands the people to give a patterned account of the monument “when your children ask in time to come, ‘What do these stones mean to you?’” Alternatively, such discourse may be preserved in textual form, as was the case for the Nine Tripods and ultimately for the Decalogue. Melissa Ramos has introduced some much-needed nuance to this discussion recently in proposing that such traditions were transmitted ritually (Reference RamosRamos 2021, 28–31, 93–98). That is, we should not imagine a purely oral or textual vector of transmission for traditions like the Decalogue. Indeed, both oral and written traditions are passed on most successfully in the context of ritual practice; they are not separate vectors of transmission but rather both components of ritual transmission.
If the Decalogue was intended to function as an “I Am” monument, then it would have been transmitted as some combination of oral and textual tradition embedded within specific rituals. In the course of this study, we will see that “I Am” monuments were always embedded in rituals, and these often included ritual acts of both inscription and oration. Both oral tradition and textual tradition were components of the ritual transmission of monumental discourse in the ancient Levant. Again, the scribes responsible for the Decalogue did not leave these connections to chance. In the narratives surrounding the Decalogue, we find depictions of rituals such as those practiced alongside other “I Am” monuments. Most importantly, these biblical rituals explicitly prescribe both the inscription and recitation of the text. That was how it was to be ritually transmitted.
In general, I will speak of the composition and editing of the Decalogue in terms of writing, while other scholars might favor an oral transmission of the tradition in its earliest forms. What is most important to emphasize, however, is that the composers and editors of these traditions were depicting monuments as they knew them via ritual traditions. They were not recovering historical knowledge that was otherwise inaccessible to them. The biblical composers will undoubtedly have depicted the material and ritual culture of their own time or that of living reporters. When the editors of these accounts updated them, they did so according to their own perception and experience of monuments and the rituals attached to them. Otherwise, we must propose that the composers and editors of these passages were recalling traditions of monuments without any means of recollection, or that they were accidentally reinventing earlier attested practices at a later date. Both options are less likely than assuming that the communities involved in composing and editing the Decalogue utilized their own experience in their literary activity. And so – in addition to factors like language, archaeology, and more general history – art history has an important role to play in dating the composition of biblical texts that depict material culture and ritual engagements with it.
The Structure of This Study
This study will argue that the Decalogue was depicted in the Hebrew Bible as a Levantine “I Am” monument. Moreover, this study will suggest that the reception of the Decalogue as a monument can be confirmed by strategic changes in its depiction. Just as the Nine Tripods were depicted differently in different time periods to better match the monuments of each new writer’s present, the Decalogue’s monumentality shifted in Exodus and Deuteronomy as its editors updated it to better match the prestige monumental inscriptions of their respective times. This is the history of the Decalogue’s monumentality.
Chapter 1 serves as a history of monuments to act as the background to the history of the Decalogue’s monumentality. I will focus on the discourse of what I call Levantine “I Am” monuments: monuments that include inscriptions opening with the phrase “I am so-and-so.” I argue that this corpus of inscriptions provided the cultural models that were adapted by the Decalogue. To structure my analysis, I propose that Levantine monuments were designed to communicate in three ways: verbally, aesthetically, and spatially. By considering historical trends among ninety exemplars of “I Am” monuments, it is possible to periodize their verbal, aesthetic, and spatial discourse. This will serve as a baseline for comparison with the Decalogue, allowing us to reach new conclusions about when it was produced and edited and why.
Chapter 2 opens with a new translation of the Decalogue in light of its connection to “I Am” monuments. The following commentary analyzes the verbal communication strategies adapted by the Decalogue and the depicted aesthetic and spatial strategies juxtaposed to it in the book of Exodus. I will demonstrate that the Decalogue was originally produced using the discourse of Levantine “I Am” monuments from the ninth–eighth centuries and monumental installations in the kingdom of Israel. While the material in Exodus has seen further transformation, it nevertheless preserves a depiction of the Decalogue closest to ninth- or eighth-century monumental traditions.
Chapter 3 will turn to the place of the Decalogue within the preexilic discourse of the book of Deuteronomy. Especially by utilizing the methods of innerbiblical discourse, I demonstrate that the Decalogue in Deuteronomy was strategically edited and connected to new depictions of material culture. Following previous work on the history of Deuteronomy, I argue that these changes began in the kingdom of Judah and were partially motivated by changes in monumentality during the seventh and sixth centuries. Levantine practices of monument-making underwent dramatic transformations during this period, and the editors of Deuteronomy appear to have been remarkably sensitive to those changes. In analyzing these changes, I suggest some additional modifications to typical translations of the Deuteronomic Decalogue.
Chapter 4 will turn to the Decalogue in relationship to late monarchic and postmonarchic discourse in both Exodus and Deuteronomy. Some material in these books suggests a growing fixation on small-scale inscribed artifacts like amulets and scrolls as well as personal religious practices to accompany more communal ones. While these features of material culture were already growing in significance during the late monarchic period in Judah, they became especially relevant after the fall of the Judahite monarchy when large-scale monument production ceased to be a viable means of social formation. In the case of the Decalogue, this culminated in its transformation into a portable text that was not limited to a particular locality. Even some of the verbal dimension of the Decalogue was reinterpreted in order to distance the text from earlier monumental discourse. The result was a radical recasting of textual authority that laid the foundation for scripturalization.
In the Conclusion, I review the history of monuments and monumentality presented in the prior chapters and point forward to how that history set the stage for the interpretive movements that followed. Those early attempts to imbue a text with divine authority laid the foundation for the emergence of Jewish and Christian Scripture as well as for competition between different communities interpreting the text. In spite or perhaps because of this competition, the Decalogue achieved as Scripture that which no other monument ever has: seemingly perennial relevance. It is an eternal monument to a divine king.
