BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Louisiana has become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom under a bill signed into law by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry on Wednesday.
The GOP-drafted legislation mandates that a poster-sized display of the Ten Commandments in “large, easily readable font” be required in all public classrooms, from kindergarten to state-funded universities. Although the bill did not receive final approval from Landry, the time for gubernatorial action — to sign or veto the bill — has lapsed.
Opponents question the law’s constitutionality, warning that lawsuits are likely to follow. Proponents say the purpose of the measure is not solely religious, but that it has historical significance. In the law’s language, the Ten Commandments are described as “foundational documents of our state and national government.”
The displays, which will be paired with a four-paragraph “context statement” describing how the Ten Commandments “were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries,” must be in place in classrooms by the start of 2025.
The posters would be paid for through donations. State funds will not be used to implement the mandate, based on language in the legislation.
The law also “authorizes” — but does not require — the display of the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence and the Northwest Ordinance in K-12 public schools.
Similar bills requiring the Ten Commandments be displayed in classrooms have been proposed in other states including Texas, Oklahoma and Utah. However, with threats of legal battles over the constitutionality of such measures, no state besides Louisiana has had success in making the bills law.
Legal battles over the display of the Ten Commandments in classrooms are not new.
In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a similar Kentucky law was unconstitutional and violated the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution, which says Congress can “make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” The high court found that the law had no secular purpose but rather served a plainly religious purpose.
Louisiana’s controversial law, in a state ensconced in the Bible Belt, comes during a new era of conservative leadership in the state under Landry, who replaced two-term Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards in January.
The GOP also has a two-thirds supermajority in the Legislature, and Republicans hold every statewide elected position, paving the way for lawmakers to push through a conservative agenda during the legislative session that concluded earlier this month.
Short answer is we know it was Hebrew, but we don't know what kind of Hebrew, because the Hebrew language changed over time.
On the basis of a variety of arguments, modern secular scholars generally see the completed Torah as a product of the time of the Persian Achaemenid Empire (probably 450–350 BCE). The absence of archaeological evidence for the Exodus narrative, and the evidence pointing to anachronisms in the patriarchal narratives of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, have convinced the vast majority of scholars that the Torah does not give an accurate account of the origins of Israel.This implies that the Torah could not have been written by Moses during the second millennium BCE, as Jewish tradition teaches. It is generally agreed that Classical Hebrew and Late Biblical Hebrew had distinctive, identifiable features and that Classical Hebrew was earlier. Classical Hebrew is usually dated to the period before the Babylonian captivity (597–539 BCE), while Late Biblical Hebrew is generally dated to the exilic and post-exilic periods. However, it is difficult to determine precisely when Classical Hebrew ceased being used, since there are no extant Hebrew inscriptions of substantial length dating from the relevant period (c. 550–200 BCE). Another methodological difficulty with linguistic dating is that it is known that the biblical authors often intentionally used archaisms for stylistic effects, sometimes mixing them with words and constructions from later periods. This means that the presence of archaic language in a text cannot be considered definitive proof that the text dates to an early period.