I Was Asked to Rewrite the Ten Commandments. Two Had to Go.

Testing one of history’s most influential moral codes against the ethics of the modern world

Today someone asked me a dangerous question.

“If you were God for a day, and you could rewrite the Ten Commandments, what would you change?”

Oh.

Now we’re talking!

Forget healing the sick, ending all wars, or finally explaining what the hell was going on with the platypus. Apparently I have been granted absolute power over the universe, and my first job is to tell Moses I have some feedback.

Hand me the stone tablets and a chisel.

The question came up during a conversation about universal morality and an interesting feature of the modern Western world. Christianity has been steadily losing its grip on Western culture for decades. Church attendance has fallen, religious affiliation has declined, and millions of people who once would have called themselves Christian no longer do.

But we haven’t become morally blank.

We still have remarkably strong convictions about right and wrong. In fact, on some questions, our moral convictions may be stronger than those of the societies that produced the Bible. There are things tolerated in the ancient world that would horrify almost all of us today, religious or otherwise.

So here is the interesting thought experiment.

If Christianity really has shaped the moral imagination of the West as profoundly as Christians often claim, what happens when you remove the Christianity and leave a modern person alone with the Ten Commandments?

How many would survive?

My immediate reaction was: ‘Surely not many.‘

So I Decided to Actually Do It

So, I decided to take my friend’s question seriously and actually do the exercise. If I were handed the stone tablets and given permission to rewrite the Ten Commandments, which ones would I keep exactly as they are, which ones would I change, and which ones would I ditch altogether?

At this point, I can already sense some Christians shifting uncomfortably in their chairs.

“Rewrite the Ten Commandments? Who exactly do you think you are?”

Fair question. There is probably a word for taking a chisel to something allegedly written by the finger of God, and I suspect that word is heresy.

But relax. I haven’t actually been given control of the universe. Moses’ tablets are safe, nobody is rewriting the Bible, and God has not temporarily handed the moral governance of humanity to a mildly opinionated Australian blogger.

It’s a thought experiment, and good thought experiments are supposed to make us a little uncomfortable. The point isn’t really to discover whether I could write better commandments than God. The point is to discover what we actually believe makes something morally right or wrong, which ancient moral instincts we still share, which ones we have moved beyond, and why.

To make the exercise fair, I have given myself a few rules. Each of the original Ten Commandments has to receive one of three verdicts: KEEP, CHANGE or DITCH.

‘KEEP’ means the commandment survives essentially as it is. I can modernise the language and explore what it might mean in our world, but I don’t get to completely reinvent it and then congratulate myself for agreeing with it. ‘CHANGE’ means I think there is something morally important at the heart of the commandment, but I would rewrite, broaden or substantially update it. ‘DITCH’ means it loses its place on the tablets, not necessarily because it is completely worthless, but because I only have ten spaces available and I think something more important deserves the real estate. And remember, I am not writing these commandments specifically for Christians, Jews or even religious people. I am imagining ten universal moral laws for every human being on the planet, regardless of their religion, culture or worldview. So, to make the cut, a commandment needs to work as a moral principle for everyone.

And because I’m limiting myself to ten, every commandment I ditch creates an empty space that eventually has to be filled. By the end of this exercise, I need to have my own ten commandments sitting on those tablets.

So, with apologies in advance to Moses, theologians everywhere and anyone already composing an angry comment, let’s start chiselling.

KEEP

Let’s begin with the easy ones. Which of the Ten Commandments would I keep?

When I first started thinking about this exercise, I assumed this would be the smallest category. After all, these commandments come from an ancient culture separated from mine by thousands of years, and I had already given myself permission to rewrite the things. Surely most of them would need at least a little renovation.

As it turns out, Moses is about to have a surprisingly good run.

You Shall Not Murder

Yep. Keeping it.

I realise this isn’t exactly a revolutionary contribution to moral philosophy, but if humanity is going to have ten basic rules for getting along, “don’t kill each other” seems worthy of a spot.

There are, of course, enormous arguments hiding underneath those four words. What about war? Self-defence? Capital punishment? Euthanasia? Abortion? Entire libraries have been written about where killing ends and murder begins, and I’m not pretending four words settle any of those questions.

