Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments, also known as the Decalogue, are a set of biblical principles relating to ethics and worship, which play a fundamental role in the Abrahamic religions. The Ten Commandments appear twice in the Hebrew Bible: in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy. The commandments include instructions to worship only God, to honour one's parents, and to keep the sabbath day holy, as well as prohibitions against idolatry, blasphemy, murder, adultery, theft, dishonesty, and coveting. Different religious groups follow different traditions for interpreting and numbering them. Modern scholarship has found likely influences in Hittite and Mesopotamian laws and treaties, but is divided over exactly when the Ten Commandments were written and who wrote them. ]After the full forty days, Moses and Joshua came down from the mountain with the tablets of stone: And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses' anger waxed hot, and he cast the tablets out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount. After the events in chapters 32 and 33, the L told Moses, Hew thee two tablets of stone like unto the first: and I will write upon these tablets the words that were in the first tablets, which thou brakest. And he wrote on the tablets, according to the first writing, the ten commandments, which the L spake unto you in the mount out of the midst of the fire in the day of the assembly: and the L gave them unto me. According to Jewish tradition, constitutes God's first recitation and inscription of the ten commandments on the two tablets, which Moses broke in anger with his rebellious nation, and were later rewritten on replacement stones and placed in the ark of the covenant; and consists of God's re-telling of the Ten Commandments to the younger generation who were to enter the Promised Land. The passages in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 contain more than ten imperative statements, totalling 14 or 15 in all. Different religious traditions divide the seventeen verses of Exodus 20:1-17 and their parallels in Deuteronomy 5:4-21 into ten commandments or sayings in different ways, shown in the table below. Some suggest that the number ten is a choice to aid memorization rather than a matter of theology.