Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Exodus · About this commentary
An Altar of Unhewn Stone
Exodus 20:18-26
18 All the people perceived the thunderings, the lightnings, the sound of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking. When the people saw it, they trembled, and stayed at a distance. · WEB
The people ask never to hear God's voice again, and the first law after the ten forbids decorating an altar.
When the people saw it, they trembled, and stayed at a distance. They said to Moses, "Speak with us yourself, and we will listen; but don't let God speak with us, lest we die" Exodus 20:18–19.
The request is made after ten sentences. God had spoken directly to a whole nation, which is the thing every later generation says it wishes for, and the nation that got it asked for it to stop. Their fear is not unreasonable and the narrative does not mock it. But something is lost here that is never recovered: from this point Israel deals with God through a man, and the arrangement they chose out of terror becomes the arrangement they later resent.
Don't be afraid, for God has come to test you, and that his fear may be before you, that you won't sin Exodus 20:20.
Two kinds of fear in one sentence, and Moses distinguishes them. The panic that drives people backward is to be dismissed; the reverence that keeps a person from sin is the purpose of the whole display. The first empties a mountain; the second changes a life, and they are not the same thing at all.
The people stayed at a distance, and Moses came near to the thick darkness where God was Exodus 20:21.
One sentence, two directions. The same phenomenon drove a nation back and drew one man in.
Then the first legislation after the ten commandments, and its subject is unexpected. Not a moral code, not a system of sacrifice, but a rule about how to build an altar.
You shall make an altar of earth for me... If you make me an altar of stone, you shall not build it of cut stones; for if you lift up your tool on it, you have polluted it Exodus 20:24–25.
Dirt, or stones exactly as they were found. A chisel pollutes it. This is placed against everything the reader knows about the country they have just left, where worship meant monumental architecture, and it says the opposite: the place of approach to God is not to be improved. What a craftsman adds is not neutral, because it introduces the one element the arrangement cannot tolerate, which is human contribution to the terms of access. The same principle runs through the sacrificial law and is the reason a man's own work can never be brought to it.
You shall not go up by steps to my altar, that your nakedness may not be exposed to it Exodus 20:26.
A practical modesty rule for men in robes, and also a refusal of elevation. Egyptian and Canaanite altars were approached by climbing. Israel's is to be reached on level ground.
In every place where I record my name I will come to you and I will bless you Exodus 20:24.
The promise given with these rules is the largest one in the chapter and cuts against every instinct that builds shrines. The location does not confer the presence; the presence chooses the location, and where God puts his name he comes — to an earth mound in a wilderness as readily as anywhere else.
settled What this mark means