in the rock (Exo 33:22) has been supposed by some to be the same place as the “cave” in which Elijah lodged at Horeb, and where the Lord appeared to him in the still small voice (1Ki 19:9.). The real summit of the Jebel Musa consists of “a small area of huge rocks, about 80 feet in diameter,” upon which there is now a chapel that has almost fallen down, and about 40 feet to the south-west a dilapidated mosque (Robinson, Palestine, vol. i. p. 153). Below this mosque, according to Seetzen (Reise iii. pp. 83, 84), there is a very small grotto, into which you descend by several steps, and to which a large block of granite, about a fathom and a half long and six spans in height, serves as a roof. According to the Mussulman tradition, which the Greek monks also accept, it was in this small grotto that Moses received the law; though other monks point out a “hole, just large enough for a man,” near the altar of the Elijah chapel, on the small plain upon the ridge of Sinai, above which the loftier peak rises about 700 feet, as the cave in which Elijah lodged on Horeb (Robinson, Pal. ut supra).
Chap. 34
verses 1-8
When Moses had restored the covenant bond through his intercession (Exo 33:14), he was directed by Jehovah to hew out two stones, like the former ones which he had broken, and to come with them the next morning up the mountain, and Jehovah would write upon them the same words as upon the first,[1] and thus restore the covenant record. It was also commanded, as in the former case (Exo 19:12-13), that no one should go up the mountain with him, or be seen upon it, and that not even cattle should feed against the mountain, i.e., in the immediate neighbourhood (Exo 34:3). The first tables of the covenant were called “tables of stone” (Exo 24:12; Exo 31:18); the second, on the other hand, which were hewn by Moses, are called “tables of stones” (Exo 34:1 and Exo 34:4); and the latter expression is applied indiscriminately to both of them in Deu 4:13; Deu 5:19; Deu 9:9-11; Deu 10:1-4. This difference does not indicate a diversity in the records, but may be explained very simply from the fact, that the tables prepared by Moses were hewn from two stones, and not both from the same block; whereas all that could be said of the former, which had been
- ↑ Namely, the ten words in Ex 20:2-17, not the laws contained in Exo 34:12-26 of this chapter, as Göthe and Hitzig suppose. See Hengstenberg, Dissertations ii. p. 319, and Kurtz on the Old Covenant iii. 182ff.
