So now, Israel, give heed to the statutes and ordinances that I am teaching you to observe, so that you may live to enter and occupy the land that the Lord, the God of your ancestors, is giving you. You must neither add anything to what I command you nor take away anything from it, but keep the commandments of the Lord your God with which I am charging you.
Deuteronomy 4:1-2
The basic statutes which the Israelites were to observe were the Ten Commandments. Of course they couldn’t resist adding to the basic rules, and by the time Jesus came along there were 613 commandments derived from scripture: 365 negative commandments, corresponding to the number of days in a solar year, and 248 positive commandments, ascribed to the number of bones and significant organs in the human body. We have a hard time accepting that we cannot improve on God’s work. And in spite of all the additions we made to the original commandments, we could still forget why we were given the commandments in the first place – to show us how to love the Lord our God above all else and our neighbor as ourselves. If we work really hard on those two, the other 10 or 611 will take care of themselves.
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