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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 167. The Ten Words
Subjects in this Topic:
VIII
The Ten Words
Literature
Driver, S. R., The Book of Exodus (Cambridge Bible) (1911), 176, 426.
Farrar, F. W., The Ten Commandments (1907), 35.
Foakes-Jackson, F. J., The Biblical History of the Hebrews (1903), 73.
Gibson, E. C. S., The Old Testament in the New (1907), 35.
Gibson, J. M., The Mosaic Era (1881), 77.
Harper, A., The Book of Deuteronomy (Expositor's Bible) (1875), 73.
Hort, F. J. A., Sermons on the Books of the Bible (1900), 35.
Jackson, G., The Ten Commandments (1898), 1.
Kalisch, M., Exodus (1855), 339.
Kittel, R., A History of the Hebrews, i. (1895) 244.
Matheson, G., The Representative Men of the Bible, i. (1902) 196.
Meyer, F. B., Moses the Servant of God, 115.
Meyer, F. B., Exodus, i. (1911) 313; ii. (1913) 9.
Montefiore, C. G., The Bible for Home Reading, i. (1896) 77.
Ottley, R. L., Aspects of the Old Testament (1897), 161.
Ottley, R. L., A Short History of the Hebrews (1901), 64.
Pearse, M. G., Moses: His Life and its Lessons (1894), 173.
Stanley, A. P., Sinai and Palestine (1877), 39.
Trumbull, H. C., Studies in Oriental Social Life (1894), 395.
Wade, G. W., Old Testament History (1901), 111.
Westphal, A., The Law and the Prophets (1910), 169.
Whitham, A. R., Old Testament History (1912), 89.
Biblical World, xxix. (1907) 454 (K. Fullerton); xxx. (1907) 60 (K. Fullerton).
Christian World Pulpit, lxi. (1902) 214 (G. S. Barrett).
Expository Times, xxv. (1913) 90 (S. H. Wainright).
We have now reached the record of the greatest event in the life of Moses. It was much indeed that he should rise up from the midst of the splendours of Pharaoh's court, and step forth from that high position to become one with these poor enslaved and spirit-broken Israelites. It was much, very much, that he should be called of God, and commissioned to demand the release of Israel, and to bring them out from the house of their bondage. It was much that he should have stood and spoken to the waters of the Red Sea in the name of Jehovah, and have taken so great a part in Israel's deliverance and the overthrow of Egypt's hosts. It was much that he should have led so vast a multitude in the trackless wilderness. But, of all honours ever put upon man, this surely was the greatest-the law was given by Moses. If the supreme advantage of the Jew was that to him were committed the oracles of God, how great was his honour to whom it was given to climb the mount of God, to enter into the majesty of the Divine presence, and to receive from the Almighty those tables of the law which were to inspire and shape the religious life of the world.
1. Leaving Rephidim, the pilgrim-host, led by the cloud, travelled slowly along the Wady-es-Sheykh, which still forms the great highway of the desert, running due east and west, from the Red Sea to the Gulf of Suez, until they came on the plain Er Râheh, which means “the palm of the hand.” It lies outspread from north to south two miles long and half a mile wide, nearly flat, and dotted over with tiny shrubs. On either side are mountains far higher than the loftiest mountain in Britain, composed of black and yellow granite, and at the end, blocking the southern extremity of the plain, rises the sheer precipice of Sinai, 1200 to 1500 feet in height-the mount of God.
2. Every aspect of the scene demands our earnest and careful consideration.
(1) All the previous dealings of God with Israel have been a preparation for this. God did not begin with the commandments. He first made men free, and then He gave them the Law. The whole history is a striking illustration of St. Paul's words, “Being made free from sin, ye became servants of righteousness.” It is impossible for us to think of Israel beginning to keep these great commandments in Egypt. We need only recall their ignorance of God, and their utter misery. It is impossible to get faith when hope is dead. Workers in missions tell us that to create hope is the first and hardest thing-to stir men out of the awful apathy of a dulled and stupefied despair. Then we have to remember that their surroundings were full of heathenism, with its vice and degradation. The cruelty of the taskmasters would have found a new strength and bitterness if they had been provoked by the insult done to the gods of Egypt. The religion of Jehovah might live in such a condition, but it is very difficult to conceive of the Jewish religion commencing under such conditions.
(2) God desired to assure them of their unique relationship to Himself. They had already seen what He had done for them. He had given Ethiopia and Egypt for them, had borne them on eagles' wings, had fed them with manna, had smitten the flinty rocks for them, had delivered them from Amalek, and now He desired to assure them that, as the children of Abraham His Friend, they were peculiarly dear to Him. They were to be a peculiar treasure among all peoples, a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation.
(3) God desired to enter into covenant with them, and to give them laws. Does it seem incredible that God, whom the Heaven of Heavens cannot contain, should condescend to enter into a compact with sinful man? It may seem so, if we degrade humanity and account men as worms or atoms. But if we realize, apart from sin, the greatness of man-his moral worth, his likeness to God, his creative powers, his patience, his hope, his love-then it will seem less wonderful that God should subordinate all else to the education of a being who is capable of eternal fellowship with Himself, and who is doubly bound to Him, first by original creation and then by the blood of the cross. How shall He not with Christ freely give us all things?
