The Ten Commandments

The Ten Commandments or Decalogue

The Ten Commandments, or Decalogue, are a list of religious and moral imperatives that, according to the Hebrew Bible, were spoken by God to the people of Israel from the mountain referred to as "Mount Sinai" or "Horeb", and later
authored by God and given to Moses in the form of two stone tablets. They are recognized as a moral foundation in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

In Biblical Hebrew, the commandments both translatable as "the ten words."
The English name "Decalogue" is derived from the Greek translation dekalogos "ten terms", found in the Septuagint at Exodus 34:28 and Deuteronomy 10:4.

The phrase "Ten Commandments" is generally used to refer to similar
passages in Exodus 20:2–17 and Deuteronomy 5:6–21. Some scholars distinguish between this "Ethical Decalogue" and a different series of ten commandments in Exodus 34:11–27
that they call the "Ritual Decalogue". Although Exodus 34 contains ten imperative statements, the passages in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 contain fourteen or fifteen.
However, the Bible assigns the count of ten to both lists.[10] Various denominations divide these statements into ten
in different ways, and may also translate the Commandments differently.

The Tablets of Stone, Stone Tablets, Tablets of Law, or Tablets of
Testimony (in Hebrew "the tablets [of] the covenant") in the Bible, were the two pieces of special stone inscribed with the Ten Commandments when Moses ascended Mount Sinai as recorded in the Book of Exodus. Exodus
31:18 refers to the tablets as the "Tablets of Testimony" because they give insight into the nature of God.

According to the Bible, there were two sets: the first, inscribed by God, were smashed by Moses when he was enraged by the sight of the Children of Israel worshiping the Golden Calf; and the second, later cut by Moses and rewritten by God.

According to traditional teachings of Judaism in the Talmud, they were made of blue sapphire stone as a symbolic reminder of the sky, the heavens, and ultimately of God's throne; many Torah scholars, however, have opined that the Biblical "sapir" was, in fact, the lapis lazuli.
Both the first shattered set and the second unbroken set were stored in the Ark of the Covenant