Biblion Bible Commentary
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Forty Days in the Cloud
Exodus 24:12-18
12 Yahweh said to Moses, “Come up to me on the mountain, and stay here, and I will give you the stone tablets with the law and the commands that I have written, that you may teach them.” · WEB
Moses disappears into fire on a mountaintop for six weeks, and everything that follows in the book happens while he is up there.
Come up to me on the mountain, and stay here, and I will give you the stone tablets with the law and the commands that I have written, that you may teach them Exodus 24:12.
The tablets are described before they are given, and one detail is stated twice in this book and never softened: they are written by God himself Exodus 31:18. Of everything in the law, the ten commandments alone are not delivered through a human hand. Moses writes the ordinances Exodus 24:4; the ten are inscribed.
He said to the elders, "Wait here for us, until we come again to you. Behold, Aaron and Hur are with you. Whoever is involved in a dispute can go to them" Exodus 24:14.
Arrangements are made for an absence of unstated length. Aaron is left in charge, which the reader is meant to remember, and the provision made for the nation is a judicial one — someone to settle disputes. Nobody anticipates the kind of trouble that actually arrives.
Moses went up on the mountain, and the cloud covered the mountain. Yahweh's glory settled on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it six days. The seventh day he called to Moses out of the middle of the cloud Exodus 24:15–16.
Six days of waiting inside a cloud before a word is spoken. Nothing is said about what he did there, and the silence is the substance of it: the man who is about to receive the most detailed set of instructions in Scripture spends the better part of a week in the presence of God without an agenda. The seventh day is when the speaking begins, which in this book is never an accident.
The appearance of Yahweh's glory was like devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the eyes of the children of Israel Exodus 24:17.
The camp can see it. For forty days the nation looks up at a burning summit with their leader somewhere inside it, and the account is careful to say the fire was visible from below. Whatever they later claimed about not knowing what had become of him Exodus 32:1, the evidence was overhead the entire time.
Moses entered into the middle of the cloud, and went up on the mountain; and Moses was on the mountain forty days and forty nights Exodus 24:18.
Forty days without food or water Exodus 34:28, a span that recurs at the crises of Scripture — a prophet walking to this same mountain 1 Kings 19:8, and a fast in the wilderness of Judea Matthew 4:2.
Everything in the next seven chapters is spoken inside this cloud. The tabernacle, the ark, the priesthood, the garments and the Sabbath sign are all given here, at the top of a mountain, while at the bottom a nation that had promised three times to obey is beginning to wonder whether anyone is coming back.
settled What this mark means