Moses Removes the Grounds for Boasting

“This day” means now, in this season; the crossing itself comes weeks later in Joshua 3. “Fenced up to heaven” is the spies’ phrase from 1:28, walled up to heaven, and it carries a faint echo of Babel’s tower “whose top may reach unto heaven” (Genesis 11:4).

“Anakims” doubles a plural: Hebrew -im already makes Anakim plural, and the King James adds an English -s, as it does in “cherubims”. The question in quotation marks sounds like a saying people repeated. Caleb later drives Anak’s three sons out of Hebron (Joshua 15:14).

God crosses first, the verb avar again, and Joshua 3:11 enacts it: the ark “passeth over before you into Jordan”. “Destroy them quickly” seems to sit against 7:22, “not consume them at once”. The quick destruction is of the armies and kings; the slow part is the emptying and settling of the land.

The second time a sentence spoken “in thine heart” is quoted and refused, after the boast about wealth in 8:17. The remark about the nations’ wickedness recalls Genesis 15:16, where Abram was told his descendants would wait four generations because “the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full”.

“Uprightness of thine heart” is the quality God asks of Solomon in 1 Kings 9:4. “Perform” is heqim, to make stand or establish, the verb of 8:18. The reason for the gift lies in the word sworn in Genesis 15 and repeated to Isaac and Jacob, a promise already four centuries old.

“Stiffnecked” is qesheh oref, hard of neck, a draft animal that will not bend to the yoke. It is God’s own word for Israel at the golden calf (Exodus 32:9, 33:3, 34:9), which is why the next verses go straight to Horeb. Stephen throws it back at the council in Acts 7:51.

“Rebellious” is mamrim, from marah, to defy. It is the word Moses shouted at Meribah, “Hear now, ye rebels” (Numbers 20:10), the outburst that cost him the crossing. The span is exact: from Egypt to “this place” is the whole forty years.

In Hebrew “Horeb” comes first for emphasis: even at Horeb. Psalm 106:19 condenses the scandal the same way: “They made a calf in Horeb, and worshipped the molten image.” The mountain of the covenant is the one place where the failure is least excusable.

Forty days and forty nights without food or water is beyond ordinary endurance. Elijah later walks forty days and nights to this same mountain of Horeb (1 Kings 19:8), and Jesus fasts forty days in the wilderness (Matthew 4:2).

The magicians of Egypt had said of the plague of lice, “This is the finger of God” (Exodus 8:19), and Exodus 31:18 uses the phrase of the tablets. Jesus takes it up in Luke 11:20: “if I with the finger of God cast out devils”. The tablets carried “all the words”, nothing added.

The verse restates 9:10 almost word for word, as if the moment of handing over is being slowed down before what follows. “Tables of the covenant” is the name Hebrews 9:4 uses for the tablets kept inside the ark.

“Quickly” is maher, and it appears twice: get thee down quickly, for they are quickly turned aside. A molten image is massekhah, from nasakh, to pour, metal cast in a mould. “Corrupted themselves” is shachat, the word 4:16 warned about.

“I have seen” is ra’iti. God used the same words at the burning bush, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people” (Exodus 3:7). The God who once saw their suffering now sees their stubbornness, and the phrase “this people” keeps them at arm’s length.

“Let me alone” is heref mimmenni, let go of me, as if Moses were holding on. Midrash read it as an invitation to intercede. “I will make of thee a nation” echoes Genesis 12:2 to Abram: the promise is offered to Moses personally, and he turns it down by praying.

Exodus 32:15 adds that the tablets were written on both sides. “Two hands” is repeated in 9:17: Moses is carrying the covenant with nothing free. The mountain still burning behind him keeps the fire of 5:23 in view as he walks into the camp.

“I looked, and, behold” gives the scene through Moses’ eyes as he arrives. The calf is egel, a young bull, a standard image of strength and fertility in Canaan and Egypt. Jeroboam’s calves at Bethel and Dan come with Aaron’s own words, “behold thy gods, O Israel” (1 Kings 12:28).

The broken tablets were not simply discarded in Jewish tradition. The Talmud (Bava Batra 14b) says both the whole tablets and the broken ones were placed in the ark together. “Before your eyes” makes the breaking a public act: the people see the covenant shatter.

“Fell down” is hitnappal, a reflexive form: I threw myself down. Exodus 34:28 records a second forty days without bread or water when the tablets were rewritten. “As at the first” means Moses fasted twice, eighty days in all.

“I was afraid” is yagorti. Hebrews 12:21 has Moses say at Sinai, “I exceedingly fear and quake”, most likely drawing on the Greek of this verse. “Hot displeasure” is chemah, heat. “At that time also” implies earlier prayers already answered, as at Taberah (Numbers 11:2).

Exodus 32 records Aaron’s excuse, that he threw the gold into the fire “and there came out this calf” (32:24), but not that God meant to destroy him or that Moses prayed for him. Only Deuteronomy adds this. Aaron’s death at Mosera is noted in 10:6.

Exodus 32:20 adds that Moses scattered the powder on the water and made Israel drink it. Josiah later treats the Asherah pole the same way, burning it at the brook Kidron and stamping it small to powder (2 Kings 23:6). The idol is called by what it was: “your sin”.

The names are verdicts. Taberah means burning (Numbers 11:1-3), Massah testing (Exodus 17:7), and Kibroth-hattaavah the graves of craving, where the quail-eaters were buried (Numbers 11:34). The list is not in order of time: Massah came before Horeb.

“Believed him not” is from aman, the verb of Genesis 15:6, where Abram “believed in the LORD”. The fathers believed and the sons did not, over the same promise of land. Numbers 14:11 asks, “how long will it be ere they believe me”, and Psalm 106:24 repeats the charge.

The verse closes a bracket with 9:7, returning to the same word, rebellious. The Greek Old Testament and the Samaritan text read “from the day that he became known to you”, dating the rebellion from God’s self-revelation rather than from Moses’ acquaintance.

The Hebrew has “the forty days and the forty nights”, with the article: the same forty already mentioned in 9:18, taken up again. The verb “fell down” is repeated inside the verse, which keeps Moses prostrate while the prayer itself is finally quoted.

“Destroy not” is al tashchet, from shachat, the verb used in 9:12 when the people “corrupted themselves”. They corrupted, and Moses asks God not to corrupt in return. The same two words head four psalms as a tune name, “Al-taschith” (Psalms 57, 58, 59, 75).

The patriarchs are called God’s servants, and the prayer leans on them rather than on the living. “Stubbornness” is qeshi, a noun found nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible, formed from the same root as the hard neck of 9:6 and 9:13.

“The land” stands for its people, the Egyptians, as the Greek makes explicit. Moses used this argument twice before, at the calf (Exodus 32:12) and at Kadesh, where he said the nations would claim the LORD “was not able to bring this people into the land” (Numbers 14:16).

The prayer ends with the phrase it began with in 9:26, thy people and thine inheritance. Solomon closes his temple prayer on nearly the same words: “they be thy people, and thine inheritance, which thou broughtest forth out of Egypt” (1 Kings 8:51).