1 And the Lord said unto Moses, Hew thee two tables of stone like unto the first: and I will write upon these tables the words that were in the first tables, which thou brakest.

2 And be ready in the morning, and come up in the morning unto mount Sinai, and present thyself there to me in the top of the mount.

3 And no man shall come up with thee, neither let any man be seen throughout all the mount; neither let the flocks nor herds feed before that mount.

God and Moses are concluding their discussion in the tabernacle, but they have to meet again on Mount Sinai. As I suggested in the last chapter, I suspect that this means that the meeting in the tabernacle was only a sort of preliminary or planning stage for how God and Israel would proceed forward together, and now Moses needed to come into the mountain so that he and God could formalize His contract with the people.

Indeed, things are going to even be put in official writing, and Moses is to bring two new tables of stone for the Lord to etch His law into as He did the last time Moses went up into the mount. The first tablets, of course, were broken by Moses when he saw the idolatry that the Israelites had got up to during his absence.

Note that this story is allegorical for a common aspect of the human experience. All the time we are breaking a moral law, then relying on God’s grace to re-establish the broken contract. Christians play out this pattern when they regularly partake of the bread and the wine, the idea being that we regularly stray from Christ, so we must regularly recommit ourselves to him. When we do this, it is humbling to reflect on the fact that we are playing out something that goes all the way back through humanity, even to Moses and his stone tablets from Mount Sinai.