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If somebody asked me how the Ten Commandments begin, I would probably say, “You shall have no other gods before me.”
That is the first commandment, after all. It is the point where the familiar list of instructions begins. Even if we cannot remember the correct order, most of us have a rough idea of what is there. But recently, while reading the passage again, I noticed that God says something else first.
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.”
I knew that sentence was there, but I had treated it as a kind of introduction before the serious business began. It tells us who is speaking, then we move on to the commandments themselves.
Except I am beginning to wonder whether that sentence changes the way we hear everything that follows.
