Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Exodus · About this commentary
The Name Proclaimed
Exodus 34:1-9
1 Yahweh said to Moses, “Chisel two stone tablets like the first. I will write on the tablets the words that were on the first tablets, which you broke. · WEB
Asked to show his glory, God recites his own character, and mercy is named four times before justice is named once.
Chisel two stone tablets like the first. I will write on the tablets the words that were on the first tablets, which you broke Exodus 34:1.
The replacement is identical. Not a reduced code for a people who have proved they cannot keep the full one, and not a revision — the same words, written again by the same hand. What changes is who cuts the stone: the first pair were God's work throughout Exodus 32:16, and Moses quarries these himself and carries them up. Grace restores what was lost and does not spare the man the labor of bringing it back.
Yahweh descended in the cloud, and stood with him there, and proclaimed Yahweh's name Exodus 34:5.
This is the answer to please show me your glory Exodus 33:18, and it arrives as a sentence rather than a sight. What follows is the fullest self-description of God in the Old Testament, spoken by God about himself, and it is quoted back to him by psalmists and prophets for the next thousand years.
Yahweh! Yahweh, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness and truth, keeping loving kindness for thousands, forgiving iniquity and disobedience and sin; and who will by no means clear the guilty Exodus 34:6–7.
The order is the substance. Merciful, gracious, slow to anger, abundant in kindness and truth, keeping kindness for thousands, forgiving three different words for wrongdoing — and then, last and undiminished, one who will by no means clear the guilty. The proportion is not accidental and neither clause may be dropped. A God who only forgave would be indifferent to what was done to the people he made; a God who only punished would have destroyed this nation a chapter ago and been within his rights.
The declaration is made, of all moments, six weeks after the golden calf, to the man who broke the tablets over it, on the mountain where the covenant was violated. The place is the argument. Mercy is being described in the one setting where its cost is fully visible.
How both halves can be true at once is not explained here, and the book does not pretend to explain it. The mercy seat is the shape of the answer rather than the argument for it — a covering placed over the broken law, with blood on it, in the room where God said he would meet them.
Moses hurried and bowed his head toward the earth, and worshiped Exodus 34:8.
The response to hearing what God is like is not analysis but worship, and it is immediate. Then, still on the ground, he asks again for the one thing he has asked for throughout: please let the Lord go among us, even though this is a stiff-necked people Exodus 34:9. He repeats God's own diagnosis of them and makes it the ground of the request rather than an obstacle to it. They are stiff-necked; that is precisely why they cannot be left to travel alone.
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