- [Narrator] The Bible, a book whose origins
lie thousands of years ago in the Middle East
and still inspires billions today.
- Creations roots us in the wonder of our own drama.
What a beginning.
- [Narrator] Its teachings provoke controversy.
- The Ten Commandments are the hysterical believings
of a group of desert tribes.
- We know the Bible is completely accurate.
- It shows me how dangerous Revelation can be.
- "Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God."
- [Narrator] Seven figures from different walks of life
offer their personal perspective on the best-selling book
of all time and what it means to them.
- The women of the Bible still speak to us today.
- Who was this Jesus Christ,
and who was it that murdered him?
(dramatic music)
- Even if you've never read a word of the Bible,
your life will have been shaped by it.
- [Narrator] In this program,
Ann Widdecombe explores the Law of Moses.
- Exodus, the second book of the Bible, is an epic tale.
It tells how the children of Israel escaped from the slavery
of Egypt, of the often-reluctant leadership of Moses,
of how the Israelites wandered for 40 years in the desert
until they found the land God had promised them.
But above all, it's the story of how God gave his laws
to his people and commanded them to live by them.
(dramatic music)
- The Jewish people had in their hands the commandments,
which were the beacon of social justice for all eternity.
- [Ann] The Ten Commandments God gave to Moses
also became the cornerstone of Christianity.
- The law shows us how to live in the image of God,
be generous in the way that God is generous.
- [Ann] These laws shaped our society and our lives,
and I think they're hugely important.
But not everyone agrees.
- These damn commandments of yours.
You say they've made life better.
I say they've suppressed and tyrannized and bullied.
- Dump the Old Testament, start afresh.
You're saddled with this savage Judaism,
I submit that there's actually evil.
- I don't mind being saddled with the Ten Commandments.
I've never made a secret of the fact
that I believe in the Ten Commandments, and in this film,
I'm going in search of them.
I want to find out more about where these laws came from,
trace them through our history, and discover
how they've shaped our society for over two millennia.
Why are they so important,
and would our nation be better off
if we lived by them today?
(tense instrumental music)
(upbeat dramatic music)
The Ten Commandments.
I learnt them as a child,
and they've been the moral compass of my life,
telling me what was right and what was wrong.
And for hundreds of years,
the same was true of British society.
But in the space of my lifetime, all that has changed.
(upbeat dramatic music continues)
When I looked at Britain today, many of us seem better off.
We wear designer clothes, go on exotic holidays,
and spend our time and money acquiring material things.
But scratch the surface, and you find a society in turmoil.
Marital breakdown, alcohol and drug abuse,
sexual promiscuity, teenage pregnancies,
and violent crime.
It seems to me that our moral core,
our very sense of what is right and wrong, is disappearing.
(jet engine roars)
We've departed from the Law of Moses.
But who precisely was he, and where did his laws come from?
(gentle music)
(engine hums)
My search for Moses begins here at Egypt
where, according to one theory,
he was born in a town called Avaris
more than 1,000 years before Christ.
Three millennia later, the story of his life
is still celebrated in popular culture.
His people, the Israelites, were slaves,
and the ruler of Egypt decided to cull their population
by drowning all firstborn male babies in the Nile.
But Moses was rescued from his fate
by the pharaoh's daughter who adopted him,
and he grew up in the royal court,
until one day, he saw a slave master mistreating
some fellow Israelites.
Enraged, Moses killed the Egyptian.
(gentle music continues)
I've always been struck by the idea
that the Bible's greatest lawgiver
began his journey by committing murder.
So how does the church explain this episode
in Moses' story?
- He did it to achieve a kind of justice.
He preferred to identify with his own community
who were humiliated, enslaved, and treated unjustly
than the palace of the pharaoh and all the easy life
and nice life as a son of the princess.
This led him to escape into the desert.
(dramatic music)
- [Ann] Moses was now a fugitive from the Egyptians.
For the next 20 years,
he lived as a shepherd in the wilderness.
Then he had an experience which would change his life.
God, appearing to Moses in the flames of a burning bush,
told him to return to Egypt
and free his people from slavery.
The idea of confronting the pharaoh,
the leader of a world superpower, daunted Moses,
and I can't say I blame him.
