Fiery Words Circled Sinai Before They Cut Into the Stone

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The Stones at the Base

Moses set the last marker stone at the base of the mountain and wiped dust from his hands. The instruction had two halves, and the second half is the one people miss. Do not climb the mountain. Do not go near its edges either. Whoever comes close will be put to death (Exodus 19:12).

The fence did not sit at the summit. It ran around the whole base, a ring of stones on open ground with nothing on the other side of it but slope and smoke. Beasts had to be kept off it as strictly as people. On the one morning in history when God came down to talk to everybody at once, the first thing built was a barrier to stop anyone from walking toward Him.

Nobody crossed it. The smoke went up off the peak the way smoke comes off a kiln, and the ground moved under them, and the people stood behind a line of rocks and waited.

The Word That Flew

The first word came out of heaven burning. It went up like a shooting star, circled the wilderness, and came back. Fiery torches moved with it. Every man and woman in the camp stood watching a sentence fly.

What came out of the fire did not sound at first. It flew. Lightning came with it and torches came with it, and the thing wheeled in the air over the camps like something searching for an address. Then it stopped and hung above the tents, and stayed there long enough for the whole of Israel to understand that whatever happened next was not going to be undone.

Then it dropped, and where it landed it engraved itself into the stone of the covenant, and only after the letters were cut did the sentence arrive in a form a person could repeat.

"I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage" (Exodus 20:2).

Then the second word came the same way. Star, wheel, hover, engraving. And the third. All ten words took that road, one after another, ten times fire crossing the sky over a crowd that had walked out of a brickyard seven weeks earlier.

They Asked Him to Stop

Israel had asked for this. Now they backed away from it.

They saw the thunder and the flames and the mountain smoking, and they moved back and stood at a distance, and they sent Moses forward with a request that is one of the strangest things a people ever asked of a God who had just rescued them. "You speak with us and we will listen. Do not let God speak with us, or we will die" (Exodus 20:19).

Nobody argued with them. Moses left the crowd standing where it was and walked up into the thick darkness by himself, and the fence stayed exactly where it had been laid, and the people watched a man they knew go into a cloud that had been killing the air all morning.

Sapphire Cut from the Sun

What he came back with was stranger than the fire had been.

The tablets sat in his hands like rods of gold. They were sapphire, and they curled. He could have rolled them like a scroll and they would not have snapped. They had been hewn from the orb of the sun, a slab cut from daylight, carried down a mountain by a man on foot.

The writing did not stop at an edge. He turned a tablet and the letters were still there, going through, as if the stone had no back. Five on this side would have been an ordinary count, like fingers on a hand. The stone in his grip was not ordinary. Ten, twenty, forty: the numbers later argued in study houses all began in that weight on his palms, writing that refused to be only a front.

He came down holding daylight that could roll, and the camp below him was already making a different kind of fire.

What Broke at the Foot

Moses carried them down and heard the noise in the valley before he could see it, and then he saw it, and he threw the tablets and they broke at the foot of the mountain.

Sapphire hewn from the sun, lying in pieces on the ground next to a calf made out of melted earrings. The camp went quiet. Somewhere behind them the ring of boundary stones was still sitting on the sand where it had been laid, and it had done its work perfectly. Not one person had crossed it. The damage on that plain had all been done from the safe side of the line.

He stood among the shards. The first word had hung over the tents until every throat went dry. The last sound in the valley was a calf and a break. The fence had kept their feet off the slope. It had not kept their hands off the gold.