Who Wrote the Ten Commandments?

“Who wrote the Ten Commandments?” sounds like a question with one answer, but it holds three. Who spoke them at Sinai? Who engraved them on the stone tablets? And who wrote down the story, and the laws around it, that we read today? The Bible gives a different answer to each, and they fit together better than they first seem to.

The clearest statement comes at the end of Moses’ forty days on the mountain:

When he finished speaking with him on Mount Sinai, he gave Moses the two tablets of the covenant, stone tablets, written with God’s finger.

Exodus 31:18

The short answer: the Bible says God wrote the Ten Commandments, with his own finger, on two stone tablets. It says Moses wrote down the covenant words and the laws that surround them, and that he gave a spoken retelling of the ten in Deuteronomy. The second set of tablets is described in two ways, and scholars disagree about how the texts reached the form we have. For the chapter itself, see What Is Exodus 20? and for all ten in one place, The Ten Commandments: What Each One Means.

Start with the first set, because the Bible is unusually direct about it. Before Moses climbed the mountain, God announced what he would give him:

The LORD said to Moses, “Come up to me on the mountain, and stay here, and I will give you the stone tablets with the law and the commands that I have written, that you may teach them.”

Exodus 24:12

Moses came down carrying them, and the narrator stops to describe them:

Moses turned, and went down from the mountain, with the two tablets of the covenant in his hand; tablets that were written on both their sides. They were written on one side and on the other. The tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, engraved on the tablets.

Exodus 32:15–16

Moses repeats the claim in Deuteronomy: the tablets were “written with God’s finger” and carried “all the words which the LORD spoke with you on the mountain” (9:10). The same phrase turns up in Egypt, where it means a display of power: when the plague of gnats came, Pharaoh’s magicians told him, “This is God’s finger” (Exodus 8:19).

The ten were also spoken before they were written. “God spoke all these words” (Exodus 20:1) opens the list, and Moses later reminds Israel that God spoke to the whole assembly out of the fire and “added no more” (Deuteronomy 5:22). Only these ten were given to everyone at once. Every other law came to the people through Moses.

Jewish tradition took the claim of divine authorship so seriously that the Mishnah lists the tablets and the writing among the things God made at twilight at the end of creation week (Avot 5:6). That is a teaching, not a historical record, but it shows how firmly the tradition denied a human hand.

The second set is where the question gets interesting. After the golden calf, Moses broke the first tablets, and God told him to cut new ones (the story is told in Why Did Moses Break the Tablets?). Then comes a promise about who will write:

The LORD said to Moses, “Chisel two stone tablets like the first. I will write on the tablets the words that were on the first tablets, which you broke.

Exodus 34:1

Deuteronomy agrees: “He wrote on the tablets, according to the first writing, the ten commandments” (10:4). But a few verses later in Exodus, the text says something harder to pin down:

The LORD said to Moses, “Write these words; for in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel.” He was there with the LORD forty days and forty nights; he neither ate bread, nor drank water. He wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant, the ten commandments.

Exodus 34:27–28

God tells Moses to “write these words.” Then comes “he wrote on the tablets,” with no name given. Most Jewish and Christian readers take the “he” as God, because Exodus 34:1 and Deuteronomy 10:4 say so. Others point out that the nearest “he” in the paragraph is Moses, who has just been told to write.

The two readings need not collide. The same chapter can say that the words were God’s covenant, that Moses was commanded to write the covenant words, and that God inscribed the tablets. Whichever reading you prefer, no part of the story gives Moses credit for composing the ten. Every account presents him as receiving them.

If God wrote the tablets, what did Moses write? Quite a lot. After the ten were spoken, God gave Moses further laws, and Moses recorded them before sealing the covenant:

Moses wrote all the LORD’s words, then rose up early in the morning and built an altar at the base of the mountain, with twelve pillars for the twelve tribes of Israel.

Exodus 24:4

He then read “the book of the covenant” to the people, and they agreed to it (24:7). By the end of his life, Moses is said to have written down “this law” and handed it to the priests who carried the ark (Deuteronomy 31:9). Jewish and Christian tradition has long treated the first five books as his.

The Ten Commandments also appear a second time, in Moses’ own voice. In Deuteronomy, forty years after Sinai, he stands east of the Jordan and says, “Hear, Israel, the statutes and the ordinances which I speak in your ears today” (5:1). His version differs from Exodus 20 in a handful of places, especially in the Sabbath commandment, and the differences are set out in Ten Commandments: Exodus 20 vs Deuteronomy 5.

The New Testament holds both claims together without strain. Jesus can say, “Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’” (Mark 7:10), and John can write that “the law was given through Moses” (John 1:17). The law comes through Moses, from God.

Many scholars ask a different question: how did the texts of Exodus and Deuteronomy come to read as they do? Readers differ, usually according to what they already believe about Scripture.

• The traditional view holds that Moses received the ten at Sinai and that Exodus and Deuteronomy come from him. Its supporters date Moses to the fifteenth or thirteenth century BC and read the differences between the two chapters as Moses preaching on the same words.
• The critical view holds that Exodus and Deuteronomy took their present shape over a longer period, and that the two slightly different versions of the ten are evidence of that growth. Some scholars think the original list was shorter, with the longer explanations added later.
• A middle view accepts that a core goes back to Moses while later editors shaped the wording, much as other ancient texts were handed on.

The manuscripts do not settle it. No tablet has survived. The oldest copies of the commandments we have are far later: several of the Dead Sea Scrolls preserve Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5, and the Nash Papyrus, a fragment from Egypt dated to the second or first century BC, has a version of the Decalogue that blends wording from both chapters.

Whatever the answer to the scholars’ question, the text itself is plain about what it claims:

The LORD spoke to you out of the middle of the fire: you heard the voice of words, but you saw no form; you only heard a voice. He declared to you his covenant, which he commanded you to perform, even the ten commandments. He wrote them on two stone tablets.

Deuteronomy 4:12–13

See Where Is Mount Sinai? for the place, The Ten Commandments in Hebrew for the language, and The Ten Commandments in Judaism for how the claim has been carried through the centuries.

Who wrote the Ten Commandments, God or Moses?

According to the Bible, God wrote them on the stone tablets, “with God’s finger” (Exodus 31:18; Deuteronomy 9:10). Moses received the tablets, wrote down the covenant and the laws around it, and retold the ten in his own words in Deuteronomy 5.

Did Moses write the Ten Commandments?

The Bible says Moses wrote down the words of the covenant (Exodus 24:4; 34:27), but it presents the ten themselves as written by God. Exodus 34:28 can be read as Moses writing the second set, though most readers take it as God, as in Exodus 34:1 and Deuteronomy 10:4.

Who wrote the second set of Ten Commandments?

Exodus 34:1 and Deuteronomy 10:4 say God wrote them again. Exodus 34:27–28 tells Moses to write the words and then says “he wrote on the tablets,” which some read as Moses. Most readers hold the passages together: God inscribed, and Moses carried and recorded.

What language were the Ten Commandments written in?

The Bible does not say, but the story is told in Hebrew, and the people who received them were Hebrew speakers. The tablets themselves have not survived, so how the letters looked is unknown; the square script used in Hebrew Bibles today came into use many centuries later.

Why does it matter who wrote the Ten Commandments?

Because it settles whose authority they carry. Jews and Christians have held that the ten are God’s words, not human advice, and that is why they have been taught for about three thousand years.