If a covenant has terms (the first of the four elements), the Ten Commandments are the terms of the covenant at Sinai. Scripture itself calls them "the words of the covenant, the ten commandments" (Exodus 34:28; "the ten words," Deuteronomy 4:13; 10:4). The ISBE's entry (John Richard Sampey, "Ten Commandments, the") makes the connection plainly: "Israel as a nation was now placed by God in a stated relation to Himself by means of a covenant, the condition upon which the covenant was based being, on his people's part, their obedience to a given law." So the law given at Sinai is not a list of rules detached from relationship; it is the stipulation of a bond, the vassal's sworn obligation to his king. The commandments were written on two stone tablets "written with the finger of God," and the tablets were later deposited in the ark of the covenant (Exodus 31:18; 34:1–4; Deuteronomy 10:1–5; Exodus 40:20), the document of the agreement, kept in the chest at the heart of Israel's worship. (Source: ISBE 1915, "Ten Commandments, the" [Sampey]. Note: the ISBE does NOT make the modern suggestion that the two tablets were two duplicate copies of a treaty; that idea, common in later scholarship, is not asserted here.)
---
The thread. Set in its own world, the Old Testament's law and covenant look at once familiar and distinct. Familiar: the case-law form, the talion, the "cutting" rite, the treaty shape of a binding agreement are the common stock of the ancient Near East, older than Israel and shared across it. Distinct: the ISBE finds in the covenant law an unusual lean toward the slave, the poor, and the stranger, and, far more fundamental, a covenant not between a king and his subjects but between God and a people, whose terms are the Ten "words." The parallels place the Bible in its time; the differences are where its readers have always located its particular claim. None of this is settled by the parallels alone, and this file picks no verdict, it sets the two side by side, as the sources do.