Parshat Ki Tisa5 min read

Michael Summoned Moses, Sapphire Tablets Came from the Throne

An archangel calls Moses up, the tablets are cut from the throne's sapphire floor, and the glory he glimpses is the knot of God's tefillin.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. The Archangel Who Issued the Summons
  2. The Tablets From the Throne's Floor
  3. The Procession of Ministering Angels
  4. The Knot Moses Saw From Behind

The Archangel Who Issued the Summons

The Hebrew says simply: and to Moses He said, come up to the Lord. No intermediary is named. The command arrives as if God spoke directly. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan names the intermediary. Michael, the Prince of Wisdom, said to Moses on the seventh day of the month: come up before the Lord.

Michael as Sar Hokhma, Prince of Wisdom, carries Israel's case in the heavenly court and serves as the archangel closest to the throne in the angelological traditions the Targum draws on. The Targum is not replacing the divine address with a lesser one. It is specifying the channel through which it arrived. The invitation to the covenant ceremony came through the highest available messenger, named, dated to a specific day of the month, addressed to a specific group: Moses, Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, and seventy elders. The names were called in order. The day was fixed on the calendar. The list was closed before the ascent began. The precision is deliberate. Heaven organized the Sinai meeting as a formal occasion, summoned by the one voice in the court that stood nearest the seat of glory.

The Tablets From the Throne's Floor

When Moses came down from Sinai the second time, he was carrying something that had not been quarried from any mountain. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan specifies: the two tablets of testimony were tablets of sapphire-stone from the throne of glory, weighing forty sein, inscribed by the finger of the Lord.

The sapphire connection was not invented by the Targum. Exodus 24:10 had already described the pavement beneath God's feet when the elders of Israel saw the foundation of heaven as a work of sapphire-stone, clear as the sky itself. The tablets, in this reading, were carved from that pavement. The commandments were written on the floor of the divine throne room and carried down to earth by one human being. The stone was blue and clear, the color of the sky seen from above, and the letters stood cut into its face by no chisel but the finger of God. Their weight, forty sein, was enormous, too heavy for an ordinary person to lift, let alone bear down a mountain. Moses carried them because he had been changed by forty days inside the cloud. The man who came down was not the same weight as the man who went up.

The Procession of Ministering Angels

Moses had asked to see the divine glory. The answer was no, not the face, but the back. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan explains what the back consisted of: I will make the host of angels who stand and minister before Me to pass by, and you shall see the handborder of the tefillin of My glorious Shekhinah, but the face of the glory of My Shekhinah you cannot be able to see.

Two images arrived in that single verse. First, the back of God was the procession of the ministering angels. Moses stood in the cleft of the rock and watched the heavenly court cross in front of him, rank after rank of the host that stand and minister, passing by in their service. He saw the angelic court in motion, not God Himself. What crossed his vision was the heavenly liturgy walking, the whole standing army of heaven turned into a moving wall that screened the face he was not permitted to see.

The Knot Moses Saw From Behind

Second, and this is the Targum's most stunning detail, Moses saw the knot of God's tefillin. As the procession passed, his eye fell on the handborder, the edge of the strap, the knot bound at the back where the leather is tied. The Talmud in Berakhot 7a develops this further: just as Moses asked to see God and was shown the divine tefillin-knot, so Israel is blessed because the Holy One wears the prayer-straps that bind Him to the people, and the people sees the beauty of that binding from behind. Moses was permitted to see the structure of the divine commitment to Israel, expressed in the image of leather straps bound and knotted, the same act of binding that every Jew performs each morning on their own arm. The knot at the back of God's head answered the knot tied each dawn at the back of a worshipper's. Moses saw, from behind, the matching half of a bond he already wore.

Targum Pseudo JonathanExodusMosesSinaiMichaelTefillinTablets
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The texts this telling draws on, in full. Open a card to read inline, or expand it for a wider, quieter read.

Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus 24:1Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus

Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus (Exodus 24:1) opens with an unexpected speaker: Michael, the Prince of Wisdom, said to Mosheh on the seventh day of the month, Come up before the Lord, thou and Aharon, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel, and worship at a distance.

The Archangel Who Carries the Invitation

The plain Torah text says simply And He said unto Moses. The Targum reveals the intermediary: Michael, called here Sar Hokhma, Prince of Wisdom. In the Jewish angelic tradition, Michael is Israel's defender, the archangel who stands for the nation in the heavenly court. Now he delivers the summons that begins the covenant ceremony.

The detail that this happens on the seventh day of the month is specific. The rabbis placed this moment in Sivan, the month of the giving of Torah. On that exact day, Michael arrived to call the leadership up the mountain.

Who Climbs, and How Close

Five named figures: Moses, Aaron, his sons Nadab and Abihu, and seventy elders. A stratified ascent. Moses alone would ultimately go to the summit. The others would stop along the way. Worship at a distance, the Torah draws invisible concentric circles around the divine presence, and each group stops at the line appropriate to its level.

