The Midrash of the Ten Commandments, a medieval midrashic anthology organized around the Decalogue that was popular in Jewish communities from Spain to Yemen in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, opens with an astonishing picture of the moment the Torah was given.
All of Israel, it says, was prostrate at Mount Sinai, flat on their faces before the thunder. The load of divine presence was so heavy that the people could not remain standing, and so malachim, angels, were sent down to hold them up. Each Israelite, the midrash teaches, had two angels beside him, one to steady his shoulders and one to lift his chin. That is how Israel received the Ten Commandments: prone, overwhelmed, propped up by the heavenly host so that their bodies did not collapse under the weight of what their ears were hearing.
And then the Midrash makes a still bolder claim. In that moment of revelation, each Israelite saw what normal human eyes cannot see. They saw the sheva shamayim, the seven layered heavens, stretching one above the other, with their names and their functions. They saw the sheva tehomot, the seven primordial abysses, the depths that churn beneath creation. They saw the arba kanfot ha-aretz, which in this version becomes the sheva pinot ha-aretz, the seven corners of the world. The whole cosmos unfolded before them in its tiered architecture.
But within all of that multiplicity, they saw only one God. No second power. No rival deity. No helper beside Him. The sevenfold heavens and abysses and corners all pointed to a single source, and that source was the one who was speaking to them from the cloud. This exemplum, preserved as the opening of number 375 in Moses Gaster's 1924 Exempla of the Rabbis, is itself a brief theological sermon. Creation may be layered. Reality may be sevenfold. But the Master of all of it is One, and Sinai was the moment Israel saw that truth with its own eyes. The other parts of the exemplum cross-reference further stories, including the binding of Isaac by Abraham and the mother and seven sons who died al kiddush Hashem, for the sanctification of the Divine Name, under the persecutions of Antiochus.