The Ten Commandments and How They Shaped the World

The author of the bestselling E=mc² reveals how 10 ancient rules have influenced the world's civilizations for millennia.

An illuminating cultural history tracing how a set of 3,000-year-old rules shaped the world. David Bodanis reveals how our attitudes towards sex, authority, obligations toward the widowed and elderly, conscription, taxes, killing, and much else have depended on those seemingly simple directives. In mediaeval times, the ninth commandment about false witness led to the notion of "innocent until proven guilty." The fifth commandment was used by John Locke to refute kingly authority, leading to conclusions about personal freedom which Thomas Jefferson immortalized in the Declaration of Independence. The commandments inspired literary masterpieces, such as King Lear, and social upheavals such as the union movement. Their ideas were central in the spread of Islam, in the scientific ambitions of Isaac Newton, and the activism of Martin Luther King Jr. David Bodanis brilliantly uses archaeology, linguistics, social history and above all vivid human stories to show how the Commandments have been and remain an enduring tenet of Western civilization.

From the Hardcover edition.