Answer # 34

This verse is often misunderstood. Notice what it says: "And he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten commandments." Some have assumed the word he in this verse refers to Moses - that Moses wrote the Ten Commandments on the tables of stone.

This assumption is absolutely untrue!

In Exodus 24:12, God told Moses, "Come up to me into the mount... and I will give thee tables of stone ... and commandments which I have written." God "gave unto Moses, when he had made an end of communing with him upon mount Sinai, two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God" (Ex. 31:18).

Exodus 32:16 also states that "the tables were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God. graven upon the tables." Moses broke these first tables of stone (verse 19). Then God commanded Moses: "Hew thee two tables of stone like unto the first: and I will write upon these tables the words that were in the first tables, which thou brakest" (Ex. 34:1).

Here God plainly said He would write them again.

Near the end of the 40 years in the wilderness, Moses rehearsed in the ears of the Israelites the things God had done for them. In speaking of the great works of God, Moses said: "These words the Lord spake unto all your assembly in the mount ... And he [God] wrote them in two tables of stone, and delivered them unto me" (Deut. 5:22). Those were the first tables of stone, which Moses broke when he came down from the mount and saw the people reveling in idolatry.

Moses then repeated to the Israelites in Deuteronomy 10:1-2, 4 the fact that God wrote the Ten Commandments again.

God, not Moses, wrote the Ten Commandments both times and gave them to all Israel.