Thread by @JoelBaden

#Exodus 24:12-14

Tablets...of what?

God tells Moses to come up the mountain and get from God the tablets “and the torah and the commandment” that God has inscribed to instruct the Israelites. This verse has troubled people forever, and with good reason.

So first let’s decide what story we’re in. It has to be E: not only is E the only story with any content that could be called instruction, in J Moses is already on top of the mountain, while in E he’s down below with the people sacrificing.

Add to that the presence of Joshua, who is unknown to J in the Pentateuch, and Moses’s old pals Aaron and Hur, whom we last met holding up Moses’s hands while Joshua fought the Amalekites back in Exod 17, and we should feel pretty good about the E identification.

What’s more, Moses’s speech about leaving Aaron and Hur in charge is based on the judicial structures put in place in Exod 18: the elders take care of most stuff, but someone has to handle the hard cases. It should be Moses, but he’s leaving; so his deputies will do that work.

Anyway this is all E. And if so, then...what’s on the tablets? Traditionally, of course, and canonically, thank you D, it’s the Decalogue. But...I’ve argued that the Decalogue isn’t original here. So what would YHWH write to instruct the Israelites?

Why not the same thing Moses just wrote in scroll form down at the foot of the mountain? That is: why not the Covenant Code? Because we picture the Decalogue on the tablets? Because it couldn’t fit? Says who? God is writing it. (Psst, they’re not real.)

This is the monumental copy of the covenant, the treaty. That’s not so strange in the ANE. And this is what Israel will break with the golden calf (the first law of the Covenant Code), and that’s why Moses will shatter these tablets.

The Decalogue is usually seen as the sign of the covenant, but it doesn’t function or make any sense as such in the E narrative. (In D it does - we’ll get there...some day.) The only logical thing to be on the tablets is the Covenant Code.

Now what about the phrasing here: “the tablets and the torah and the commandment”? Is that tablets with torah and commandment? Is it three different things?

Put simply, I think those two words, “the torah and the commandment,” are a later addition. They’re both typical D terms for the law - neither is used this way anywhere else in E, or actually anywhere else in any pentateuchal source other than D.

So I think E originally just read here “I will give you the stone tablets which I have inscribed to instruct them,” which is perfectly good. But why would anyone add these words here, these specifically D terms for D’s law?

Simple: because canonically, Moses received on the mountain both the tablets, with whatever they had on them, and D’s laws, which he then held on to for the next forty years. This is just D’s story: when Moses went up for forty days and nights, he got tablets *and* laws.

It’s just not the E story, in which Moses already got the laws, and he goes up a second time for the tablets. So this addition brings the Exodus version in line with the canonical (D) story: Covenant Code, yes, and *also* D’s laws, in different trips up the mountain.

So from an original E story with one set of laws, the Covenant Code, written on tablets, the expanded canonical text now has *three* things: the Decalogue (on tablets), the Covenant Code, and these other laws to be saved for later, all given at various moments. It’s kinda wild.