Ten Commandments Twice Removed

How the Ten Commandments Twice Removed Actually Works

The Ten Commandments Twice Removed is a creative adaptation exercise. You take the traditional Ten Commandments, rewrite them for a modern context once, then rewrite that modern version a second time through a different lens or setting. It sounds simple enough on paper. The trick is making the double transformation land without losing coherence. At its core, the technique asks you to perform two layers of translation. Layer one takes each biblical commandment and converts it into a secular or contemporary equivalent. Layer two takes those contemporary equivalents and reframes them again — usually into a specific genre, subculture, organization, or fictional setting. The result is a set of ten principles that feel fresh but carry the structural weight of the original framework. I learned this working on a table top RPG campaign setting a few years back. The game master wanted a moral code for a cyberpunk megacorporation. Straight rewriting from the biblical text would have been too on-the-nose. Doing it twice removed gave us something that felt culturally grounded without being preachy. We spent about four hours on the first pass across the team, then another two restructuring for the second pass. Total investment was manageable, but the output quality varied wildly depending on who was doing the rewrites.

The Method

Here is how you actually do it without getting lost in the weeds. Start with the original text. Keep a reference copy open. Write all ten out in a standard translation like the NIV or ESV — whichever your audience will recognize. Don't skip this step. I've seen people try to do this from memory and end up with four commandments about killing when the originals are spread across multiple categories. For the first removal, group the commandments by theme rather than by number. The original numbering varies between Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant traditions anyway, so the arbitrary numbering causes more confusion than it solves. You will find clusters: duties toward the divine, prohibitions against violence, directives about family and property, and honesty-related rules. Working in clusters makes the second pass significantly easier because you already understand the underlying principle.

The first removal should strip the theological framing and replace it with a secular or modern institutional equivalent. "You shall have no other gods before me" becomes something like "Loyalty to the organization takes priority over external allegiances." Concrete. Specific. No room for misinterpretation. The second removal is where most people fumble. You are not just swapping words. You are transposing the principle into a new context entirely. If your first removal lands in corporate policy language, your second removal might place it inside a hacker collective, a monastic order, a school system, or a survivalist community. The moral structure stays intact but the vocabulary and enforcement mechanisms change completely. Test each commandment by asking whether it would make sense if read aloud in its new setting without any preamble. If someone has to explain it, you have not gone far enough in the second removal. It needs to feel native to that world.

A Concrete Example

Take the fifth commandment: Honor your father and your mother. First removal produces something like "Respect your elders and mentors." The principle is preserved but stripped of its religious context. Second removal into a pirate crew setting gives you "Follow the chain of command and never undermine a shipmate in front of the crew." Same underlying concept — hierarchy and respect within a group structure — but the wording belongs entirely in a different world. This example came from my own work on a historical fiction project. The second-pass version felt right for the setting because it mirrored the actual naval discipline structures of the period without explicitly citing the source material. Readers absorbed it naturally.

Common Pitfalls

The biggest mistake is treating this as a word substitution exercise rather than a principle translation exercise. If your second removal just replaces nouns and verbs while keeping the same sentence structure, you have not actually done the work twice. You have just paraphrased once and edited the surface. Another trap is losing the negative form too quickly. The original commandments are mostly phrased as prohibitions. When you flip everything to positive assertions in the first removal, you lose the sharp edge that makes the framework memorable. Keep some "do not" language intact. It reads cleaner and feels more authoritative in either setting. I also ran into a problem once where the second removal was too clever. I was writing for a near-future military sci-fi setting and ended up embedding so many inside references that the commandments became unreadable to anyone who had not played the same video games I had. The fix was blunt: hand the draft to someone completely outside the genre and ask them to explain each commandment back to me in plain language. Three of the ten failed that test. I rewrote those three and kept the rest.

When This Approach Fails

Not every subject matter benefits from double removal. If your target audience is already deeply familiar with the original text in a devotional context, the second layer can come across as flippant or dismissive. I encountered this when a client asked me to adapt the commandments for a church youth group newsletter. The twice-removed versions read as trivializing to the pastor reviewing the draft. We scrapped the second removal entirely and went straight from biblical text to modern application. Sometimes one pass is the correct answer. The method also struggles with commandments that are already abstract. "Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy" does not translate cleanly into a secular context without becoming something vague like "Take regular rest." The abstraction collapses under the weight of the exercise and you end up with rule number seven being half the length of the others. Pick a different framing device or accept that one or two commandments will always be weaker than the rest.

Practical Workflow

Use a three-column spreadsheet. Column one is the original commandment. Column two is your first removal. Column three is your second removal. Having them side by side makes it obvious when a principle has drifted too far from its source or when two commandments have accidentally merged into the same idea. I recommend keeping this visible throughout the entire process rather than doing all the first passes and then all the second passes separately. Mixing the order leads to inconsistency in tone across the set. Target a total write time of about two to three hours for a complete set of ten. More than that and you start second-guessing yourself and the language gets stiff. Less than that and you have not pushed hard enough through the second removal. The sweet spot is around ninety minutes to two hours if you are working alone and familiar with the source material.