Exodus/Shemoth 34 – "Hew you two tablets of stone like the first"

[The previous chapter ends with Moses catching a guarded glimpse, a rear view of YHWH’s glory; what words could possibly describe what he saw? Being in YHWH’s Presence evidently starts reflecting on Moses himself, for at the end of his private personal meetings the face of Moses glows to where the Israelites could not look upon him and he had to resort to covering his face.

While YHWH’s patience occasionally runs thin as it did in the Golden Calf incident, His grace abounds nonetheless.  With the people breaking the Covenant with their idolatry, YHWH gives them a second chance though He does not replicate the first set of tablets with another divine issue; this time Moses who broke them has to produce the material himself.  Surely this one looked man-made but as we have said earlier, it is not so much the material that matters, rather it is the Words of God that do not have to be written on anything except in human minds and hearts, then externalized in conduct, behavior, and action. Yet, would it not have been better to have had the original? What a privilege the chosen people had from the very beginning, and yet even to this point, they seem to take it for granted. Reading in hindsight, we tend to think: why? Had we been in their place, we would not have cherished the supreme privilege of being chosen and directly ruled by the True Creator God! But we cannot judge, we know what we know today because of the record provided for us in the Torah—mistakes and consequent judgment.  Had we been slaves and children of slaves for 400 years, we would have had the same slave mentality and our orientation would be much the same.

P&H notes:

“Neither Aaron nor the elders (XXIV, 9) were to be with him on the mountain. Moses alone was this time to witness the Revelation.  The Rabbis remark that the first Tables were given amid great pomp and upheaval, physical and psychic; and they were destroyed.  The Second Revelation was given in silence, to one human soul alone in mystic communion with his Maker; and these Tables endured, for the salvation of Israel and mankind.”

Translation is EF/Everett Fox, The Five Books of Moses.   Commentary from AST/ArtScroll Tanach and  P&H/Pentateuch and Haftorah, ed. Dr. H.J. Hertz, added as well.  Reformatting and highlights ours.–Admin1.]

Image from www.israelcraft.com

Exodus/Shemoth 34

 [AST:  For you shall not prostrate yourselves to an alien god for the very Name of HaShem is ‘Jealous One.’  He is a jealous God.]
15 -Lest you cut a covenant with the settled-folk of the land:
when they go whoring after their gods
and slaughter-offer to their gods,
they will call to you to eat of their slaughter-offerings;
16 should you take of their women (in marriage) for your sons,
their women will go whoring after their gods,
and they will cause your sons to go whoring after their gods.
17 Molten gods you are not to make for yourselves!
18 The Pilgrimage-Festival of Matzot you are to keep;
for seven days you are to eat matzot, as I commanded you,
at the appointed-time, in the New-moon of Ripe-grain, for in the New-moon of Ripe-grain you went out of Egypt.
19 Every breacher of a womb is mine,
and every one that your herd drops-as-male, breacher among oxen and sheep;
20 the breacher among donkeys you are to redeem with a sheep,
and if you do not redeem it, you are to break-its-neck.
Every firstborn among your sons you are to redeem.
No one is to be seen before my presence empty-handed.
21 For six days you are to serve,
but on the seventh day, you are to cease,
at plowing, at grain-cutting, you are to cease.
22 The Pilgrimage-Festival of Weeks you are to make for yourselves,
of the first-fruits of the wheat cutting, a
s well as the Pilgrimage-festival of Ingathering
at the turning of the year.
23 At three points in the year
are all your male-folk to be seen
before the presence of the Lord, YHVH,
the God of Israel.
24 For I will dispossess nations before you, and widen your territory,
so that no man will desire your land,
when you go up to be seen before the presence of YHVH your God,
at three points in the year.
25 You are not to slay my blood offering with anything fermented.
You are not to leave-
overnight, until morning, the pilgrimage- offering of Passover.
26 The premier of the firstfruits of your soil you are to bring into the house of YHVH your God. You are not to boil a kid in the milk of its mother.
27 YHVH said to Moshe:
Write you down these words,
for in accordance with these words
I cut with you a covenant, and with Israel.
28 Now he was there beside YHVH
for forty days and forty nights;
bread he did not eat
and water he did not drink,
but he wrote down on the tablets the words of the covenant,
the Ten Words.
29 Now it was
when Moshe came down from Mount Sinai
with the two tablets of Testimony in Moshe’s hand,
when he came down from the mountain
-(now) Moshe did not know that the skin of his face was radiating because of his having-spoken with him,-
30 Aharon and all the Children of Israel saw Moshe:
and here, the skin of his face was radiating!
So they were afraid to approach him.
31 Moshe called to them,
and then Aharon and all those exalted in the community came back to him,
and Moshe spoke to them.
32 Afterward all the Children of Israel approached,
and he commanded them
all that YHVH had spoken with him on Mount Sinai.
33 Now when Moshe had finished speaking with them,
he put a veil upon his face.
34 Now whenever Moshe would come before the presence of YHVH, to speak with him,
he would remove the veil, until he had gone out;
and whenever he would come out and speak to the children of Israel that which he had been commanded,
35 the Children of Israel would see Moshe’s face,
that the skin of Moshe’s face was radiating;
but then Moshe would put back the veil on his face,
until he came in to speak with him.

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Here’s a bit of trivia — what happens when Scripture is twisted, mistranslated, misrepresented:

(Photo from Google Images; writeup from Wikipedia)

 The marble sculpture appears to depict Moses with horns on his head, though some modern artists and historians claim that there were never intended to be horns.^[2]

The depiction of a horned Moses was the normal medieval Western depiction of Moses, based on the description of Moses’ face as “cornuta” (“horned”) in the Latin Vulgate translation of Exodus.^[3]

The Douay-Rheims Bible translates the Vulgate as, “And when Moses came down from the mount Sinai, he held the two tables of the testimony, and he knew not that his face was horned from the conversation of the Lord.”^[4] This was, however, a mistranslation of the original Hebrew Masoretic text which uses a term equivalent to “radiant”,^[5] suggesting an effect like a halo. The Greek Septuagint translated the verse as “Moses knew not that the appearance of the skin of his face was glorified.”^[6]

The church historian Diarmaid MacCulloch comments about this: “Jerome [the translator of the Old Testament into Latin], mistaking particles of Hebrew, had turned this into a description of Moses wearing a pair of horns – and so the Lawgiver is frequently depicted in the art of the Western Church, even after humanists had gleefully removed the horns from the text of Exodus.”^[7]

The assumption for centuries was that Michelangelo simply “didn’t know better” than the accepted mistranslation. However, as Rabbi Benjamin Blech pointed out in his 2008 book, Sistine Secrets,“—–[The statue] never had horns. The artist had planned Moses as a masterpiece not only of sculpture, but also of special optical effects worthy of any Hollywood movie. For this reason, the piece had to be elevated and facing straight forward, looking in the direcion of the front door of the basilica. The two protrusions on the head would have been invisible to the viewer looking up from the floor below — the only thing that would have been seen was the light reflected off of them.” ^[2]