What was the significance of the Ten Commandments to the ancient Hebrews?

It marked the beginning of the Exodus as the people were freed from Egypt.

The Ten Commandments appear twice in the Hebrew Bible: in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy. According to the story told in the book of Exodus, God wrote these commands on two tablets of stone, which he gave to Moses on Mount Sinai; According to the story, when he came down from the mountain, he saw the people who were worshiping a golden calf and he broke it. Later, he asked God to forgive the people and to seal with him an "agreement" (covenant); Then, the Lord commanded Moses to take two stone slabs and in them were written the Ten Commandments of the covenant, rebuking him that "they must not tolerate disobedience."

For orthodox Judaism, God first pronounced the Ten Commandments simultaneously and then repeated each Commandment separately in the Torah. According to this vision, each of the Ten Commandments would have been addressed to all Jews in the singular because every Jew should feel a personal obligation to observe them since they were addressed directly to him, however, the majority of the members of Conservative Judaism rejects the idea that God dictated the literal content of the commandments to Moses in an act of verbal revelation and believes, instead, that the Torah was written from various previous sources.