The Takeaway

Even the greatest moments in Israel's history come packaged with structure. Michael calls. Moses climbs highest. Aaron, his sons, and the elders each halt at their station. Encountering God is not a free-for-all, it is a carefully graded approach, mediated by angelic hands.

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Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus 31:18Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus

When Moses came down from Sinai, he was carrying something that did not come from earth. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan preserves the tradition with striking specificity: God gave to Moses the two tablets of the testimony, tablets of sapphire-stone from the throne of glory, weighing forty sein, inscribed by the finger of the Lord (Exodus 31:18).

Sapphire from the throne?

This is one of the great targumic expansions. The plain Hebrew says only that the tablets were stone, inscribed by God. The targum identifies the stone as sanpirinon, sapphire, the same blue stone that (Exodus 24:10) describes beneath the feet of God when the elders of Israel saw the pavement of heaven. The tablets, in this reading, were carved from the very floor of the divine throne room.

The midrashic tradition (Devarim Rabbah 3:12, c. 600 CE) extended this further. The sapphire was self-luminous, it gave off its own light, as if a piece of the divine radiance had been cut loose and handed down. The forty sein of weight (a measure of considerable heft) were so heavy that, had God not supported them, no human arm could have carried them. Moses bore them, the sages said, because the letters inscribed on them lifted themselves. When the letters fled, later in the story, the tablets became too heavy to hold.

The inscription itself was not ordinary writing. "Inscribed by the finger of the Lord", the sages of the Talmud (Shabbat 104a, c. 500 CE) taught that the letters were cut all the way through the sapphire, readable from both sides, and that certain letters (the samekh and the final mem) hung suspended in their centers by miracle alone.

The tablets were not a document. They were an object from above, placed for a moment in human hands, with consequences we will see in the next verses.

The Maggid takes this home: sometimes God gives us a piece of heaven to carry for a while. Carry it carefully. The letters may still be flying.

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Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus 33:23Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus

The Torah says Moses saw God's "back" but not His face. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, the Aramaic paraphrase of the Torah, explains what that backward glimpse actually revealed.

"I will make the host of angels who stand and minister before Me to pass by, and you shall see the qitra di-tefillin d'yeqar Shekhinti, the handborder of the tefillin of My glorious Shekhinah; but the face of the glory of My Shekhinah you cannot be able to see" (Exodus 33:23).

Two astonishing images. First, the "back" of God is translated as a host of angels passing in procession. Moses saw the ministering angels, not God Himself. The angelic throng was what crossed his vision.

Second, and this is the Targum's most famous mystical leap, Moses saw the knot of God's tefillin. The Talmud (Berakhot 7a) develops this image further - God wears tefillin, and inside those tefillin is not the verse about Israel's oneness but a verse about Israel's chosenness: "Who is like Your people Israel?" The knot, the qesher, is the clasp at the back of God's head, and this Moses was allowed to glimpse.

The face is too much. The angels and the tefillin knot are already more than any prophet before or since has been granted. The greatest vision in the Torah is still a vision of the back, the procession, the knot.

Takeaway: We do not see God's face in this world. We see the knot at the back of the Shekhinah's tefillin - evidence that we are bound to the One who binds Himself to us.

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Targum Jonathan on Exodus 31Targum Jonathan

The appointment of Bezalel and the commandment of Sabbath in (Exodus 31:1-18) culminate in one of the most extraordinary images in all of Targum Jonathan: the physical description of the tablets of the covenant.

The Hebrew Bible says God gave Moses two tablets of stone. The Targum says God gave Moses "two tablets of the testimony, tablets of sapphire-stone from the throne of glory, weighing forty seah, inscribed by the finger of the Lord." The tablets were not ordinary rock. They were cut from the sapphire of God's own throne. And they were massive, weighing approximately forty seah, a unit of dry measure that translates to hundreds of pounds.

Bezalel himself receives a title upgrade. The Hebrew text calls him by name. The Targum calls him "the good Bezalel," and notes that God filled him "with the Spirit of holiness from before the Lord, in wisdom and in intelligence, in knowledge, and in all workmanship." His assistant Oholiab likewise received the Spirit of wisdom directly into his heart.

The Sabbath commandment is sharpened. The penalty for violating it is spelled out as death "by the casting of stones." The Targum adds that the Sabbath is to be kept with "delightful exercises," a phrase suggesting celebration rather than mere restriction.

The covenant is described as a "sign between My Word and the sons of Israel," using the Targum's characteristic Memra theology. God did not simply rest on the seventh day. He "created and perfected the heavens and the earth" in six days, then "rested and refreshed." That final word, refreshed, implies that even the Creator experienced something like relief at the completion of the world.

Then came the sapphire tablets, heavy as a man, radiant as a throne, written by God's own finger.

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