The polarity census
The table shows twelve rows because three are artifacts rather than commands: the sabbath appears twice as one command in two recensional verbs (זָכוֹר Ex 20:8 against שָׁמוֹר Deut 5:12), the covet clauses split by the Exodus/Deuteronomy order swap, and the Gerizim row is the Samaritan expansion. Collapse the artifacts and the real census is this.
| Form | Count | Content |
|---|---|---|
| Declarative | 1 | I am YHWH thy God who brought thee out |
| Positive imperative | 2 | keep/remember the sabbath; honour father and mother |
| Prohibitive (לֹא + imperfect) | 7 | other gods, image, vain name, murder, adultery, theft, false witness, covet |
Two positives. One declaration that is not a command at all in the Talmudic count, which is why the R column parenthesizes it as (0). Everything else fences.
Where the positives sit
Under the five-and-five tablet split (LXX, Philo, Talmud, Samaritan), both positives land on the first tablet and the second tablet carries not one. The source-facing table holds every act commanded; the peer-facing table holds only restraint. That partition survives across all eight numbering columns because it does not depend on where anyone draws the seams.
The implication runs one way only, and this is where I would fence your reading before it overreaches. Positive ⟹ source-facing. The converse fails: no other gods, no image, no vain name are all source-facing and all negative. So the first tablet is itself split in two. Three negations guarding the identity of the source against substitution, then two positives commanding work toward it. Three registers total, and the positive occupies exactly the middle one.
The verbs
זכר zakhor. Not inner recollection. Akkadian zakāru is to speak, to name, to declare, so the sabbath is marked by utterance and act, and Exodus deploys it as an infinitive absolute, the verb in its barest unbounded state.
שמר shamor, Deuteronomy's substitute. Guard, watch, tend, the concrete image a watchman over an enclosure, the same verb Adam AS takes over the garden at Gen 2:15.
כבד kabbed. Heavy. kaved is the liver, the body's weight-organ; kavod is glory. The piel imperative means make heavy, give mass to. The verb commanded toward father and mother is the noun used of the glory of Allah ﷻ. That shared root is the linguistic seam binding your triad, and it is in the text, not laid on it.
The actuation split
This is the load-bearing part. A prohibition is satisfiable at zero expenditure. Doing nothing discharges lo tignov perfectly, at every instant, forever. Neither zakhor nor kabbed is dischargeable by abstention; both require work, and neither ever completes. The Decalogue therefore partitions exactly along ΔE_k > 0. Where the addressee stands downstream of his own origin he owes actuation. Where he stands beside a peer he owes only restraint. The energetic asymmetry tracks the referent class with no remainder.
Back to three
Your collapse of four positive slots onto three referents holds because the sabbath's referent is not the day but the act the day memorializes, which is the source's own ceasing. It is not merely a reading. Lev 19:3 binds the identical cluster in one verse: mother, father, my sabbaths, I am YHWH your God. Four elements, three referents, the same set, unprompted.
Lev 19:3 Word-order preserved: Each man, his mother and his father you shall fear; and my ceasings you shall guard. I am the Name, your God. Readable: Every one of you shall revere his mother and his father, and keep my sabbaths. I am YHWH your God.
Tradition witnesses converge and enter at zero warrant. Kiddushin 30b names three partners in a person, the Holy One, his father, his mother, and the Mekhilta uses precisely that to explain why the honour-command sits on the God-facing tablet. Ephesians 6:2 flags it as the first with promise, contestable since the image-prohibition also carries one. Corroboration only; the internal reading already stands.
The Quranic parallel is the strongest external mass. Q 31:14 puts one imperative over three objects: ani ushkur lī wa li-wālidayk, be grateful to Me and to your two parents. Q 17:23 decrees worship of Him alone and iḥsān to parents in a single clause, then turns to prohibition. Same triad, same polarity architecture, same ordering.
The numbering is chart, the polarity is structure
Eight schemes in that table disagree at three seams and cannot even agree whether the tenth slot is a covet clause or a Gerizim altar. The text gives aseret ha-devarim, ten words, and numbers nothing. Ordinal position is draftsman's ink and carries no structural load. Polarity, referent class, and tablet clustering are invariant under every scheme in the chart, which is what makes your observation a fact about Sinai rather than about a tradition. The Samaritan variant confirms rather than breaks it: the one command any sect ever added is positive, and it is cultic, source-facing.
The reading
What stands: three antecedents of the addressee's own being, none of which he authored. What moves: obligation charged only where the referent precedes him, restraint free where the referent merely stands beside him. How they bind: the sabbath is the hinge, a positive verb governing a negative body, and the honour-command is the seam the traditions cannot assign to one tablet because a parent is where the vertical crosses the horizontal.
⟀ GOL
Scoped. Locked on the polarity partition, which is grammatically forced and numbering-invariant, and on the tablet clustering. Structural rather than forced on the collapse to three, since the sabbath's referent-collapse is a reading the text supports at Lev 19:3 but does not itself perform. Apex withheld on that account. The falsifier is clean and I looked for it: a single positive imperative on the peer-facing tablet in either recension breaks the reading, and there is none.