My Big Fat Greek Headache

In my ambition to master Greek, I actually took on a question related to it. A person on Yahoo asked why Christians call the instruction given to Moses in Exodus the "ten commandments," when in Hebrew they are called statements, rather than commandments. My Greek, though primitive still, and my better command of Latin, actually served me to find an answer.

I wrote:

Because Christianity founded itself on the Septuagint (Greek Bible) and later the Vulgate (latin) rather than the Hebrew (bible).

The Septuagint word used in Exodus 20:6 is "prostagma" (Greek for "orders".) In the Vulgate, the word used is "praecepta" for precepts.

So because of this, there is definitely a slightly different emphasis in Christian understanding. We don't really consider ourselves wrong to use these texts, as they're actually older (by several centuries) than the Masoretic Hebrew used for modern Torah scrolls. They do offer a valid insight into how the texts were interpreted and thought of in ancient times.