The Yalkut Shimoni on Torah 392 makes a breathtaking claim about the two stone tablets that Moses received on Mount Sinai: they were not made from any earthly material. "The tablets were the work of God," the text declares, and then adds a crucial detail — "the tablets were not created from earth, but rather from heaven."
This distinction matters enormously in rabbinic thought. Everything in the physical world — stone, wood, metal — belongs to the realm of creation, subject to decay and destruction. But the tablets containing the Ten Commandments were fashioned from heavenly substance, a material that existed before the physical universe was formed.
According to several midrash (rabbinic interpretive commentary)ic traditions, the tablets were among the objects created at twilight on the sixth day of creation, in that liminal moment between the natural world and Shabbat (the Sabbath). Other sources place their origin even earlier, suggesting they were part of God's original blueprint for the cosmos. Either way, the message is the same: the Torah is not a product of history. It precedes history.
The phrase "the work of God" — ma'aseh Elohim — appears in (Exodus 32:16) and is read by the rabbis as emphasizing divine craftsmanship without any human intermediary. Moses carried these tablets down the mountain, but he did not carve them. He did not shape them. They came from a realm entirely beyond human capability.
When Moses shattered those first tablets in rage at the Golden Calf, the loss was therefore incalculable — a piece of heaven itself, broken on the ground.