The Ten Commandments, also known as the Decalogue, are a set of biblical principles relating to ethics and worship, which play a fundamental role in Judaism and most forms of Christianity. They include instructions to worship only God and to keep the Sabbath, and prohibitions against idolatry, blasphemy, murder, theft, and adultery. Different groups follow slightly different traditions for interpreting and numbering them.

The Ten Commandments appear twice in the Hebrew Bible, in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy. According to the story in Exodus, God inscribed them on two stone tablets, which he gave to Moses on Mount Sinai. Modern scholarship has found likely influences in Hittite and Mesopotamian laws and treaties, but is divided over exactly when the Ten Commandments were written and who wrote them.

In biblical Hebrew, the Ten Commandments are called עשרת הדברים (transliterated Asereth ha-D'bharîm) and in Rabbinical Hebrew עשרת הדברות (transliterated Asereth ha-Dibroth), both translatable as "the ten words", "the ten sayings" or "the ten matters". The Tyndale and Coverdale English translations used "ten verses". The Geneva Bible appears to be the first to use "tenne commandements", which was followed by the Bishops' Bible and the Authorized King James Version as "ten commandments". Most major English versions follow the Authorized Version.

Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was an English American author and journalist whose career spanned more than four decades. Hitchens, often referred to colloquially as "Hitch", was a columnist and literary critic for New Statesman, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Mirror, The Times Literary Supplement and Vanity Fair. He was an author of twelve books and five collections of essays. As a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits, he was a prominent public intellectual, and his confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded and controversial figure.

Hitchens was known for his admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, as well as for his excoriating critiques of various public figures including Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger and Diana, Princess of Wales. Although he supported the Falklands War, his key split from the established political left began in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left to the Rushdie Affair. The September 11 attacks strengthened his internationalist embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face." His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative, although Hitchens insisted he was not "a conservative of any kind", and his friend Ian McEwan describes him as representing the anti-totalitarian left.