The Stone Tablets Were Written Through — Readable From Either Side
The Torah says the commandments were written on both sides of the tablets. The midrash says the writing was miraculous — the letters were cut all the way through, and when you turned a tablet over, the letters read correctly from either direction.
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When Moses descended from Sinai, he carried two stone tablets. The Torah says the writing was on both sides — on the front and on the back. The midrash asked the obvious question: how could writing on both sides of a stone tablet be read? The answer is one of the more extraordinary descriptions of a physical miracle in all of rabbinic literature.
The Tablets Were Not Carved — They Were Created
The Torah says the tablets were "the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God" (Exodus 32:16). The Mishnah (Tractate Avot 5:6) lists the tablets — and the writing on them — among the ten things created in the twilight of the sixth day of creation, at the transition between the ordinary world and the Sabbath. They were not manufactured in ordinary time. They existed as a prepared object, held in reserve until the moment at Sinai when they were needed.
The Legends of the Jews describes the tablets as made of blue sapphire cut directly from the divine throne. Their weight was enormous — according to the tradition, so heavy that they bore themselves rather than being carried, hovering in Moses's hands rather than resting in them. The writing went all the way through the stone. There was no front and back in the usual sense. The letters were cut through the full thickness of the tablets, visible from either side simultaneously.
The Miracle of the Final Letters
The Babylonian Talmud (Tractate Shabbat 104a, compiled c. 500 CE) discusses the two letters that present the clearest problem: the samech (ס) and the final mem (ם), which are closed letters — letters whose interior space is fully enclosed by the stone around them. In any normal carved inscription, the enclosed center of such a letter would fall out once you cut through the stone from behind.
The Talmud says the enclosed portions of those letters hung in the air, unsupported. The Midrash Rabbah (Shemot Rabbah, c. 400–500 CE) describes this as one of the visible signs that the tablets were not the product of normal craft: the letters that should have fallen remained suspended. The inner pieces of stone within the closed letters floated in place, a continuous small miracle visible to anyone who looked at the tablets.
What Was Written on Them
The ten commandments appear twice in the Torah: in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5, with slight differences between the two versions. The Midrash Aggadah reconciles the two versions by saying both were spoken simultaneously at Sinai — a speech act that transcended normal sequential language. The Babylonian Talmud (Tractate Shevu'ot 20b) notes that "remember" and "observe" (Exodus 20:8 and Deuteronomy 5:12) were spoken in a single divine utterance that the human ear cannot reproduce.
The Kabbalistic tradition of the Zohar (c. 1290 CE) describes the tablets as containing not just the ten commandments but all 613 commandments in condensed form — each of the ten containing multiple others within it, like a compressed archive. The physical tablets were the densest form of the Torah: the complete law in its most concentrated, least discursive expression, written in God's own hand in letters made of fire.
What Happened When Moses Broke Them
When Moses came down from the mountain and saw the Golden Calf, he threw the tablets and broke them. The Legends of the Jews records that the moment Moses broke the tablets, the letters flew off the stone and ascended back to heaven. The stone became ordinary stone again — heavy, inert, not bearing itself. Moses carried the fragments down to the camp, but what had made them sacred was already gone.
The fragments were kept. The Babylonian Talmud (Tractate Bava Batra 14b) records that both the broken tablets and the second set — carved by Moses under divine instruction but written by God — were placed together in the Ark of the Covenant. The broken pieces traveled with Israel through the wilderness. A nation that carries its own broken sacred objects is a nation that has not forgotten how the breaking happened. Explore the tablets of the covenant and Sinai traditions in our full collection at jewishmythology.com.