American Minute with Bill Federer: “THE TEN COMMANDMENTS are not the laws. They are THE LAW,”stated
Cecil B. DeMille at the New York opening of his epic film, THE TEN COMMANDMENTS.
Starring Charlton Heston as Moses and Yul Brynner asPharaoh Rameses II, the film was released by Paramount Pictures in 1956.
While filming on-location in Egypt, Cecil B. DeMille, then 75 years old, climbed a 107-foot ladder to shoot the famous Exodus scene from atop of the massive Per Rameses set.
In the intense heat, DeMille suffered a near-fatal heart attack.
Though doctors ordered him to rest, DeMille finished directing the movie.
DeMille never fully recovered and died of a heart condition on JANUARY 21, 1959.
He had anticipated doing a film on the Biblical Book of Revelation.
For almost five decades, Cecil B. DeMille produced monumental films in Hollywood, including:
-Samson and Delilah,
-The King of Kings,
-The Sign of the Cross,
-The Crusades, and
-The Greatest Show on Earth, for which he won an Academy Award.
Cecil B. DeMille was educated at Pennsylvania Military Academy and at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
His niece, Agnes de Millechoreographed films and musicals, such as:
-Oklahoma! (1943);
-Paint Your Wagons (1951);
–Carousel (1945); and
–Rodeo (1942).
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Continuing his comments at the 1956 New York opening of THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, Cecil B. DeMille stated:
“Man has made 32 million laws since THE COMMANDMENTS were handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai more than three thousand years ago, but he has never improved on God’s law …
… THE TEN COMMANDMENTS are the principles by which man may live with God and man may live with man. They are the expressions of the mind of God for His creatures.
They are the charter and guide of human liberty, for there can be no liberty without the law …
… What I hope for our production of THE TEN COMMANDMENTS is that those who see it shall come from the theater not only entertained and filled with the sight of a big spectacle, but filled with the spirit of truth …
… That it will bring to its audience a better understanding of the real meaning of this pattern of life that God has set down for us to follow.“
The Ten Commandments and their Influence on American Law
At the time of the Exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt, dated between 1.200 BC to 1,400 BC:
-the Hittite language had around 375 cuneiform characters;
-the Indus Valley Harappan language had around 417 symbols;
-the Luwian language of Anatolian had over 500 logographic hieroglyphs;
-the Akkadian language, most prevalent in Mesopotamia, had over 1,500 Sumerian cuneiform characters;
-the Egyptian language had over 3,000 hieroglyphic characters;
-the Chinese language had nearly10,000 pictogram and ideogram characters, invented by scribes of China’s Yellow Emperor.
When Moses came down from Mount Sinai, he not only had THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, but he had them written in an easy-to-learn 22 character alphabet. (“aleph” is the first letter in Hebrew and “beth” is the second).
With so few characters, everyone could learn to read, even children.
Israel’s priests and levites taught the Law, and also taught the people how to read it for themselves.
It was not only a privilege to read it, the people were required to read it, as the law was addressed to each person who was personally accountable to God obey it.
In most other countries, only the upper class could read: kings, pharaohs, emperors, their scribes, with the ruling and merchant class.
How did writing develop?
The first invention ever was the plow — “Cain was a tiller of the ground.” (Genesis 4:2)
Then people started hitting each other with them and they turned into weapons.
People gravitated together for protection and formed the first cities.
When people get together, something happens — one person ends up telling the others what to do.
At first, this is great, as you are able to protect yourselves from getting killed. But then this person has sons and grandsons who claim to be a special, elite class, and it turns into a hereditary monarch.
St. Augustine called this
“libido dominandi” — the lust to dominate.
Kings claimed to own everything and they needed accountants and scribes to count it all. In China, scribes developed a way of counting with knots in ropes and bamboo strips.
In Sumeria, they developed rods with beads — an abacus, then used tokens in dishes. They began making markings in the tokens — like tallying — which turned into cuneiform.
Writing evolved to keep track of a king’s genealogy, decrees, astrological observations, myths, and royal propaganda.
There was no need for common people to read as they had relatively few possessions to keep track of and obviously made no decrees.
Slaves not only had no need to read, in most cases they were forbidden to learn how to read.
In Ancient Egypt, the literacy rate was less than one percent.
The National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece, has a display on “Scribes” in its section on Egyptian Artifacts:
“Only a small percentage of ancient Egypt’s population was literate,namely the pharaoh, members of the royal family, officials, priests and scribes.
Particularly popular and lucrative, the scribe’s profession was mostly hereditary. Scribes had careers in the government, priesthood, and army.”
It is theorized that scribes kept writing complicated as job security. It was their secret knowledge. They were needed to decipher the cryptic hieroglyphs.
The “deep-state” ruling class used complicated writing as a means to maintain control over uneducated masses.
Anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss (1908-2009) wrote:
“Ancient writing’s main function was to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings.”
George Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four:
“In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.”
A similar situation existed in Medieval Europe, where the fall of the Roman Empire left only the upper class and clergy able read.
Most commoners could not read, which contributed to the people being controlled more easily by a monarch. Many Islamic countries limit education of women.
