Ten Commandments vs. Aseret Hadevarim - Torah portion Yitro
If you're reading the text of Exodus 20 straight, without any preconceptions and without thinking you had to divide verses 2-13 into ten distinct laws, you'd most likely never assume that "I am YHVH your God" is, by many people's interpretations, a command. First off, in the traditional parsing of verses, it's not even a separate verse: I am the YHVH your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the home of slavery; you should have no other gods before me. (Ex 20:2) Though to be fair, verse 12 contains 4 commandments. And verses 7-10 encompass one commandment. So you can't look to the verse as a unit of measure for a commandment here. But even in the traditional paragraph spacing ( petuchot and setumot ), "I am YHVH" is grouped with the commands relating to idolatry, i.e. with no break in between, whereas there is a space between all the other commandments. (Interestingly though, there's also a space between "Do n...