He was a bit of a reluctant leader, wasn't he?
- Yes, because he felt very much
of his limitation as a person.
He stuttered when he spoke, and also he felt
that this goal is big responsibility for him.
But he has something which made his own people respect him,
which is a trust in God.
(hopeful music)
- Moses returned to Egypt,
and after God had sent 10 devastating plagues
and destroyed the Egyptian Army in the Red Sea,
the Israelites were freed from slavery.
With Moses at their head,
they set off for the Promised Land.
But first he led them to the place
where God had appeared to him, Mount Sinai.
(hopeful music continues)
But it wasn't long before the Israelites began complaining.
(engine roars)
(birds chirping)
You know, I can't help feeling sorry for Moses.
Like all leaders,
he found that whatever he did wasn't right.
There were the Israelites,
begging him to get them freed from slavery, out of Egypt.
Then when he got them out of Egypt, they wanted to go back.
They missed their home comforts,
and they missed the certainty that they'd had.
They turned on Moses to such an extent
that they even threatened to stone him to death,
but then Moses came here to Sinai
and to a meeting with God that was to change
the course of religious history,
and I would say, the course of history itself.
(engine roars)
(triumphant music)
Just a few months into their epic journey,
the Bible tells us that Moses led his people here
to Mount Sinai in modern Egypt.
The Israelites were a nation of refugees
without land, without homes,
and they were on the verge of rebellion.
And then God summoned Moses for a revelation
that would shape Jewish and Christian societies
for the next 3,000 years.
Well, here we are.
I'm beginning my trek up to Sinai.
Feels okay now.
What it will feel like in a few hours' time,
I'm not sure,
but I shall remember that Moses did it before me.
(soothing music)
(people chattering) (shoes thumping)
(man speaking in foreign language)
(wind whooshing)
(dramatic soothing music)
- Of course, it's very easy standing here
just to be captured by the beauty of it all.
But this was also the place where God gave us his law,
he gave us the precepts by which he commanded us to live.
And that's a very awe-inspiring thought out here
in the desert.
(gentle music) (birds chirping)
The Bible tells us that as part of his revelation,
God wrote down his laws on two tablets of stone
using his finger to carve these words.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] "I am the Lord thy God
who has brought thee out of slavery in Egypt.
Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
Thou shalt not make unto me an graven image
or any likeness of anything
that is in heaven above or earth below.
Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.
Honor thy father and thy mother.
Thou shalt not kill.
Thou shalt not commit adultery.
Thou shalt not steal.
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife."
- [Ann] The Ten Commandments were just the beginning.
According to the Bible, Moses spent a further 40 days
on the top of this mountain while God instructed him
with a total of 613 laws,
or in Hebrew, mitzvot, that for Jews
cover every aspect of their lives, from not eating pork
to how to celebrate the Sabbath.
(man speaks in foreign language)
- [Ann] For Christians, however,
the Ten Commandments are the key part of the epic encounter
between Moses and God on Mount Sinai.
At the foot of the mountain is Saint Catherine's Monastery,
founded in the 6th century AD
to venerate that revelation.
(monks chanting in foreign language)
- It's a beautiful scenic place in this harsh desert way,
but above all, it is a sacred place.
And when you stand in the church that was built in 550,
you're overwhelmed by the sense
of continuity and the presence of God.
- Saint Catherine's is the place where scholars
rediscover the Codex Sinaiticus, a 4th-century Bible
and the oldest complete copy of the New Testament.
The monastery also has an extraordinary collection
of ancient scriptures, including a 10th-century Bible.
(gentle music)
Just think of them writing it on these very bits of paper.
You can just see them sitting there doing it.
- I think there's something special about any book.
When you see the paper or the parchment, the ink,
this is a way of preserving
and conveying the thoughts of another person.
But there's something of special significance
of manuscripts of the scriptures,
because this then become a witness to the revelation of God.
When Moses received the inspiration of the law,
he recorded it so that it would be passed down in posterity,
and these scrolls, these writings,
were taken with the children of Israel
when they entered the Promised Land.
So he becomes the archetype of writers of the scriptures.
- So Moses actually wrote the first five books of the Bible.
- The scriptures were written by Moses himself.
