Place the Ten Commandments into their proper context. The time frame was roughly 1400 BC. The Covenant of Moses, delivered by God on Mount Sinai, took a very familiar form for the people involved. The closest documentary parallel was the Hittite suzerain-vassal treaty. The Hittites began colonizing and conquering during Abraham’s sojourn in Canaan (2200 BC), and their power faded during David’s reign (1000 BC).
A conquering emperor through his representatives would establish his identity as the suzerain, the overlord to whom fealty is due. In the Ancient Near East (ANE) this included the notion all those under the treaty terms were entering his personal household as servants. That made them vassals — dependents who owed something to the suzerain. While he did propose standard legal policy, each individual was personally liable to any whim of the suzerain.
The Ten Commandments were not law as we think of it, but legal policy. The responsibility to the divine Suzerain was to construct laws and adjust customs to produce the results depicted by the ten commands. Thus, it’s a matter of “your conduct shall fit in these limits.”
Along with this was usually a body of previous rulings which served as detailed examples of how it worked. Thus, the various civil, kosher, ritual and other bodies of code in the Pentateuch were not set in stone like the Ten Commandments, but were precedent. No one expected each precedent to fit every circumstance. The suzerain always set up courts to ensure conflicting demands were resolved, and confusing applications were clarified.
For us today the Ten Commandments are not specifically binding in the sense of God’s Law for today. We are not under a suzerain-vassal treaty. However, the Covenant of Christ’s Blood does build on that ground; it serves as a cognitive parable of some higher truth which is beyond words.
