Exodus 24:12-18
Come up to me into the mount, and be there
The instruction includes waiting as well as climbing. A cloud covers the mount six days and he is called on the seventh.
Objects of the Bible
The tablets of the covenant
The only thing in Scripture described as written with the finger of God, and it lasted about forty days.
Moses goes up to receive tables of stone, and a law, and commandments which I have written, that thou mayest teach them. He is there forty days and forty nights. The description of what he is given is unusually physical: two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God, and later, written on both their sides, on the one side and on the other were they written. The work was the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, graven upon the tables.
Scroll down to the story
The movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of The tablets of the covenant
- 01
- 02
Exodus 31:18
Written with the finger of God
One verse ends the long instructions for the tabernacle and hands him the tables, and the phrase it uses is not used of anything else.
- 03
Exodus 32:15-19
He cast the tables out of his hands
The description of how beautiful they are comes immediately before they are destroyed, which is the order the text chooses on purpose.
- 04
Exodus 34:1-4
Hew thee two tables of stone
The replacement is a collaboration. He cuts the stone and rises early and carries it up himself, and the writing is still not his.
- 05
Exodus 34:29-30
He wist not that the skin of his face shone
He comes down with the second pair unaware of his own face, and Aaron and the people are afraid to come near him.
Why it matters
He comes down carrying them into a camp that has spent the interval making something else, and breaks them beneath the mount. The second set is different in one way that matters: hew thee two tables of stone like unto the first, and I will write upon them the words that were in the first tables, which thou brakest. The stone is now his work and the writing still is not. He is there another forty days, neither eating bread nor drinking water, and comes down with a face he does not know is shining.
2 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
