The Tables of the Law (German: Das Gesetz) is a 1944 novella by German writer Thomas Mann. It is a dramatic retelling of the Biblical story of Moses contained in the Book of Exodus, although some of the laws which Moses proscribes for his followers are taken from Leviticus. It was the only story that Mann was ever commissioned to write, and he finished it in just eight weeks, beginning on January 18, 1943, and ending on March 13, 1943.[1] Publisher Armin L. Robinson, believing the Ten Commandments to be the basis on which civilization was founded, wanted to make a movie detailing the Nazis' "desecration of the Mosaic Decalogue".[2] Instead, he settled on a book, entitled The Ten Commandments: Ten Short Novels of Hitler's War Against the Moral Code, with ten authors, one for each commandment. Mann's novella, which he was paid $1,000 to write, was originally meant to be the introduction to the volume, but Robinson liked it so much that he decided to make it the first story, under the heading "Thou Shalt Have No Other God Before Me".[2] Mann considered his story to be greatly superior to that of his fellow contributors, and he considered the overall book a "failure".[3]
Mann's story, while broadly faithful to the account given in Exodus, differs from it in several important ways:
In his afterword to the 2010 English translation of book, Michael Wood suggests that Mann was not as fully devoted to Robinson's project as others. Wood begins by explaining that Robinson first wanted to put together the volume on the Ten Commandments when he heard that Adolf Hitler had ranted against the idea of commandments one evening to two of his associates, Joseph Goebbels and Julius Streicher. Wood argues that in fact by having his character Moses present the commandments as a black-and-white ethical code, Mann was disagreeing with Moses, and expressing a position that was not necessarily opposed to Hitler's. Wood writes, "[Mann's story] disturbingly echoes and complicates rather than simply refutes Hitler's views. Mann had read his Nietzsche too – and had read a lot more Freud than Hitler had."[11]
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