The Ten Commandments and US Law: 6th Commandment

6^th Commandment

Quote from the Bible

13.  You shall not murder*. [or “kill”]

My interpretation what it means

The word murder, rather than kill, makes more sense for this commandment.  It means you will not kill people illegally and implies there are legal reasons to kill people.  War, punishments for certain crimes, self defense and a few other examples I’m sure I’m missing are examples of legal reasons.  So, don’t kill people when it is against the law (God’s Law, specifically).

How it relates to US Law

An interesting thing about how this applies to US Law, as you no doubt know, it’s against the law here in the United States to commit murder.  So it is plausible that the US laws took the Ten Commandments guidance for this.

Commentary

But…

So, there’s this problem with assuming that the “Thou shall not murder” is exclusively based upon the Ten Commandments of the Holy Bible.  Virtually every society ever has had a proscription against murder.   It’s more likely that this particular Commandment has to share credit for influence upon the United States Constitution with the laws of every other society our founding fathers knew of that existed prior to the writing of the Constitution.

The Code of Ur-Nammu has as much claim to be the foundation for the laws against murder in the United States as the Ten Commandments.