But the fundamental moral intuition remains remarkably durable: human life has value, and you do not get to deliberately take another person’s life simply because they are inconvenient, threatening, different, expensive or standing between you and something you want.

Thousands of years later, I don’t think I can improve much on that.

Verdict: KEEP.

You Shall Not Steal

Also staying.

Again, the interesting part isn’t whether stealing is wrong. You would struggle to find a functioning human society that thinks taking someone else’s belongings whenever you fancy them is a particularly good foundation for civilisation.

What has changed is the scale on which stealing can occur.

An ancient person might steal your goat. A modern person can steal your identity, empty your bank account from another continent, underpay thousands of workers, manipulate financial systems, exploit someone else’s intellectual property or build extraordinary wealth while ensuring the people creating it receive almost none of the benefit.

We have become much more sophisticated creatures, which means we have developed much more sophisticated ways of taking things that don’t belong to us.

The commandment doesn’t need replacing. If anything, we might need to take it more seriously.

Verdict: KEEP.

You Shall Not Bear False Witness Against Your Neighbour

If anything, this one has aged spectacularly well.

The original commandment is more specific than simply “don’t lie”. It concerns giving false testimony against another person, particularly in a context where your words can damage their reputation, livelihood or even their life.

Try telling me that isn’t relevant anymore.

We live in an age in which a rumour can travel around the world before the person being accused has even opened their phone. We can destroy reputations with screenshots stripped of context, repeat claims we haven’t bothered to verify, share stories because they confirm what we already believe, and publicly condemn people we have never met on the basis of information supplied by people we don’t know.

Technology has changed dramatically. Human beings, apparently, less so.

If I have ten commandments available, one of them is absolutely going to concern the responsibility we carry when we say something about another human being.

Moses can keep this one.

Verdict: KEEP.

You Shall Not Commit Adultery

This one might be more controversial, particularly in a culture whose sexual ethics have changed enormously, but I’m keeping it.

Not because I think the government should be policing people’s bedrooms, and not because I want to resurrect the sexual morality of the ancient Near East. I’m keeping it because underneath the commandment is something I still think matters enormously: fidelity.

When you make a promise of exclusivity to another person and then secretly break that promise, the moral problem isn’t merely that sex occurred outside an approved boundary. The problem is betrayal. Someone trusted you with their vulnerability, their body, their future and, often, their family, and you violated the terms of that trust.

Our ideas about marriage have changed. Our understanding of sexuality has changed. Relationships themselves look very different from those of the ancient world. But I don’t think betrayal has somehow become morally neutral because we’re modern.

If you make a promise to someone, keep it. If the relationship needs to end, end it honestly. But don’t build intimacy on deception.

Verdict: KEEP.

You Shall Not Covet

This was the one I initially thought might not survive.

Coveting feels different from murder, theft or adultery because nobody else necessarily knows you’re doing it. You can covet your neighbour’s house, partner, career, bank account, body or lifestyle without ever actually taking anything from them.

But the longer I thought about it, the more I liked its inclusion.

Because this commandment recognises something the others largely don’t: our actions have an interior life.

Long before we steal something, betray someone or trample over another person to get what they have, there is often a quieter conviction growing inside us that what we possess isn’t enough.

And if there is one ancient commandment that seems almost comically well suited to a twenty-first-century consumer economy, it might be this one. We have constructed an enormous advertising industry around cultivating dissatisfaction. Your phone isn’t good enough. Your house isn’t big enough. Your body isn’t attractive enough. Your holiday wasn’t exotic enough. Your career isn’t impressive enough. Somewhere, someone has something better than you, and you should probably want it.

Perhaps Moses understood Instagram after all.

So, somewhat to my own surprise, I’m leaving this one on the tablets.

Verdict: KEEP.

CHANGE

This is where the exercise gets more interesting.

There are a few commandments I wouldn’t throw away because I think there is something genuinely valuable sitting underneath them. But I also wouldn’t leave them untouched. If I’m being given the chisel, these are the ones getting some fairly substantial edits.

You Shall Not Misuse the Name of the Lord Your God

I’m keeping the idea behind this one, but I want to make it much bigger.

