“12 And the LORD said unto Moses, Come up to me into the mount, and be there: and I will give thee tables of stone, and a law, and commandments which I have written; that thou mayest teach them.” Now you can understand why people are mixed up or confused in differentiating the Ten Commandments from the “ 613 laws of the covenant “ or “the book of covenant”. Unless the Holy Spirit point out to you the mis-interpretations that the Reverend fathers made under the instructions of the Papacy. The clear points of the covenant or book of covenant was dictated to Moses which Moses wrote to make a book
The Ten Commandments were written by God with His fingers twice which cost Moses to spend forty days twice on the mountain of God. All these are explained in this article.
In any calculation of the number of commandments in the Mosaic Law, complications arise. For example, if a command occurs in Exodus and is then repeated in Deuteronomy, does that count as one commandment or two? Further, some laws in the covenant book can be understood as clarifications of other laws rather than laws.
There is some debate as to who first came up with 613 as the number of laws in the book of covenant. The Talmud points to Rabbi Simlai in the 3rd century AD as the originator. However, there is no record of Rabbi Simlai listing all 613 commandments. The most commonly accepted breakdown was done by Maimonides in the 12th century AD. Maimonides further divided the 613 commandments into positive, “do this” commandments, numbering 248, and negative, “do not do this” commandments, numbering 365.
Biblically speaking, whether or not 613 is the correct count is not that important. The purpose of the Law the Ten Commandments was to point us to Christ. Galatians 3:24says, “Therefore the law was our tutor to bring us to Christ, Then now made the ten commandments more than they were before Jesus Christ by writing them on our hearts through the blood of Jesus Christ. These our hearts are not thethe hearts that the world know. Believers hearts that God wrote the Ten Commandments is the Holy Spirit of God inside us that we might be justified by faith” (NKJV). No one can perfectly obey all the commandments, no matter how many or few there are (Ecclesiastes 7:20; Romans 3:23). In fact, no one can even perfectly obey the Ten Commandments. The Law makes our sinfulness evident (Romans 7:7). God gave the Law to define sin and demonstrate our need for a Savior. Jesus is the only one who has perfectly obeyed the Law. Through His life, death, and resurrection, He fulfilled all of God’s righteous commands (Matthew 5:17–18).When God gave Moses these Ten Commandments, there was no blood sprinkled on it, but specifically commanded Moses to put it inside the ark of cvenant
