Rabbi Akiva challenged Rabbi Eliezer with a question about what happened when God spoke the commandments at Sinai. Moses spoke and God answered — but what does that mean? Rabbi Eliezer's interpretation, Akiva argued, stated the obvious. The real question was deeper.
Rabbi Akiva offered a stunning answer. God gave Moses supernatural vocal power. He assisted Moses with His own divine voice, amplifying it so that Moses could relay each commandment to all of Israel in exactly the same form he had received it from God. When the verse says "Moses spoke, God answering him with the voice," it means God lent His voice to Moses.
This is a remarkable claim. The Mekhilta is saying that at Sinai, Moses' voice was not merely human. God reinforced it, strengthened it, and infused it with divine power. Moses became a living loudspeaker for God's words — not paraphrasing, not summarizing, but transmitting the exact divine speech to an entire nation assembled at the foot of the mountain.
The theological implications are profound. At Sinai, the boundary between divine speech and human speech momentarily dissolved. Moses heard God's words and then spoke them to Israel with God's own voice backing him up. The people received the Torah not through a secondhand report but through a divinely enhanced transmission. This teaching elevates Moses' role at Sinai from mere messenger to active participant in the act of revelation itself.