1. And to Moses He had said. As is often the case in sequences of episodes in the Bible, there is some ambiguity about the chronological location of this passage. The form of the verb (perfective instead of the usual imperfective prefixed by waw) may well indicate a pluperfect, and Rashi, no doubt noting that what Moses does here is to go up the mountain and bring back God’s words, claims, “This passage was said before the Ten Commandments.”

2. Moses . . . shall come near . . . they shall not come near . . . the people shall not go up. There is evidently a tripartite deployment: Moses alone goes up to the mountaintop; the seventy elders, Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu remain at a stopping point partway up the mountain; and the people stay at the foot of the mountain, as they were instructed to do in chapter 19.

3. all the LORD’s words and all the laws. The two terms are strategically precise. “Words” (devarim) refers to the Ten Words, or Commandments; “laws” (mishpatim) is the term that announces (21:1) the catalogue of legal injunctions that constitutes the Book of the Covenant.

4. twelve pillars. These pillars (matsevot) are not structural elements in the altar but cultic pillars or steles, just like the ones that, when they are pagan, the Israelites have been enjoined to smash (23:24).

5. the lads. This term, neʿarim, has a multiplicity of meanings, but a common one, reflected here, is as a designation of anyone performing a subaltern or assisting function—in the cult, an acolyte.

7. the book of the covenant. There are differing opinions as to whether this phrase explicitly refers to the legal text of chapters 21–23, despite an established scholarly tradition for using it as a title for that literary unit. In any case, this entire ritual, including the sacred feast and the epiphany that follow the sacrifice, is a solemn confirmation of the covenant between God and Israel, and it is conceivable that the “book of the covenant” is a spelling out of the terms of that pact in language not necessarily incorporated in the preceding narrative.

8. And Moses took the blood and threw it upon the people. Although splashing blood on the altar is a standard sacrificial procedure, throwing blood on the people is unique to this episode. Some squeamish modern commentators have claimed that the blood is thrown on the pillars that represent the twelve tribes, but such a notion surely undercuts the primal archaic power of the rite. (Addressing the problem of how blood could be sprinkled over 600,000 adult males, or more than two million people, Abraham ibn Ezra plausibly suggests that the seventy elders served as ritual stand-ins for the whole people.) The idea of two parties to a solemn, binding agreement confirming the mutual obligation by dipping hands in the same blood, or exchanging blood smears, is attested in many cultures. In this covenant of ontologically disparate partners, the altar that is sprinkled with half the blood may serve as surrogate for the deity to whose service the altar has been erected. The covenantal rite of casting blood on the people is a climax of the sundry occurrences of blood in this narrative from the Bridegroom of Blood episode onward: the blood of circumcision (itself a covenantal act) that deflected the threat of death to Moses or his child and the blood of the lamb that warded off the Destroyer in Egypt reappear here as the blood of the sacrifice that confirms Israel’s everlasting bond with God.

9. and with him Aaron, Nadab and Abihu and seventy of the elders. As often elsewhere in this translation, “with him” is added to reflect the focusing function of the Hebrew verb: the verb is in the singular, indicating that the primary or focused subject of the going up is Moses, and that the others join in, or are subsidiary to, Moses’s act of ascent. The indications of spatial deployment here are minimal, but it appears that after the covenantal sacrifice, Moses led his three followers and the elders to the mountaintop, or perhaps only near the mountaintop, where they were vouchsafed their epiphany. Then they went back down (verse 14), while Moses went back up the mountain, evidently accompanied part of the way by Joshua (verse 13). In any event, it is Moses alone who enters into the cloud at the mountaintop that conceals God’s glory or presence.

10. And they saw the God of Israel. The boldness with which this immediate vision is stated is startling, especially against a biblical background in which humans repeatedly fear that they cannot see God and live (compare the next verse, “But against the elect of the Israelites He did not send forth His hand”). Such collective vision is reserved for this unique event. A symptom of how shocking this frank anthropomorphism could be is Onkelos’s evasive substitution in his Aramaic translation: “And they saw their sacrifices that had been accepted favorably as though they had eaten and drunk.” Pace Onkelos, the eating and drinking after the beholding (verse 11 employs a verb of visionary experience) are a communion feast enjoyed by the elders at God’s feet.

and beneath His feet was like a fashioning of sapphire pavement. Mere flesh and blood cannot long sustain the vision of God, and so the visual focus immediately slides down to the celestial brilliance beneath God’s feet. Even for this zone touched by the divine, direct linguistic reference is not possible, and so the writer uses a doubled simile—“like a fashioning of . . .,” “like the very heavens. . . .”

sapphire. Many scholars think that the Hebrew sapir refers to lapis lazuli. If the Hebrew term is actually cognate with sapphire, the writer clearly has in mind a blue sapphire.

12. the stone tablets and the teaching and the commandments that I have written. Although the often repeated devarim, “words,” implies speech (dibur), this central event of the giving of the Law places a strong stress on the act of writing as the vehicle for endowing words with permanence. Moses writes down the words and the laws, presumably with ink on parchment or papyrus. God now declares He will do His own inscription—presumably of the Ten Words—in the perdurable medium of stone.

14. Whosoever has matters to air. The Hebrew, mi baʿal devarim, literally means, “whosoever has/is possessor of words,” but devarim here clearly means “legal matters,” “cases to bring before the law,” as the term is used in the Jethro episode (chapter 18). Since Moses seems to know he will be required to stay on the mountaintop a long time (the formulaic forty days), provision has to be made for the judicial needs of the people during his absence. The necessary implication is that the elders now have gone all the way down the mountain to where the people are waiting. Joshua will presumably stop somewhere short of the summit of the mountain.

17. And the sight of the LORD’s glory was like consuming fire . . . before the eyes of the Israelites. After the direct epiphany to the elders, we get a long-distance view of God’s presence from the perspective of the people at the foot of the mountain. There is more mystifying occlusion than revelation here: an enveloping cloud, flashes of fiery effulgence from within it. Even such distant glimpses of the deity must be qualified by simile—“like consuming fire.”

18. and Moses entered within the cloud. The terrifying gap between Moses and the people is beautifully registered. They quail down below, seeing pulses of consuming fire from within the cloud; on the mountaintop, Moses actually enters into the cloud. His entering the cloud was already implied in verse 16 (“He called out to Moses from the midst of the cloud”—perhaps what he called out was the Ten Words), but now we get a kind of recapitulative summarizing report, strongly colored by the viewpoint of the assembled people at the foot of the mountain who look up awestruck as Moses disappears into the cloud for forty days and forty nights. That seemingly interminable absence of the leader will in due course engender trouble down below.