(gentle music continues)
- [Ann] So tradition tells us
that Moses wrote the Book of Genesis,
which describes the story of the creation,
as well as the books called Exodus, Leviticus,
Numbers, and Deuteronomy, which are both his own biography
and give all the detail of God's laws.
His words have been read by billions of people
as Jews and Christians traveled from the Middle East
to Western Europe and finally across the entire world,
taking the Bible with them.
(gentle music continues)
But these laws are much more than ancient history.
Back home in England, I'm on my way to witness
how they govern people's lives to this day.
(upbeat music)
I can see you have the Ten Commandments
dominating the scene.
- Yes, I think most synagogues have
those tablets somewhere, but they are not
an essential part of a synagogue.
What is essential in the synagogue is the ark,
the holy ark, based on the Ark of the Covenant
that was in the temple
where the Torah, the five books of Moses,
the first five books of the Bible, were stored
and I will take out one of the many
that we are fortunate to have,
and what we actually do is we don't say our prayers.
We chant our prayers.
And here, you can see the Ten Commandments
written verse by verse.
(Lionel chants in Hebrew)
- So how important are the Ten Commandments?
- They are very important.
The commandments were the beacon
of social justice for all eternity.
God chose the Jews,
not because of their any innate superiority,
but because they were chosen to give
to the world the commandments and the rule of the law.
But they are only 10 of 613 commandments.
The Ten Commandments are basic ones and include
as subdivisions the other commandments.
- Well, I won't put you to the test,
but do you know them all?
- I will tell you them all after I've revised for a year.
- Rabbi Rosenfeld explains to me that these 613 laws
or mitzvot govern every aspect of Jewish life,
from morality to cleanliness and what food they can eat.
One of these laws from the Book of Exodus tells Jews
that they must keep milk and meat separate at all times.
- Hello, hello. - Hello.
- Busy preparing the bread for the Sabbath,
and this is the best that we can do in a Jewish kitchen.
- [Ann] Well, the first thing that strikes me is,
you have two sinks.
- [Lionel] Correct.
- You have two ovens.
- Two ovens.
- You have two of everything?
- We have two crockery, cutlery, even two dishwashers.
Now I have to say-
- Is that Moses' fault?
- (laughs) Basically, it all came from the dietary laws.
- As a Christian, I try to follow the commandment
to keep the Sabbath as a day of rest, but Jews have scores
of addition rules which expand on that idea.
Can you give me some examples
of what you can and can't do?
- Well, you can't carry outside your private dwelling
on the Sabbath.
- You can't carry? - You can't carry.
You can't use your car.
- You can't drive? - You can't drive it.
- Because you can't start the engine,
because the spark is generated.
And Torah law, "You shall not burn fire on the Sabbath."
- It all seems to me an incredibly complicated business.
You and I have in common the Old Testament.
How come the Christians don't have to observe 613 mitzvots?
- Well, you said, we share the Old Testament,
but then you went onto the New,
which isn't part of our Bible, and you devised
a new religion which you called Christianity.
And therefore, the Mosaic laws stopped applying to you
the moment that you,
in a sense, rejected the Judaism for something else.
- I know there was a huge debate in the early church
about whether followers of Jesus
had to obey all the Laws of Moses.
But I believe, from reading the Gospel of Saint Matthew,
that Jesus gave a new interpretation of the law
in his famous Sermon on the Mount.
But how did Christ change the law?
- The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus as the second Moses
sitting down on the mountain,
and he interprets the law and says,
"What I want is love and the generosity
that is needed in obeying the commandments."
When he's asked, what is the greatest commandment
of the law, he says, "You must love the Lord your God
with all your heart and all your soul,"
and the second commandment is,
"You must love your neighbor as yourself."
- That's a great summary, isn't it, of the commandments?
- Yes, or you can use the Golden Rule, "Do not do to another
what you do not want done to yourself,"
which Jesus also uses in the Gospel of Matthew.
- [Ann] Christ's message of love was also tempered
with a stricter reinterpretation
of the laws of the Old Testament.
- It's not enough that you
should just not actually commit adultery,
that you should not actually kill,
but you mustn't get near it, and you mustn't want to kill.
