ABSTRACT
Charles de Gaulle is supposed to have said that the Ten Commandments are so simple, brief and clear, and can be understood by everyone because they were drawn up without a commission. It follows from this that the Ten Commandments are not the work of Moses, at least not in the form in which we now have them. A famous brief formula for the Old Testament is the law and the prophets. Modern scholarship has learnt that this formula should be turned upside down, becoming the prophets and the law. Both are Old Testament commandments and their sequence too is previously exemplified in the Old Testament, in the Decalogue. One of the most important preliminaries for the universal element in Judaism emerges several times in the translations of the Decalogue. The rejuvenation cure of a good five hundred years which scholarship has conferred on the Decalogue undoubtedly fails to accord with the intention of its author.
