1. Carve you two stone tablets. The first set of tablets had been given by God to Moses (31:18). Now, as Rashi aptly puts it, God says to Moses, “You smashed the first ones, you, carve you others.”

2. take your stance. The same verb, nitsavta, is used here as at the end of the immediately preceding section (33:21); so it is reasonable to assume that the revelation now on the mountaintop of God’s moral attributes is precisely the just promised revelation of God’s “goodness” to Moses when he is to stand in the cleft of the crag.

3. no man shall be seen in all the mountain. These instructions repeat the injunction in chapter 19 to separate the people from Moses before God gives the law to Moses on the summit of Sinai. Now, however, after the incident of the Golden Calf, the separation is total—this time there are no attendants stationed partway up the mountain.

5. stationed Himself with him there, and He invoked the name of the LORD. Given the propensity of biblical Hebrew to use verbs without making the grammatical subject explicit, either Moses or God could be doing the stationing and the invoking. God makes better sense as the subject of “stationed” (the same verb as the one used for Moses, “take your stance,” but in the reflexive conjugation, perhaps to distinguish God’s action) because it immediately follows “came down,” of which God is the unambiguous subject. It might seem more plausible that Moses would be the one to invoke (qaraʾ bE) God’s name, but this is precisely what God said He would do in the previous dialogue with Moses (33:19). The exclamation “The LORD, the LORD!” would then be that invocation.

6. The LORD, the LORD! The translation follows the traditional understanding of the two Hebrew words as an exclamatory repetition. It is also possible, as Maimonides and others have noted, to read the sequence of words as follows: “And the LORD called out, ‘The LORD!’”

7. keeping kindness for the thousandth generation . . . yet He does not wholly acquit. See the second comment on Exodus 20:5. “Wholly acquit” (which does not appear in the version in the Decalogue) clearly implies that in cases where the offenders persist in their offense they cannot expect to be acquitted, for all of God’s stated compassion.

9. may my Master, pray, go in our midst. Virtually every word Moses speaks here harks back to his exchange with God after the fiasco of the Golden Calf. God had said that He would not go in the midst of the people because it was stiff-necked and that He would instead send a messenger; Moses invokes the same attribute of being stiff-necked to argue that the people needs God’s intimate guiding presence. Moses had referred before to his finding favor in God’s eyes; now he requests as confirmation of that favored status that God go in the midst of the people.

10. Look, I am about to seal a covenant. Many scholars identify the verses that follow, through to verse 28, as the Small Book of the Covenant. It manifestly replicates material from the Book of the Covenant (chapters 21–23) as well as from the Decalogue. It has also been proposed that these injunctions reflect a variant set of Ten Commandments, but that interpretation seems strained because some of the laws here—e.g., the redemption of firstborn animals and the ban on the use of leavened stuff with sacrifices—are too secondary to be part of a list of ten defining demands that God makes of Israel.

12. lest you seal a covenant with the inhabitant of the land. Such a covenant with idolators would be a kind of anti-covenant to the one God is now making with Israel. As many commentators have observed, in the aftermath of the Golden Calf episode, this series of injunctions pointedly begins with a stern command to keep a distance from the pagans and to destroy their cultic objects.

13. pillars . . . cultic poles. The pillars, matsevot, are sacred steles, probably made of piled-up stones (hence the verb “smash”). The cultic poles, ʾasherim, were in all likelihood initially associated with the worship of the fertility goddess Asherah; their exact design and dimensions are not known, but it is clear that they were made of wood (hence the verb “cut down,” which also plays against the verb in Hebrew for sealing a covenant, which is literally to “cut” a covenant).

14. His name is Jealous. See the first comment on Exodus 20:5. The fact that the very next verses three times invoke the metaphor of whoring to represent idolatry strongly argues for a quasisexual sense of “jealous” (rather than “impassioned”): the God Who has chosen Israel implicitly represents Himself as Israel’s husband and lover (a metaphor that both Hosea and Jeremiah will make explicit), and when the Israelites betray Him by worshipping other gods, they go “whoring,” are unfaithful as an errant spouse is sexually unfaithful.

17. No molten gods. This reiterated prohibition has special resonance after what has just happened with the Golden Calf.

20. break its neck. See the second comment on Exodus 13:13.

21. In plow time and in harvest you shall cease. This clause does not occur in the earlier prohibitions of work on the seventh day. For the agriculturist, it is a vivid way of stressing that the obligation of the sabbath day is binding throughout the annual cycle, even when a farmer might feel the urgent temptation to go on with the plowing of his fields in the early spring or the harvesting of his crops in the fall.

23. the Master. The Hebrew ʾadon is an approximate synonym of baʿal, and there may be a polemic point to the use of the term here in a legal document that begins with a warning against the seductions of Canaanite cults: it is before the Master, the ʾadon, the God of Israel, and not before any Baal that Israel is to appear. For the double valence of “to appear in the presence of the LORD,” see the comment on 23:15.

24. I will widen your territory and no man will covet your land. As Abraham ibn Ezra plausibly suggests, the fact that Israel will have ample, and secure, borders means that when people leave their holdings to go up to the sanctuary for the pilgrim festivals, they will not have to fear incursions from marauders or invaders.

26. You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk. See the comment on Exodus 23:19.

28. Bread he did not eat, nor water did he drink. This parallelism is a kind of epic flourish, stressing the superhuman heroism of “the man Moses” as he undergoes his epiphany in a formulaic period of forty days.

the words of the covenant, the Ten Words. This is the first time that what is inscribed on the tablets is designated the Ten Words, or “Commandments.” (The Hebrew devarim means “words” or “things,” and has several additional senses.)

29. Moses came down . . . Moses’s hand . . . Moses did not know. The triple repetition of the name is stylistically odd. It may serve here to throw a kind of spotlight on Moses, who, after his forty days with God, is set off visibly from the rest of humankind.

the skin of his face had glowed. The sense of the verb would seem to be “had begun to glow” since the condition continues. There is some question about the precise meaning of the verb qaran, which occurs only here. The Greek translation of Aquila and the Latin Vulgate famously understood it to mean “sprouted horns” (from qeren, “horn”), a virtually impossible reading because horns would grow from the head, not from “the skin of the face.” Others have imagined that the verb could indicate a hornlike toughness of the skin, a kind of radiation burn after exposure to the divine effulgence. (Ibn Ezra indignantly dismisses the rationalists who claim Moses’s face had turned hornlike from the forty days’ fast.) It makes more sense to see something terrifyingly luminous—a reflection of the divine fire glimpsed by the people from the foot of the mountain—rather than a disfiguration in Moses’s face. The notion of divine radiance enveloping the head or face of a god, a king, or a priest appears in numerous Mesopotamian texts, and so would probably have been a familiar idea to the ancient Hebrew audience.

30. and they were afraid to come near him. If, as seems likely, Moses’s face is giving off some sort of supernatural radiance, the fear of drawing near him precisely parallels the people’s fear of drawing near the fiery presence of God on the mountaintop.

33. a veil. Richard Elliott Friedman interestingly connects this with the covering and curtain in the Tabernacle: the site of holiness, he proposes, has to be partitioned off, enveloped in layers, and yet it remains accessible to the people.