Exploring the Commandments Part 1-The Idea

How often do we explore and study the Old Testament (O.T.) Commandments?

There are 613 commandments in the O.T. See Hebrews4Christians and The Refiner's Fire for more details and a complete list.


If you google something to the effect of “List of 613 Old Testament Commandments” a variety of lists will appear. Would you like to read them in Biblical/textual order? Then check out Hebrew4Christians. How about the positive and negative commandments? There are lists of those too (such as this one at The Refiner's Fire). The original list of all 613 commandments in their textual order that I used came from the site Hebrew4Christians. <http://www.hebrew4christians.com/Articles/Taryag/taryag.html> 


These get a bad reputation for being negative, being outdated, and being highly detailed. Actually, of the 613 commandments, 365 are negative and 248 are positive.

As for being outdated, I think that the commandments are still relevant in our lives today.

In terms of detail, yes the commandments are highly detailed. This is where I come in. I sorted the commandments into categories.

One hindrance to understanding the O.T. commandments is that many Christians don't understand the context of the O.T. laws and get bogged down by the details. (At least that's true for me). I don't understand *why* a law exists and therefore don't want to follow it.


This blog series will center on those commandments in a different order: categorical. I read through each of the commandments and sorted them into a category. I came up with 18 main categories with 7 sub-categories and 1 sub-sub-category. Since these commandments come from the Jewish Tanakh (i.e. the Torah/Law, the Writings, the Prophets, etc./ Christian Old Testament), you may pick up on some unknown words. They may be unknown since they are in Hebrew. Each blog post will focus on a couple of these categories and highlight a few noteworthy commandments.

Parsons, John J.. "Taryag Mitzvot 613 Commandments of Torah." Hebrew4Christians. Web. 2004. <http://www.hebrew4christians.com/Articles/Taryag/taryag.html>.