Jews and Christians affirm the Ten Commandments (the Decalogue) as a foundational summary of divine moral law, given to Moses at Sinai and recorded in two versions (Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5). They open with the claims of God (worship of one God, no idols, reverence for the divine name, the Sabbath), and turn to duties among people: honouring parents, and prohibitions of murder, adultery, theft, false witness, and covetousness. Both traditions receive them as words spoken by God and inscribed on tablets of stone.
Modern historical-critical scholarship has drawn attention to a third, less familiar version of commandments at Exodus 34:14-26, a list of primarily ritual and cultic instructions that the nineteenth-century biblical critic Julius Wellhausen argued was an older core sometimes called the Ritual Decalogue, distinct from and possibly earlier than the more ethically weighted Decalogue of Exodus 20; this theory, still discussed though not universally accepted among biblical scholars, points to a more complex textual history behind the commandments than the traditional account of a single unified giving at Sinai, a critical question the traditions themselves generally set aside in favor of their received account of the text.