Take Two Tablets and Climb Back Up to Me in a Few Chapters
Moses does get two tablets from God, but not for another eleven chapters. “When YHVH finished speaking to Moses on Mount Sinai, he gave him the two tablets, the covenant, two tablets of stone inscribed by the finger of God” (Exodus 31:18). Later, when Moses finds his people worshiping the golden calf, he smashes the tablets (Exodus 32:19). God kills many Israelites with a plague and then orders Moses to lead the survivors to the Promised Land (Exodus 32:34–35). Days pass before God tells Moses to “carve for yourself two stone tablets like the first ones, and I shall inscribe on the tablets the words that were on the first tablets, which you shattered” (Exodus 34:1). So Moses, carrying the two stone tablets, once more treks up to the summit of Sinai, a journey that now includes the distance the people have traveled since the plague. But at last he is going to get the real Ten Commandments directly from God, the very commandments that were inscribed on the first set of tablets long after Moses’s recitation of his own ten commandments.
Great spiritual books are filled with moments of cognitive dissonance: turning a conventional teaching on its head to get us to rethink its meaning. The problem is few of us read closely enough to get it. RR
1 Do not worship alien gods (Exodus 34:14).
2 Do not make molten gods for yourselves (Exodus 34:17).
3 Observe the Festival of Unleavened Bread (Exodus 34:18).
4 Dedicate the firstborn to God (Exodus 34:19).
5 Keep the Sabbath (Exodus 34:21).
6 Observe the festival of Shavuot/Pentecost (Exodus 34:22).
7 Observe Passover (Exodus 34:22).
8 Make three pilgrimages annually (Exodus 34:23).
9 Avoid eating leavened foods during Passover (Exodus 34:25).
10 Do not cook a calf in its mother’s milk (Exodus 34:26).
These Ten Commandments listed in Exodus 34—and not those improvised by Moses in Exodus 19—are the true words of the covenant. How do we know? The Bible tells us so: “God then said to Moses, ‘Write these words for yourself, for according to these words have I sealed a covenant with you and Israel.’ Moses remained there with God for forty days and forty nights—he ate no bread and drank no water—and he wrote the words of the covenant, the Ten Commandments” (Exodus 34:27–28).
If you think it would be impossible to improve upon the Ten Commandments . . . [read] Mahavira, the Jain patriarch: “Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.”
SAM HARRIS, Letter to a Christian Nation