You also mustn't decide,
I would commit adultery if I possibly could,
going more to the spirit of the law
than to the main letter of the law.
(gentle music)
- [Ann] For Christians, Christ's teaching transformed
how they interpreted the 613 Laws of Moses.
Paul, a central figure in the early church,
believed his mission was to spread Christianity
to the Gentiles.
He argued that non-Jews did not need to follow
all the rules of Moses, such as being circumcised
and not eating certain foods.
To become children of God,
faith in Christ was what was most important.
- Circumcision, Sabbath, and clean food
were the three boundary markers
which prescribed what makes a Jew.
And Paul saw these were not necessary for salvation,
that we are saved by Christ, not by the law.
Salvation comes through the cross
and through the resurrection of Christ.
- Christianity had now developed its on distinct laws,
based own the Ten Commandments and Jesus's interpretation
of them, and these are the laws
that served us for two millennia.
But in the last 100 years, scholars have actually questioned
the very foundations of the Bible.
- Well, traditionally, scholars used to think
that Moses wrote that book,
but that was scholarship from several hundred years ago.
By the time you get to around the 17th century
and then moving forward into the 19th century,
scholars began to realize that Moses was very unlikely
to have written those books, primarily because there are
so many conflicting ideas in those books.
There were so many duplications and inconsistencies.
So it's unlikely that one person
was responsible for writing all of them.
- [Ann] Disturbingly, Francesca Stavrakopoulou,
along with many modern Biblical scholars,
doesn't think Moses could have written
the first five books of the Bible.
She and her colleagues believe that these books
from Genesis to Deuteronomy draw on a number
of different historical traditions
and were written down hundreds of years after Moses lived.
If this theory is true, what does it mean for Moses?
- Historically, we're not very sure about Moses at all.
Some scholars even doubt that he actually existed.
- So the Israelites were never enslaved in Egypt,
there was no slave revolt,
they didn't leave Egypt or wander rather uncertainly
in the desert, they didn't finally arrive at a place
that they were going to settle,
none of that actually happened,
it's all a figment of somebody's imagination?
- There's no archeological evidence for a huge group
of people leaving Egypt and coming into Canaan.
If we take the Bible at face value,
the Bible tells us that about 600,000 free men left Egypt
to come into the Promised Land.
So with their wives and their children,
that would make about two million people.
We would expect to find some kind of archeological trace
of that, whether in Egyptian records
or whether archeologically in terms of settlement patterns.
- And somebody else wrote Deuteronomy and said,
"I'll call him Moses."
Well, I have to say that smacks to me,
but let's disregard the whole of the Old Testament,
'cause hey, it talks about God.
- It's not to deny the historicity
of any of these traditions necessarily.
What's really important is that-
- So the answer is you don't know.
- We don't know for sure, of course.
There may well have been an exodus.
What we do know is that it's highly unlikely
to have been anything of the kind of scale
that's described in the Hebrew Bible.
- Well, we've heard a suggestion
that Moses may not have existed, but when pressed,
she had to say, of course nobody could be quite sure.
Crucially, of course,
what matters is what the Old Testament tells us about God,
about his relationship with man,
about what he expects of us,
and it isn't necessary and never has been necessary
that every single line should be historically proven.
(bright music)
It's one thing to cast doubt on the origins
of the Ten Commandments, thousands of years ago,
but no one can deny the influence they've had
on our society.
I've been involved in making laws for a mere 23 years.
But as I'm about to discover, the Ten Commandments
have inspired British lawmakers for over a millennium.
They've shaped our government and our lives
since the very origins of our nation.
300 years after Christian missionaries from Rome
brought the Bible and its laws to England,
they were almost wiped out by a wave of Viking invaders.
(dramatic music)
By the 9th century AD,
Christian England was on the brink of annihilation,
and a young Anglo-Saxon prince
fought a desperate campaign to preserve his kingdom.
After a series of bloody encounters with the Danes,
Alfred, the only English king ever to be called great,
defeated them to become, according to some historians,
the first king of the English.
Alfred didn't just save his kingdom.
He founded the English nation.
But to secure his rule,
he needed to establish law and order.
So where did the first king of the English
look for his inspiration?
To the Bible, of course.
