The Mountain That Burned
16 On the third day, when it was morning, there were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud on the mountain, and the sound of an exceedingly loud trumpet; and all the people who were in the camp trembled. 17 Moses led the people out of the camp to meet God; and they stood at the lower part of the mountain. 18 All of Mount Sinai smoked, because Yahweh descended on it in fire; and its smoke ascended like the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mountain quaked greatly. 19 When the sound of the trumpet grew louder and louder, Moses spoke, and God answered him by a voice. 20 Yahweh came down on Mount Sinai, to the top of the mountain. Yahweh called Moses to the top of the mountain, and Moses went up. 21 Yahweh said to Moses, “Go down, warn the people, lest they break through to Yahweh to gaze, and many of them perish. 22 Let the priests also, who come near to Yahweh, sanctify themselves, lest Yahweh break out on them.” 23 Moses said to Yahweh, “The people can’t come up to Mount Sinai, for you warned us, saying, ‘Set bounds around the mountain, and sanctify it.’” 24 Yahweh said to him, “Go down! You shall bring Aaron up with you, but don’t let the priests and the people break through to come up to Yahweh, lest he break out against them.” 25 So Moses went down to the people, and told them.
God arrives in fire, smoke and sound, and the terror the scene produces is deliberate and is not the whole story.
On the third day, when it was morning, there were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud on the mountain, and the sound of an exceedingly loud trumpet; and all the people who were in the camp trembled.
The appointment is kept on the announced day. What arrives is not a vision granted to one man on a hillside but a public event, addressed to every sense at once and impossible for anyone in the camp to miss or to explain away.
All of Mount Sinai smoked, because Yahweh descended on it in fire; and its smoke ascended like the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mountain quaked greatly.
Fire again, as at the bush, and this time it is not a shrub that survives it but a mountain that shakes. The comparison chosen is a furnace, which was the vocabulary of the slavery they had just left. The same element that failed to consume a thornbush now makes a mountain unapproachable, and both facts are true of the same God.
Moses led the people out of the camp to meet God; and they stood at the lower part of the mountain.
They are brought out to meet him. The whole apparatus of terror in this chapter surrounds an encounter that God arranged, invited them to, and set a date for. Fear was the effect; it was not the purpose, and the difference is stated plainly two chapters later — God has come to test you, and that his fear may be before you, that you won't sin Exodus 20:20.
When the sound of the trumpet grew louder and louder, Moses spoke, and God answered him by a voice.
A conversation inside a thunderstorm, audible to the nation. The point of it is given earlier: that the people may hear when I speak with you, and may also believe you forever Exodus 19:9. Moses' authority for the next forty years is being established in public, so that no one can later claim he invented what he brought down.
Yahweh said to Moses, “Go down, warn the people, lest they break through to Yahweh to gaze, and many of them perish.
The warning is repeated twice more, and Moses protests that it is unnecessary — the people can't come up to Mount Sinai, for you warned us Exodus 19:23. He is told to go and say it again anyway. The insistence is not bureaucratic. The danger is real, the fence is the only thing standing between curiosity and death, and a boundary that has been announced once is not thereby secure.
The verb used for the risk is worth noticing: they might break through... to gaze. What is anticipated is not rebellion but sightseeing. People will approach what they have been told is fatal because they want a better look, and the whole chapter is arranged to prevent an approach that awe alone would not have stopped.
This is the mountain the book returns to at its close, when a letter to Hebrew Christians sets it against another one and says believers have not come to a mountain that burned with fire and could not be touched Hebrews 12:18–22. The contrast only works because this scene is exactly what it appears to be.
settled What this mark means