Growing up, I mostly understood taking the Lord’s name in vain as saying “Oh my God” when you weren’t praying. There were certain combinations of words you simply did not say, and using “Jesus Christ” after accidentally hitting your thumb with a hammer was apparently a particularly efficient way of breaking commandment number three.

But I now think there are much more serious ways to misuse the name of God.

Human beings have attached God’s name to an astonishing collection of things God may or may not have had anything to do with. Wars have been fought with God’s blessing. Political candidates have claimed God’s endorsement. Religious leaders have used divine authority to demand obedience. People have justified racism, slavery, persecution and exclusion by insisting that God was on their side.

Even on a much smaller scale, “God told me” can be an extraordinarily powerful sentence. Add God to your opinion and suddenly disagreement isn’t merely disagreement anymore. The other person isn’t questioning you. They’re questioning God.

That seems much closer to what I would worry about if I were writing a moral code for humanity.

So I’m changing this one to:

“Do not use the name of God to justify your own power, prejudice or ambition.”

If you say “Oh my God” if you stub your toe, I think heaven will cope. But if you’re going to put God’s name behind something that harms another human being, you’d better be very sure God actually said it.

Verdict: CHANGE.

Remember the Sabbath Day and Keep It Holy

I don’t particularly care whether everybody rests on Saturday.

Or Sunday, for that matter.

What I do care about is the remarkably humane principle sitting inside the Sabbath command. Read the full version in Exodus, and the day of rest isn’t just for the wealthy landowner who can afford a weekend. Your son and daughter rest. Your servants rest. The foreigner living among you rests. Even your animals get the day off.

In an ancient agricultural society, that’s quite a command.

The principle seems to be that human beings are more than what they produce, and nobody should have the right to extract endless labour from another person.

That feels worth keeping.

In fact, in a culture of burnout, side hustles, emails at dinner, phones beside the bed and an economy that can turn every spare hour into another opportunity for productivity, perhaps we need the principle of Sabbath more than ever.

I just wouldn’t make holiness depend upon which square of the calendar you choose.

My rewritten version would be something like:

“Protect the right of every person to rest, and never measure a human life solely by what it produces.”

Verdict: CHANGE.

Honour Your Father and Your Mother

I had to think long and hard about this one.

There is something beautiful about a moral code reminding us that we have obligations to the generations around us. We don’t simply arrive in the world as autonomous individuals owing nothing to anybody. Most of us were fed, clothed, protected and carried through years in which we were spectacularly incapable of looking after ourselves.

Gratitude matters. Caring for ageing parents matters. Respect across generations matters.

But “honour your father and your mother” becomes much more complicated when your father beat you, your mother abandoned you, or the people who were supposed to protect you became the people you needed protection from.

A commandment should never become a weapon handed to an abusive parent.

And if we’re going to talk about obligations between parents and children, surely they should run in both directions. Children may owe something to good parents, but parents owe an enormous amount to the children entrusted to them.

So I would broaden it:

“Protect and nurture the children entrusted to you, and honour those who have loved and cared for you.”

That retains something I think the original commandment gets profoundly right while refusing to make respect unconditional when trust has been catastrophically violated.

Verdict: CHANGE.

And with that, we’ve reached the uncomfortable part.

Because changing something God allegedly wrote with his own finger is one thing.

Throwing it away altogether is another.

DITCH

Well, this is where I probably lose some of you.

So far, I have been surprisingly generous to the original list. Five commandments survived essentially untouched, while three contained moral principles I thought were worth preserving but needed some renovation. Considering these laws emerged from a world thousands of years removed from ours, eight out of ten is a pretty impressive strike rate.

But there are two I can’t justify keeping.

And I need to be clear about the standard I’m applying here. I’m not asking whether these commandments make sense within Judaism or Christianity. Of course they do. Nor am I asking whether religious people are entitled to organise their lives around them. They are.

I’m asking a different question.

If I had only ten spaces available to write a set of universal moral laws for every human being on earth, regardless of their religion, culture or worldview, would these two make the cut?

For me, they wouldn’t.

You Shall Have No Other Gods Before Me

This is the first one I would remove.