He used Moses as his role model
to found one of the first,
and certainly the most influential, codes of English law.
(upbeat music)
(people chattering)
To find out more about this extraordinary book
whose name in Anglo Saxon simply means the law,
I'm traveling to Downing College in Cambridge.
- [David] Yes, we've got an early manuscript.
- So Alfred actually starts his law, he opens it,
with Moses' Law.
- Yes, this seems to be the instinctive reaction,
but perhaps not just of Alfred
but also of contemporaries in the early Middle Ages.
The page that we're looking at here
covers the Ten Commandments.
- Oh, this is, of course, this is Old English.
- Yes, that's right, yes.
(David speaks in Old English)
It's a very ambitious statement of Alfred
to begin his law book with the Ten Commandments,
and then move onto a whole series of selections from Exodus,
which form a very large percentage of the book as a whole.
- And how much of this book would be Mosaic law?
- Well, 20% of the whole book. - [Ann] 20%?
- Yes, I mean, it was absolutely central
to everything that Alfred really stood for.
- So why Moses? Why his law?
- Yes, well, I suppose he was the law giver par excellence
in the Old Testament, and so he was the starting point
for all law giving and for all later law giving.
- How important is this law?
- Some of these principles became important in what
will become known as the common law,
the law by which England was governed,
really from that period onwards.
We could think of his reign for its longterm legacy
as one of the most important turning points
in English history.
- As a Christian and a lawmaker,
it's exciting to discover that English law
began with the Ten Commandments, and I'm struck by the idea
that in times of extraordinary change, these laws
have guided us and helped transform our society.
One of these seismic shifts was the Reformation,
a radical movement of religious reform instigated
by those who believed the Roman Catholic Church
had lost sight of the laws of the Bible.
(gentle music)
Here in England, Henry VIII broke with Rome,
and he declared himself to be the supreme governor
of the Church of England.
But his son Edward
was crowned the first Protestant king in 1547,
and he was even more radically reforming.
Above all, he wanted to put the Law of Moses
at the heart of the Christian Church.
(bright music)
Just a few months into his reign,
Edward introduced one of the most influential texts
in English history, the "Book of Common Prayer."
This was the first time that church services were heard
in our own language, and it became the blueprint
for Anglican worship all over the world.
- I don't think you can overstate the influence
of the "Book of Common Prayer"
in the lives of English men and women for hundreds of years.
This was what was in every parish of the country.
It's something that reached everybody.
The language is powerful and beautiful and resonant.
- Where is Moses's law in all this? How central is it?
- It becomes a key part of the "Book of Common Prayer,"
and as you can see here,
it comes right to the beginning of the communion service.
So you would have heard the Ten Commandments every Sunday.
Then after each one was read out,
the people would say, "Lord have mercy upon us
and incline our hearts to keep this law."
- [Ann] The commandments were now central
to the new Church of England.
When Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558,
the laws of the Bible took on even more significance.
- Elizabeth orders that every parish church in the land
should have painted boards
with the Ten Commandments on them.
- So suddenly, the Ten Commandments,
which have always been with the church,
are put center-stage, why?
- Yes, I think that's partly about the Reformation desire
to strip down to basics.
It's a bit of a back-to-basics, if I may use that term,
campaign by the Reformation Church.
The Ten Commandments were presented
to the laity in the prayer book.
They would have heard them week by week.
And now they're visually being shown them as well.
(upbeat music)
- But for some,
Elizabeth's reforms didn't go nearly far enough.
A sect of extreme Protestants called the Puritans
believed in living rigidly by the laws of the Bible.
I'm on my way to a town in South West England
where a group of them, led by a charismatic preacher,
embarked on a radical experiment
whose ideas reverberate to this day.
(upbeat music continues)
In early 17th century Dorchester there were many
of the problems that we associate with today.
Illegitimate children, teenage gangs,
rampant drunkenness, coarse language,
and disrespect to elders.
In 1606, John White, an ardent Puritan,
became the vicar of this church,
Saint Peter's in Dorchester,
and tried to reform its unruly citizens.
For more than seven years,
his fiery sermons fell on deaf ears.
He needed a sign from God,
something that would move his flock
away from unrighteousness.
And then, in August 1613, he got one.
