What part of Thou Shalt Not do you understand?
by Jack Neely
After 3,000 years, the Ten Commandments are suddenly top of the news. We know how important they are because they're now approved by Knox County Commission. But we might well wonder whose interpretation our commissioners mean.
What we've assumed the commandments mean has changed a great deal over the last 30 centuries. We've reinterpreted the more troublesome ones to suit the modern American lifestyle. When you see them posted on a laminated sign, they're usually rephrased from the original Exodus in what us reporters call a heavy edit. Several of them are significantly different in meaning even to "fundamentalists" than they were to the ancient Hebrews. Or, for that matter, to the people who founded Knoxville.
Take the fourth commandment: "the seventh day is the sabbath...in it thou shalt not do any work." Of course, the seventh day is Saturday, as Jews and Seventh-Day Adventists know, though most Christians have chosen to swap the Sabbath for Sunday. (Which one does County Commission approve?)
In Knoxville's past, keeping the Sabbath holy has been interpreted both more loosely and more strictly than they are today. In 1798, one Northern visitor was, in his word, "aghast" at Knoxville's Sabbath-day licentiousness—drinking, dancing, gambling—to a degree he'd never before seen anywhere else on a Sunday. But by the mid-20th century, numerous travelers, including author John Gunther, were appalled by how little was permitted here on Sundays. We've never adjusted our Sabbath observances correctly enough to suit Northerners.
A bigger surprise in Knoxville history concerns the second commandment. Researching funereal iconography for The Marble City, the book photographer Aaron Jay and I put together about Knox County gravesites, I was astonished to read about how our ancestors interpreted the "graven images" law.
Have a good look at any old—and by old, I mean pre-Civil War—graveyard in Knox County. Among the oldest is the churchyard beside the First Presbyterian Church on State Street. Established around 1795, it was officially closed to new burials in 1857. It's a capsule of late 18th- and early 19th-century Protestant burial customs, with few later adulterations.
Most of the graves are flat, arched stones, with capital-letter inscriptions or poetry in italics. Some feature simple designs: a stylized willow tree, a wreath, a Masonic compass. Here and there are a few Egyptian-style obelisks. But look around and count the Christian crosses you see. You'd expect to see plenty, wouldn't you? In most American cemeteries today, the cross is the single most common image represented in stone, whether it's carved statues of crosses or cross designs engraved into stones. But look around this graveyard of Knoxville's founders, and you don't see many.
In fact, you see only one. It's near the front, one of the graveyard's more conspicuous stones. It's a large marble Celtic cross: a cross with a circle around the crux of it, the sort you associate with rural graveyards in Ireland.
Look closer, and read the inscription. It memorializes Marguerite Dabney, daughter of UT President Charles Dabney. She died of scarlet fever at age 17. Dated 1899, her monument is much newer than all the others here. When she died, this old graveyard had been full for over 40 years. She was actually buried at New Gray, but her family put up this stone at their home church.
It's no coincidence that the only cross in this graveyard is also the newest stone here. And it's likely that many of those buried here would have disapproved of it.
Somewhere in the time between when this graveyard was closed to new burials in 1857 and when Marguerite Dabney's memorial went up here in 1899, America's Protestant churches underwent a noticeable change concerning their interpretation of the second commandment.
See, what it surprised me so much to find out was that, for a couple of centuries, American Protestants viewed crosses as sacrilege. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, goes the commandment. It seemed obvious to early American Protestants that crosses were exactly the sort of "graven images" Jehovah was referring to in the tablets He passed down to Moses. A graven image erected in a churchyard, of all places, would have been an offense to God.
In Knoxville and elsewhere, it may have been the influx of non-Protestant immigrants that got Protestants to loosen up a little about their previously strict observance of the Second Commandment. Irish and German Catholics began arriving in significant numbers around 1850 and soon began building extravagant graveyards with crosses and even statues of Mary, angels, and the saints. Calvary, the Catholic cemetery in East Knoxville, is a good example of funeral art which we'd never seen in these parts before. Not to be outdone by these newcomers, after 1865 or '70, urban Protestants put aside their grandparents' values and began to respond in kind.
We've edited and reinterpreted several of the other commandments, too. Followers have pondered the third commandment for years, wondering exactly what it means to "take the Lord's name in vain." We moderns take it to mean "no cussing," but many have taken it as a ban on evoking God's name for any frivolous or merely political purpose.
"The Knox County Commission hereby petitions the God of Heaven..." opens the remarkable text of resolution #R-99-3-105. It ends with a dark hint about the "ills which come to those who forget Him and His law."
I'm not qualified to judge them. Things change, of course. Maybe now it's okay to say "Goddamn."
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