In its original setting, I understand it. The Ten Commandments aren’t presented as a detached philosophical exercise in universal ethics. They emerge from the relationship between Yahweh and Israel, and exclusive loyalty to Yahweh sits at the heart of that relationship.

But that’s precisely the problem for my thought experiment.

I’m trying to write moral laws that apply to everyone. If a Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or atheist loves their family, acts honestly, cares for the vulnerable, treats other people with dignity and lives generously, I don’t believe they become immoral simply because they don’t worship the same God I do.

Religiously wrong according to a particular theology? Perhaps. That’s a different argument.

Morally wrong?

I can’t get there.

In fact, if I have only ten opportunities to tell humanity how we ought to live together, I find it difficult to justify using one of them to demand that everyone gets their theology right.

So, while this commandment may remain enormously important as a statement of religious allegiance, it doesn’t survive my test as universal moral law.

Verdict: DITCH.

You Shall Not Make for Yourself an Idol

This one goes for much the same reason.

I know there is an obvious way to rescue it. We could say that modern people still have idols. Money can be an idol. Career can be an idol. Political ideology can be an idol. Nationalism, celebrity, success and even religion itself can become objects of unhealthy devotion.

I actually agree with all of that.

But that’s not what the commandment says.

The prohibition concerns making an image or representation of God to worship and bow down before. Again, within the religious world of ancient Israel, that makes perfect sense. But if I am writing universal moral law for humanity, I don’t think making a religious image belongs alongside prohibitions against murder, theft and false testimony as one of the ten most important moral instructions human beings need.

Someone could spend their morning bowing before a statue and their afternoon feeding hungry people, caring for their ageing parents and treating everyone they meet with extraordinary kindness. I might disagree with their theology, but I struggle to identify the moral harm caused by the statue.

Conversely, someone could scrupulously avoid every graven image imaginable while exploiting their workers, neglecting their children and treating their neighbours like dirt.

If I’m writing universal moral law, I know which behaviour concerns me more.

So this one loses its place as well.

Verdict: DITCH.

So What Do I Put in Their Place?

I have to admit, ditching two of the Ten Commandments felt strangely wrong.

Even within the safety of a completely hypothetical thought experiment, there was something slightly uncomfortable about looking at words that have been regarded as sacred for thousands of years and declaring, “Nope. Don’t need that one.”

Perhaps that’s the former pastor in me. Perhaps it’s simply what happens when something has been embedded deeply enough in your moral and cultural imagination that taking a chisel to it feels vaguely transgressive. Either way, I didn’t discard those two commandments lightly.

But I had to keep reminding myself of the rules of the exercise.

I’m not writing the Ten Commandments for Christians. I’m not writing them for Jews. I’m not even writing them exclusively for people who believe in God.

I’m writing them for humanity.

That means my imaginary tablets have to make sense in Brisbane and Beijing, Jerusalem and Jakarta. They have to speak to Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics and everyone in between. If I’ve only got ten chances to say something about how human beings ought to live, then religious allegiance simply isn’t going to take up two of those spaces.

Which leaves me with an even harder question.

What should?

The moment I had two empty spaces, I began noticing all the things the original Ten Commandments don’t explicitly prohibit. There is no commandment that simply says, “You shall not own another human being.” There is no explicit prohibition against rape, torture or child abuse. Racism doesn’t get a mention. Neither does the exploitation of people who have less power than you.

Of course, Jews and Christians have drawn upon other biblical texts and broader theological principles to address these things, and I am not suggesting the Ten Commandments are supposed to contain the entirety of biblical ethics.

But remember, I only get ten.

And I have two spaces left.

So rather than choosing two narrowly defined offences, I want commandments broad enough to reach underneath several of them.

So here is what I’m adding.

Thou Shalt Recognise and Protect the Equal Worth of Every Human Being

This one goes straight onto the stone.

Interestingly, I don’t think I’m introducing an idea foreign to the Bible. The opening chapter of Genesis makes the extraordinary claim that human beings bear the image of God. Whatever else imago Dei means, generations of Jewish and Christian thinkers have found within it a profound basis for human dignity.

I just want to make that dignity explicit.

If every human being possesses equal worth, then no human being can legitimately be owned by another. Race cannot make one person superior to another. Wealth cannot make one life more valuable. Disability cannot make someone disposable. Sex, sexuality, nationality, religion, social status or usefulness cannot determine how much dignity a person deserves.