This situation existed in the United States prior to the Civil War, where Southern Democrat slave-holding states had laws making it illegal to teach slaves to read, especially after Nat Turner’s slave rebellion.
It was easier to control illiterate, uneducated people.
A North Carolina Act in 1831 stated:
“Whereas the teaching of slaves to read and write, has a tendency to excite dissatisfaction in their minds, and to produce insurrection and rebellion …
Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of North Carolina …
That any free person, who shall hereafter teach, or attempt to teach, any slave within the State to read or write … shall … be fined not less than one hundred dollars.”
Republican Advisor to Lincoln Frederick Douglass was born a slave in Baltimore, Maryland.
He told the story that one day, when he was about 12 years old, his master’s sister-in-law, Sophia Auld, was teaching him the alphabet.
When her husband found out, he yelled at her, adamantly forbidding it, saying that if slaves could read, they would grow discontent, desire freedom and run away.
Frederick Douglass considered this the “first decidedly anti-slavery lecture” he had ever heard, causing him to be determined to read all-the-more.
He wrote in his autobiography The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass: His Early Life as a Slave, His Escape from Bondage, and His Complete History(1881) of being caught attempting to read a newspaper.
It was snatched away from him with a scolding.
Frederick learned to read from neighborhood white children, as well as carefully observing the writings of men he worked with.
In the nation of Israel, every person was expected to read, as each person was individually accountable to God to follow the commandments.
Israel is the first well-recorded instance in history of an entire population being literate, an important prerequisite for prosperity.
When examining the types of governments, there is a spectrum of power:
TOTAL GOVERNMENT is on one side,
and NO GOVERNMENT on the other side.
On the total government side, power is in the hands of one person who rules through fear.
On the
no government side, there is anarchy, unless the people are taught to exercise self-control.
On the total government side, as power concentrates there is more favoritism and corruption.
On the
no government side, power is separated among the people and order is maintained by citizens having internal morals.
But there is an important question: why would you obey an internal moral?
What would motivate you to resist yielding to a selfish temptation?
Ancient Israel introduced into the world the necessary key, namely, a God who:
1) is watching everyone;
2) wants you to be fair; and
3) will hold you accountable in the future.
Imagine, for example, you had the opportunity to steal and not get caught. You might consider it until you remember that God is watching, He wants you to be fair, and He will hold you accountable in the future.
Your hesitation to steal is called having a “conscience.”
If everybody in the nation believes this, there would be complete order with no police.
Democrat candidate for President, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, stated in his speech “The Prince of Peace” (New York Times, Sept. 7, 1913):
“A religion which teaches personal responsibility to God gives strength to morality.
There is a powerful restraining influence in the belief that an all-seeing eye scrutinizes every thought and word and act of the individual.”
On February 5, 1996,
Margaret Thatcher stated:
“The Decalogue (TEN COMMANDMENTS) are addressed to each and every person.
This is the origin … the sanctity of the individual … You don’t get that in any other political creed …
It is personal liberty with personal responsibility.
Responsibility to your parents, to your children, to your God …
If there be no God, there is … no future account.”
President Reagan stated in 1984:
“Without God there is no virtue because there is no prompting of the conscience.”
Yale President Ezra Stilesaddressed Connecticut’s General Assembly, May 8, 1783:
“A discourse upon the political welfare of God’s American Israel… Our system of dominion and civil polity would be imperfect without the true religion …
From the diffusion of virtue among the people of any community would arise their greatest secular happiness. Israel’s decentralized form of government allowed for maximum individual liberty.”
Claude Fleury wrote in The Manners of the Ancient Israelites(1681):
“The Israelites were perfectly free. They enjoyed the liberty cherished by Greece and Rome. Such was the purpose of God.”
E.C. Wines wrote in Commentaries on the Laws of the Ancient Hebrews (NY: Geo. P. Putnam & Co., 1853):
“Another of those great ideas, which constituted the basis of the Hebrew state, was liberty …
The Hebrew people enjoyed as great a degree of
personal liberty, as can ever be combined with an efficient and stable government.”
This situation can only work with the God of the Bible. An Islamic Allah permits lying, stealing, and raping of non-Muslim infidel kafirs in certain instances.
Only the God of the Bible states that all men and women are equal — made in the image of the Creator — and to do unto others as you would have them do unto you, irregardless of whether they are a believer or of the same race.
Referring to THE TEN COMMANDMENTS,
Herbert Hooverstated in San Diego, California, September 17, 1935:
“Our Constitution … is based upon certain inalienable freedoms and protections which in no event the government may infringe …
It does not require a lawyer to interpret those provisions. They are as clear as THE TEN COMMANDMENTS …
The freedom of worship, freedom of speech and of the press, the right of peaceable assembly, equality before the law … behind them is the conception which is the highest development of the Christian faith … individual freedom with brotherhood.”
Ronald Reagan stated at a National Rifle Association banquet in Phoenix, May 6, 1983:
“If we could just keep remembering that Moses brought down from the mountain THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, not ten suggestions — and if those of us who live for the Lord could remember that He wants us to love our Lord and our neighbor, then there’s no limit to the problems we could solve.”