(fire roars)
Fire raged through Dorchester, destroying half of the town.
John White called it fire from heaven.
- Gradually, the town was rebuilt,
a society that will, in response to God's love,
be moral and godly and upright.
- And this Puritan regime, it was founded on Biblical Law?
- Absolutely, we must remember that the Protestant view
was all that is necessary for salvation
is found in the Bible.
And the Puritans were not frightened of using
the Old Testament as well as the New Testament.
- How did that manifest itself in practice?
- Remember the commandment, "Honor thy mother and father,"
and that would have been at the heart of the very matter,
for family was seen as the root building block
of a godly society.
- Supposing you've broken the commandments, what happened?
- The law was implemented with quite a lot of rigor,
and people were outraged and being fined for being drunk,
for being called out for having a bit
of unauthorized sexual contact or whatever it might be.
But it's not just negative.
It's positive as well.
There are moves to actually implement the law
in terms of social welfare, helping the poor, the widows,
education for boys and for girls.
I would argue today, while there is chaos in many areas,
there are also signs of greater gains,
which was set on the foundations of the Puritans.
So when the welfare state arrived,
when universal education arrives,
it's very often the church that's leading on this,
drawing from their great heritage.
(birds squawking)
- The Puritan attempts to reform society
grew increasingly unpopular, and by 1660,
their religious experiment was over.
But not before John White persuaded 120 Puritans
to set sail from Dorset to America to build a new Jerusalem.
Today, the Puritans have something of a bad reputation,
but I can't help feeling some admiration
for John White and his godly brethren.
However strict they might appear to us today,
they provided education and social welfare,
and they actually brought about a reduction
in unwanted pregnancies, drunkenness, violence.
Perhaps we could do with a touch of Puritanism today.
(upbeat music)
To me, it seems obvious that our country would be better
if we followed the commandments.
(bright music)
I've always tried to be guided by the Ten Commandments.
But in 21st century Britain, trendy skeptics dismiss them
as old-fashioned, out of touch.
Well, I never cared that much for fashion,
and if the Law of Moses has worked for thousands of years,
I can't see any reason to change it now.
Good morning.
In the last census,
72% of us described ourselves as Christian.
But how many people read the Bible and know its laws?
Do you read the Bible?
- Not if I can help it.
- No? - I'm an atheist.
- I don't. - I do.
- If I answered honestly, no. - Yes.
- Wrong person to ask. (laughs)
- Why's that? Why is that?
- Don't believe in any of it.
- They're good records of how one should live.
I think if there's more people that lived that way,
we'd be a much, much better country.
- I think they're a good code to live by.
- Imagine if we didn't have any rules,
what sort of society would we be?
- I think it's a novel.
I don't think people
should base their lives around it necessarily.
- I wish I did believe, 'cause I think it would help.
- If we didn't have them, you'd find that society
would crumble, which is probably what it's doing today.
- Throughout modern Britain, the voice of secularism
is growing more and more strident.
In this debate, I'm arguing against two
of Britain's leading atheists that my religion,
Roman Catholicism, is a force for good.
- How can this church say it has any moral superiority?
It has difficult catching up to what ordinary people regard
as common, moral, and ethical sense.
- It is the only owner of the truth
for the billions that is likes to boast about,
'cause those billions are uneducated and poor
as again, it likes to boast about.
But they are the ones it can tell and bully and domineer.
- A world without the Catholic Church would be poorer,
would be more hopeless,
and would be a worse place in which to live.
Sadly, a majority of the audience agreed with my opponents.
After the debate, I caught up with them
to try and find out exactly what enrages them
about the Bible and the Ten Commandments.
Christopher Hitchens, how would you sum up
the impact of the Ten Commandments?
- As an appeal to give your allegiance
to a totalitarian authority.
It's a document of a very aggressive
and cruel tribe and religion, and it shows.
- Honor thy parents. Is that?
- No, but obvious things, like this code
are common to all human morality, and I would say innate.
And that religion gets its morality from humans,
and not the other way around.
- As our interview came to a close,
Christopher gave his views on the story of Moses.
- It was Marcion, I think, of the early church fathers.
Who said, dump the Old Testament, start afresh.
Marcion was the cleverest Christian there ever was.