Human worth isn’t something you earn. It isn’t awarded by governments, bestowed by religious institutions or determined by whether somebody else finds your life valuable. It belongs to you because you are human.

And the word ‘protect’ matters just as much as ‘recognise.’ It isn’t enough for me to privately believe that everybody is equal while remaining indifferent when another person’s dignity is being stripped away. If human worth is real, it creates obligations toward one another.

So that’s my ninth commandment.

“Thou shalt recognise and protect the equal worth of every human being.”

One space left.

Thou Shalt Not Use Thy Power to Abuse, Exploit or Violate the Vulnerable

My final commandment would be about power.

The more I considered the things missing from the original Ten Commandments, the more I noticed how many of humanity’s worst behaviours share the same underlying dynamic. Rape, child abuse, slavery, torture, coercion and exploitation are very different acts, but again and again they involve someone with power using it against someone who has less.

And all of us possess power somewhere.

Parents have power over children. Employers have power over workers. Governments have power over citizens. Teachers have power over students. Religious leaders have power within their communities. Wealth, status, physical strength, knowledge and authority can all place one person in a position of considerable advantage over another.

Having power isn’t necessarily wrong. Much of it is unavoidable, and sometimes it is necessary. The moral question is what we do with it.

So I want something on my tablets that says vulnerability is never an invitation for exploitation. Another person’s dependence, weakness, poverty, age, fear or inability to fight back never gives you permission to use them for your own benefit.

In fact, I would go further. The more power you possess, the greater your responsibility becomes toward those who possess less.

So my tenth commandment is:

“Thou shalt not use thy power to abuse, exploit or violate the vulnerable.”

And there they are.

I removed only two, and in their place I added explicit protections for two things I think several thousand years of human history have taught us to take extraordinarily seriously: the equal worth of every human being and the danger of power when it is turned against the vulnerable.

Which leaves me with ten commandments again.

And, perhaps more interestingly, a rather different conclusion from the one I expected when I started.

Turns Out, Moses Did Pretty Well

When I started this exercise, I genuinely thought I was going to change most of them.

That was my assumption going in. Give a reasonably thoughtful person in 2026 the opportunity to rewrite a moral code that emerged from the ancient Near East thousands of years ago, and surely we would come up with something dramatically different.

Except I didn’t.

Five of the original Ten Commandments survived my little thought experiment essentially untouched. Three more contained moral principles I thought were important enough to preserve, even if I wanted to broaden or change the way they were expressed. Only two were removed altogether, and even then, largely because I was trying to create universal moral laws for humanity rather than commandments governing religious allegiance.

That’s surprisingly robust.

In fact, after several thousand years of moral philosophy, scientific discovery, political revolution, human rights movements, changing sexual ethics and enormous shifts in how we understand ourselves and one another, I ended up keeping or preserving the moral core of eight out of ten.

Perhaps that should tell us something.

Whatever you believe about their divine origins, the Ten Commandments have survived for a reason. They speak to some remarkably persistent features of being human: our capacity for violence, dishonesty, betrayal, greed and envy, but also our need for rest, fidelity, trust, responsibility and limits. The world around them has changed almost beyond recognition, but human beings apparently haven’t changed quite as much.

Maybe that’s why these ancient words have proved so difficult to leave behind, even in societies that are increasingly leaving the religion that carried them.

And perhaps that brings me back to the conversation that started all of this. We were wondering whether the West could discard Christianity while retaining much of the moral framework Christianity helped carry through Western culture. After spending an afternoon pretending to be God and taking a chisel to the tablets, I’m more convinced that the answer is complicated.

We may no longer agree about where these moral instincts came from. We may disagree profoundly about whether God had anything to do with them at all. We will certainly continue arguing about how they should be interpreted and applied.

But it turns out that when I was given the chance to throw them away, I mostly didn’t.

So, to those of you who started shifting uncomfortably in your chairs several sections ago, you can relax. The Bible remains intact. Moses can have his tablets back. I hereby relinquish my brief and entirely imaginary tenure as God.

And I owe the old bloke an apology.

He did better than I expected.