Steiner's esoteric reading of the Sinai Decalogue as the schooling through which the I AM force of Jahve entered the Hebrew people by Moses.
The Ten Commandments, in Steiner's spiritual science, are far more than ethical rules. They are the moment the divine teaches a people to seek God only in the human I, in the name "I am the I-am." Where earlier epochs worshipped through physical, etheric, or astral images, the Mosaic law forbids every such image and turns the soul inward to the great World-I working through the blood from generation to generation.
In Steiner's Own Words
At this point people had to allow the Mission of Moses to flow into them; he had to be the representative of the image of the "I" of God. From that moment onwards people had to be told: Just as an "I" lives in every person and is the ruler of the members of human nature, so you must imagine the Being who weaves in the world as creative Being, who lives, rules and prevails over everything that's been and is created. Nothing sensory, neither etheric nor an astral image can represent this. Merely under the form of the "I," only under the name "I am the I-am" should you imagine this highest Being.
What it Means Today
Academic biblical scholarship has long debated when and how Israel became monotheist. Yehezkel Kaufmann, in The Religion of Israel (the 1960 English abridgement by Moshe Greenberg of his eight-volume Hebrew work), argued that Israelite monotheism was not a slow evolution from polytheism but a sudden, original intuition that the one God stands wholly outside nature, bound by no image and no cosmic force. Where Egyptian and Canaanite religion located the divine in sun, river, and beast, the God of Sinai could be represented by nothing in the created world. The second commandment's image-ban is, for Kaufmann, the signature of this break.
Steiner reaches the same threshold from the side of the I. He reads the same image-ban not as theology imposed from outside but as a stage in human consciousness: the moment a people learns to find the divine only within its own "I am," the inward reflection of the great World-I. Thalira synthesis: where Kaufmann documents that ancient Israel could picture no God in nature, Steiner names what filled the vacated space, the awakening I itself, schooled by the Decalogue to become the one image fit to mirror the divine. The later academic question, why this people, why then, finds in GA 108 an esoteric answer, that the Mission of Moses was timed to ready humanity for the I that would walk the physical plane at Golgotha.
Where to Read More
- The Gospel of St. John in Relation to the Three Other Gospels, GA 108
- Find at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]