You're saddled with this savage Judaism.
I submit that there's actually evil.
- I don't mind being saddled with the Ten Commandments.
- Read the next chapters. - And I don't find them evil.
- They're ordered. - Yeah, I've read the whole.
- In the next chapter, to massacre and slaughter
and enslave people, it's wicked.
It's really awful.
And they give it to children. It's disgraceful.
- 3,000 years ago, yeah. - Really terrible.
Really terrible. And we won't let it happen.
- 3,000 years ago, yeah, quite.
- All right, bye now.
- The Ten Commandments have underpinned Western law
for centuries, indeed, for millennia.
What's wrong with that?
- Well, what's wrong with it is it isn't true, of course.
The fact is, anybody, Socrates, for example,
Plato, his recorder, anybody who is interested
in virtue, justice, truth, the right thing to do is going
to examine what is at the heart of good human behavior.
- They took a code of morals which simply said
you honor God, you honor your parents, you don't steal,
you don't kill, you remain faithful in marriage.
- You're not mentioning the silly ones, are you?
- No, I'm going right through the 10.
- [Stephen] All right, okay,
let's get to the covetousness, then.
- That's number 10.
- All right, sorry, that's very rude of me.
You're right. - That is number 10, okay?
- Okay, fair enough.
- What exactly is wrong with those code of morals?
- There's nothing wrong with those particular commandments,
as you call them, but let's look at what they don't do.
They don't stop slavery.
There's no mention of it, and they kept slaves.
So hello, what a perfect society they had
because of their Ten Commandments.
What did God forget?
The Ten Commandments are the hysterical believings
of a group of desert tribes.
Those desert tribes have stored up more misery for mankind
than any other group of people in the history of the planet,
and they're doing it to this day.
- I've asked you if you think
that there was anything wrong with them, and you've said no.
- Well, that to say that that
should underpin the way we live,
to say it's a commandment,
that gives all your game away.
How dare you command? - My game?
It's not my game.
- You bid us be commanded.
I think life is much more exciting than that.
It's to do with finding out. - Stephen, Stephen.
- It's not to do with being told by some awful patriarch.
- Stephen, Stephen, we're not speeching.
- I am, sorry. I'm happy to. - We're trying to answer-
- Because these damn commandments of yours,
you say they've made life better.
I say they've suppressed and tyrannized and bullied.
(gentle music)
- Of course I'm not such a fool
that I don't realize those views are shared
by more and more people, and that aspects of the Bible
are unpalatable to modern sensibilities.
It was written over 3,000 years ago
and in very different times.
But I still believe that like all great philosophies,
the Bible contains eternal moral truths
which are still relevant today.
Don't lie. Don't steal.
Be faithful. Honor thy father and thy mother.
(gentle music continues)
(birds chirping)
After the death of my father,
my mother lived with me until she died at the age of 95.
To me, that seemed only natural.
My mother looked after me throughout my childhood,
so the least I could do
was to honor her by looking after her.
But I was amazed by how many people asked me,
well how can you cope living with your mother?
This is a subject that fills me with rage and frustration.
We're passing on a completely callous message
to the next generation,
which it's absorbing all too quickly.
Is it so surprising that we now have so many teenagers
with no respect for their parents at all?
But I think there are even more worrying examples
of where we could end up if we abandon the Ten Commandments.
To me, the most important Commandment
is, "Thou shalt not kill."
It's one of the most fundamental principles of my religion,
that human life is sacred.
It goes right to the core of any civilized society.
Yet incredibly, we are now talking
about legalizing killing.
(upbeat music)
Driving this debate are the tragic stories
of people like Heather Pratten whose husband and two sons
suffered from Huntington's Disease, a degenerative illness
that robs victims of their physical and mental faculties.
Hello, are you Heather? I'm Ann Widdecombe.
Her middle son Nigel was in his early 30s
when he realized he had the terminal disease.
- From when we first found out about the disease,
his stand was always, he would never endure the final years.
And he said to me, "I've got the best birthday present ever.
My friends have got me this heroin."
And I didn't really argue with it,
because I thought of all the options he had,
that was a nicer way of going.
We both went to sleep,
and when I woke up,
I knew he'd nearly gone,
because his face was very white and waxy.
