Texas's classroom Commandments leave out the slaves God freed

Three months out of Egypt, a crowd of former brickmakers stands at the foot of a mountain wrapped in smoke. Not long ago their foremen were being beaten for missing Pharaoh's quotas. Then God speaks. Before he gives a single command, he tells them who he is by pointing at what he just did: he walked them out of the slave house. So every rule that follows comes from someone who has just broken the strongest government on earth to free its laborers.

Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Galveston's schools under SB 10, a 2025 state law. So on October 1, Judge Jeth Jones ordered the Ten Commandments onto every classroom wall by October 11. About 500 donated posters are ready, each readable from anywhere in the room. The law fixes their wording, and it opens like this: "I AM the LORD thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me."

The sentence stops where Sinai's keeps going.

That shorter opening follows the Protestant posters many Americans grew up with, so the cut may not have been deliberate. The Jewish version, as JTA notes, still begins with the Egypt line. But the clause matters. Without it, the commandments can float free as heritage, which is how Paxton describes them: "a cornerstone of America's moral and legal heritage." With it, they come from a God whose first public act was taking a nation's workforce away from its king.

So can a state post God's law without standing under it? The Egypt line says no, and it unsettles both camps. Backers of SB 10 insist that "school boards do not get to veto or ignore laws they don't like," yet Sinai holds legislatures to the same rule. Rabbi Mara Nathan, who has asked the Supreme Court to strike the law, calls the commandments "religious documents." The clause agrees, while claiming more than a private creed can, because its God has already confronted a king.

In Houston, Rabbi Joshua Fixler says his children "expressed a lot of anxiety" about seeing these words on their classroom walls. Their own story is in the clause the state left off. Galveston's students will read the posters from every desk. They won't learn why this God gets to give orders: he heard slaves and stood against the state that owned them. Any government that hangs his law on its walls has hung up its own judge.