President William McKinley stated in his Inaugural Address, March 4, 1897:
“Our faith teaches that there is no safer reliance than upon the God of our fathers … who will not forsake us so long as we obey HIS COMMANDMENTS.”
Alfred Smith, four-term Governor of New York, and Democratic Presidential candidate in 1928, stated in May of 1927:
“The essence of my faith is built upon THE COMMANDMENTS OF GOD.
The law of the land is built on THE COMMANDMENTS OF GOD.
There can be no conflict between them.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt stated on December 24, 1942:
“We as a Nation and as individuals will please God best by showing regard for the laws of God.
There is no better way of fostering good will toward man than by first fostering good will toward God. If we love Him we will keep His COMMANDMENTS.”
Franklin D. Rooseveltstated in a radio address on Washington’s Birthday, February 22, 1943:
“Skeptics and the cynics of Washington … are like the people who carp at THE TEN COMMANDMENTS because some people are in the habit of breaking one or more of them.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt stated in a Press Conference, December 22, 1944:
“We don’t all live up to THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, which is perfectly true, but on the whole they are pretty good. It’s something pretty good to shoot for.
The Christian religion most of us in the room happen to belong to, we think it is pretty good. We certainly haven’t attained it.
Well, the Atlantic Charter … not comparing it with the Christian religion or THE TEN COMMANDMENTS … was a step towards a better life for the population of the world.”
In 1954, President Dwight David Eisenhower, said:
“The purpose of a devout and united people was set forth in the pages of The Bible …
1) to live in freedom;
2) to work in a prosperous land; … and
3) to obey THE COMMANDMENTS OF GOD …
This Biblical story of the Promised land inspired the founders of America. It continues to inspire us.”
On March 8, 1983, at the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, President Reaganstated:
“There’s a great spiritual awakening in America …
One recent survey by a Washington-based research council concluded … 95 percent of those surveyed expressed a belief in God.
A huge majority believed THE TEN COMMANDMENTS had real meaning in their lives.”
The U.S. District Court, in Crockett v. Sorenson, (W.D. Va. 1983), stated:
“THE TEN COMMANDMENTS have had immeasurable effect on Anglo-American legal development …
A basic background in the Bible is essential to fully appreciate and understand both Western culture and current events.”
The Ten Commandments and their Influence on American Law
Senator Robert Byrd addressed Congress, June 27, 1962:
“Above the head of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court are THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, with the great American eagle protecting them.
… Moses is included among the great lawgivers in Herman A MacNeil’s marble sculpture group on the east front.”
In dissenting the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear an Elkhart, Indiana, ‘Ten Commandment’ case, 2001, Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote:
“The text of THE TEN COMMANDMENTS no doubt has played a role in the secular development of our society and can no doubt be presented by the government as playing such a role in our civic order …
A carving of Moses holding THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, surrounded by representations of other historical legal figures, adorns the frieze on the south wall of our courtroom, and we have said that the carving signals respect not for great proselytizers but for great lawgivers.”
Dr. Billy Graham stated in accepting with the Congressional Gold Medal, May 2, 1996.
“We have lost sight of the moral and spiritual principles on which this nation was established — principles drawn largely from the Judeo-Christian tradition as found in the Bible …
There is hope! Our lives can be changed … The Scripture says, ‘You must be born again’ …
Think how different our nation would be if we sought to follow the simple and yet profound injunctions of THE TEN COMMANDMENTS and the Sermon on the Mount.”
John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson, November 4, 1816:
“THE TEN COMMANDMENTS and the Sermon on the Mount contain my religion.”
On August 11, 1992, U.S. Rep. Nick Joe Rahall introduced a bill to declare November 22-28, “America’s Christian Heritage Week,” stating:
“While … emerging democracies … turn from the long held atheism of communism to true religious freedoms, we find ourselves, with heavy hearts, watching our own Government succumb to pressures to distant itself from God and religion.
Our own Government … has … evolve into bans against the simple freedom as … representation of THE TEN COMMANDMENTS on government buildings …
Such a standard of religious exclusion is absolutely and unequivocally counter to the intention of those who designed our Government.”
On February 5, 1997, Governor Fob James threatened to call out the National Guard to prevent the removal of the Ten Commandments display from a courtroom in Gadsden, Alabama:
“The only way those TEN COMMANDMENTS and prayer would be stripped from that courtroom is with the force of arms.”
In 1973, as Governor of California, Ronald Reaganstated:
“With freedom goes responsibility.
Sir Winston Churchill once said you can have 10,000 regulations and still not have respect for the law.
We might start with THE TEN COMMANDMENTS. If we lived by the Golden Rule, there would be no need for other laws.”
President Harry S Truman addressed the Attorney General’s Conference, February 1950:
“The fundamental basis of this nation’s laws was given to Moses on the Mount… I don’t think we emphasize that enough these days…
If we don’t have a proper fundamental moral background, we will finally end up with a totalitarian government which does not believe in rights for anybody except for the State.”
American Minuteis a registered trademark of William J. Federer. Permission is granted to forward, reprint or duplicate provided acknowledgement is given.