His lips were blue, and he was only breathing now and again.
And I thought, this can't go on.
This has got to end.
And I picked up a pillow,
and I put it over his face.
I then waited for half an hour,
because I didn't want any change of resuscitation,
and then I called the ambulance and police.
- Heather, you and I are of a generation,
we grew up with the commandments.
- [Heather] Yes.
- One of which was very straightforward,
"Thou shalt not kill."
Do you believe in that Commandment?
- I do believe in it,
but in an ideal world, nobody would kill.
But I do recognize there are circumstances
when people do not want to live, if they are
in continual pain, if they have terminal diseases.
- Heather was tried for murder
and was eventually given a one-year conditional discharge
for aiding and abetting suicide.
Those arguing to legalize euthanasia cite cases like hers
as an example of why the law must be changed.
But I'm still not convinced.
(birds chirping)
Heather was faced with a horrific situation,
and if somebody I loved was suffering like that,
I might have been tempted to do the same.
But I would still have expected to face the full rigor
of the law, because this is a law that must not change.
We only have to look at divorce and abortion
to see what abuse can follow.
And when it comes to life and death,
we simply can't take those risks.
We should stick with the Law of Moses,
"Thou shalt not kill."
(mellow music)
The last commandment deals with our thoughts.
"Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife.
They shall not covet thy neighbor's goods."
It's a sophisticated concept,
and one that gives the lie to any claim
that the commandments are old-fashioned or crude.
People are now gripped by covetousness,
desperate to acquire a bigger house,
the latest phone, designer clothes.
Personal borrowing has soared to historic highs.
Every day, our nation pays 182 million pounds in interest,
and every four minutes,
one of us is declared bankrupt or becomes insolvent.
We live in a society where self-restraint
is considered unhealthy and repressive.
The last of the Ten Commandments is, "Thou shalt not covet."
It's telling us not to indulge envious thoughts.
Good Commandment, isn't it?
- I don't think that you can make a law
that tells you what to think what not to think,
and basically saying thou shall not covet
is an attempt to control people's thinking,
which is impossible and unrealistic and unfair.
In general, covetousness is normal and healthy
and helps us survive as human beings.
There's nothing wrong with desiring things
that are pleasurable and not necessarily the sexual.
- There's everything wrong with being driven by that.
We're absolutely immersed in debt,
particularly in this country.
Debt is because people want, want, want.
And they want what they can't afford.
You can't control what comes in your head.
You can control whether you develop those thoughts.
- I think that the thoughts would be
far less likely to overwhelm you and consume you
if you just allowed the thought to be there
and didn't try to control it.
- I have to say at the moment,
Abigail, I think that's just wrong.
We've lost power.
We cannot say "No, I can do without that.:
(gentle music)
I realize that some of my ideas may sit uncomfortably
in 21st century Britain, but for me, Moses' revelation
on a mountain 3,000 years ago still resonates today.
For the Jews,
it transformed a tribe of slaves into a nation.
For Christians, Jesus revealed the spirit of the law
and taught us how to live.
(dramatic music)
Secular academics may question the origins of Moses' laws,
but whether we like it or not,
they are part of our moral DNA.
For centuries, we've read and recited them.
They've adorned our churches
and shown us how to build a better society.
(dramatic music continues)
Today, these laws are attacked by the new secular orthodoxy.
But for me, their eternal truth remains.
(wind whooshing)
(bird chirps)
(gentle music)
I believe that when God appeared to Moses on Mount Sinai,
he was giving us the greatest ever moral manifesto.
And for centuries, millions of people across the world
have built better, less selfish communities
by following the Law of Moses.
To me, it's not restricting to say no
to our worst instincts, to modern temptations.
It's liberating, and for all the onslaught of the skeptics,
I remain totally convinced that we would have happier,
more fulfilled lives today
if we still followed Biblical Law.
(dramatic music)
- [Announcer] In the next program,
Bettany Hughes goes in search of the women of the Bible
and reveals why they still matter today.
- Bathsheba's brazen nakedness reminds us
of the problem of Eve's natural nakedness.
And so nakedness is a really hot topic
right the way through the Bible.
(women grunting) (stick clacking)
(lively music)