Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Exodus · About this commentary
A Sign Between Me and You
Exodus 31:12-18
12 Yahweh spoke to Moses, saying, · WEB
The building instructions end with the Sabbath, so that the most urgent work God ever commissioned stops one day in seven.
Most certainly you shall keep my Sabbaths; for it is a sign between me and you throughout your generations, that you may know that I am Yahweh who sanctifies you Exodus 31:13.
The placement is the argument. Seven chapters of the most detailed instructions in Scripture end here, and the last word before Moses comes down the mountain is that the work must stop weekly. Israel has been given a commission of unmatched urgency — God is waiting to move in — and the Sabbath is not suspended for it. The tabernacle will be finished a week later than it might have been, and that is acceptable.
The same order appears when construction actually begins: the first thing Moses says to the assembled nation is the Sabbath command, before a single material is collected Exodus 35:1–3. The two statements bracket the golden calf, and together they frame the whole account of the building.
It is a sign between me and you... that you may know that I am Yahweh who sanctifies you Exodus 31:13.
A sign of sanctification, and the verb is his. The day does not make a person holy by being kept; it is the mark of a holiness God confers, in the same way that resting on it is the mark of trusting a provision rather than producing one. The reason a people who could not gather manna on the seventh day were fed anyway Exodus 16:29 is the reason the day signifies what it signifies.
It is a sign between me and the children of Israel forever; for in six days Yahweh made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested, and was refreshed Exodus 31:17.
The ground is creation again, as in the commandment Exodus 20:11, and here with a word added that is startling when applied to God: he was refreshed. Whatever it means for the maker of the world to be refreshed, it is not exhaustion recovering. It describes something taken up with pleasure and completed, and the day is set apart to share it.
The penalties in this paragraph are severe Exodus 31:14–15, and they belong to the civil law of a nation whose constitution was its covenant; open defiance of the sign was a repudiation of the agreement the nation existed under. The severity measures what the day was taken to stand for, not the size of the labor involved.
When he finished speaking with him on Mount Sinai, he gave Moses the two tablets of the covenant, stone tablets, written with God's finger Exodus 31:18.
Forty days of speech end with an object placed in a man's hands. The ten commandments alone in all of Scripture are written directly, in stone, by God — and Moses is at this moment carrying them down toward a camp that has already broken the second of them.
settled What this mark means