Key Arguments

• These prohibitions were sacralized—people knelt, bowed, and removed shoes—showing maximal authority over conduct and conscience.
• Zarathustra asks rhetorically who has ever robbed and killed more than these holy words, implying that abstract moral prohibitions can do greater violence than individuals by amputating vital forces.
• By calling what is integral to life (strife, appropriation, consumption) evil, these commandments wage war on life’s basic processes, committing a metaphysical ‘killing’ of life.
• The very fact that they were called holy resulted in the ‘killing’ of life-affirmation—holiness as instrument of life-denial.

Source Quotes

10 ‘Thou shalt not rob! Thou shalt not kill!’— such words were once called holy; before them one bent the knee and bowed the head and took off one’s shoes. But I ask you now: Where have there ever been better robbers and killers in the world than these holy words have been?

Thou shalt not kill!’— such words were once called holy; before them one bent the knee and bowed the head and took off one’s shoes. But I ask you now: Where have there ever been better robbers and killers in the world than these holy words have been? Does all life not itself comprise– robbing and killing?

Does all life not itself comprise– robbing and killing? And that such words were called holy, was itself not thereby– killed? Or was it a preaching of death that called holy whatever contradicted and spoke against all life?– O my brothers, shatter, shatter for me the old tablets!

Key Concepts

• ‘Thou shalt not rob! Thou shalt not kill!’— such words were once called holy; before them one bent the knee and bowed the head and took off one’s shoes.
• Where have there ever been better robbers and killers in the world than these holy words have been?
• that such words were called holy, was itself not thereby– killed?

Context

Zarathustra, in section marked “10,” indicts traditional moral commandments for their sacral authority and life-denying effects, contrasting their veneration with their destructive impact on life.

Perspectives

Nietzsche

Agrees: the ‘holy’ interdictions are instruments of ascetic, priestly morality that spiritually ‘kill’ by condemning natural drives; moral absolutes function as tools of ressentiment that expropriate strength and vitality.

Zarathustra

Denounces the sacred prohibitions as hypocritical and murderous toward life’s energies; he unmasks them as the greatest robbers and killers precisely because they were revered.