SUMMARY
God gives MosesProphet who led Israel out of Egypt to the Promised Land and received the law at Sinai. ten new “words,” or commandments, to write on a new set of tablets. These commandments all pertain to ritual observances and are a different set than those found in Exodus 20.
ANALYSIS
The two tablets of the covenantA covenant is a promise or agreement. In the Bible the promises made between God and God's people are known as covenants; they state or imply a relationship of commitment and obedience. that Moses had brought down from the mountain were broken when Moses threw them down in anger over the golden calf incident (Exodus 32:15-20). Now God has instructed Moses to make new tablets, this time with commandments related to ritual observances. Notably, this is the only place in Exodus that refers to “ten words” on the tablets—the phrase “Ten Commandments” is never used—and those ten do not correspond to the traditional list from Exodus 20.
Sometimes this iteration of ten words/commandments is called the “Ritual Decalogue,” to distinguish it from the “Ethical Decalogue” in Exodus 20 // Deuteronomy 5. However, we should not imagine that the considerations for ritual have nothing to do with ethics. The observance of the sabbathSabbath is a weekly day of rest, the seventh day, observed on Saturday in Judaism and on Sunday in Christianity. In the book of Genesis, God rested on the seventh day; in the Gospel accounts Jesus and his disciples are criticized by some for not..., the dedication of first fruits to God, and the commemoration of festivals that recall God’s saving acts on behalf of enslaved Israel—all of these are concerned with an ordering of life under God that is attuned to the well-being of the land and of the community.