God has rescued the people and brought them to Himself. Let them but obey His voice and keep His covenant, and three things are promised to them: (1) They shall be God's peculiar treasure; (2) they shall be a kingdom of priests; and (3) they shall be an holy nation. These three titles are all full of the future, prophetic types of what shall come after; and as such we find that they are constantly appealed to by later writers, as embodying the fundamental ideas of Israel's relation to God and position among the nations of the world. So, in an early discourse of Deuteronomy, a strong caution against the perils of idolatry is made to rest upon this thought: “Thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God, and the Lord hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto himself, above all peoples that are upon the face of the earth.”
Here I ask you to notice the appearance of another term-“chosen,” or “elected”; for the two words are the same. The term has played a large part in the history of Christian thought, and profoundly influenced the destinies and fortunes of men in after ages. But it is here that we meet with it for the first time as a theological term, and used, be it noted, in what we may call a corporate sense, of the nation collectively in its historic aspect, and not of individuals. The idea that God had “chosen” or “elected” Israel is necessarily involved in the thought of Israel as God's own “peculiar people,” or “peculiar treasure”; and so, adding the passage of Deuteronomy to the primary passage in Exodus, we get a group of four special phrases used of Israel in their new relation to God. They are-(1) God's peculiar treasure; (2) His chosen or elected ones; (3) a kingdom of priests; and (4) an holy nation. It is in these titles that the true conception of Israel's mission lies wrapped up, and we can never understand God's purpose as revealed in Scripture unless we study them carefully.1 [Note: E. C. S. Gibson, The Old Testament in the New, 35.]
3. How fitting was the place for so momentous an event. “They were departed from Rephidim, and were come to the desert of Sinai, and had pitched in the wilderness; and there Israel encamped before the mount.” The “mount” before which Israel encamped (Exo_19:2) was in all probability the northern peak (some 6900 feet above the sea) of the mass of granite mountains called Mount Sinai, or Musa Sufsafeh. This peak, Ras Sufsafeh, answers exactly to the requirements of the narrative, and has immediately to its north a plain of a square mile in extent, which commands a full view of the cliff. That such a plain should exist at all in front of such a cliff is so remarkable a coincidence with the sacred narrative that it furnishes a strong internal argument, not merely of its identity with the scene, but of the scene itself having been described by an eye-witness. The awful and lengthened approach, as to some natural sanctuary, would have been the fittest preparation for the coming scene. The plain itself is not broken and uneven and narrowly shut in, like almost all others in the range, but presents a long retiring sweep, against which the people could “remove and stand afar off.” The cliff rising like a huge altar in front of the whole congregation, and visible against the sky in lonely grandeur from end to end of the whole plain, is the very image of “the mount that might be touched,” and from which the “voice” of God might be heard far and wide over the stillness of the plain below, widened at that point to its utmost extent by the confluence of all the contiguous valleys.
The very silence in those mountain stillnesses is oppressively eloquent-
A silence as if God in heaven were still,
And meditating some new wonder;
any breaking of that silence is not less eloquent, to remind man of his littleness before God. The loneliness of the region, the nakedness of the sheer granite walls, and a peculiar atmospheric condition, combine to give a prominence to the human voice which makes its very use a reverberating rebuke to the intruder who has ventured it. It is as though one were speaking in a vast glass bell, his voice ringing back to him from every side.1 [Note: H. C. Trumbull, Studies in Oriental Social Life, 397.]
There was an idea of sanctity attached to rocky wilderness, because it had always been among hills that the Deity had manifested Himself most intimately to men, and to the hills that His saints had nearly always retired for meditation, for especial communion with Him, and to prepare for death. Men acquainted with the history of Moses, alone at Horeb, or with Israel at Sinai,-of Elijah by the brook Cherith, and in the Horeb cave; of the deaths of Moses and Aaron on Hor and Nebo; of the preparation of Jephthah's daughter for her death among the Judæa mountains; of the continual retirement of Christ Himself to the mountains for prayer, His temptation in the desert of the Dead Sea, His sermon on the hills of Capernaum, His transfiguration on Mount Hermon, and His evening and morning walks over Olivet for the four or five days preceding His crucifixion,-were not likely to look with irreverent or unloving eyes upon the blue hills that girded their golden horizon, or drew down upon them the mysterious clouds out of the height of the darker heaven. But with this impression of their greater sanctity was involved also that of a peculiar terror. In all this-their haunting by the memories of prophets, the presences of angels, and the everlasting thoughts and words of the Redeemer-the mountain ranges seem separated from the active world, and only to be fitly approached by hearts which were condemnatory of it. Just in so much as it appeared necessary for the noblest men to retire to the hill-recesses before their missions could be accomplished, or their spirits perfected, in so far did the daily world seem by comparison to be pronounced profane and dangerous; and to those who loved that world, and its work, the mountains were thus voiceful with perpetual rebuke, and necessarily contemplated with a kind of pain and fear.1 [Note: Ruskin, Modern Painters, iii. chap. xiv. § 10 (Works, v. 254).]
4. In addition to the impressiveness of nature, solemn warnings and religious exercises helped to prepare the mind of Israel for the supreme crisis which was close at hand. The Divine voice, speaking through Moses, first impressed upon the elders of Israel the greatness of the national calling, its unique and supreme character. Israel had been chosen by the God of the whole earth to be His covenant people, His Church. “Thus shalt thou say to the house of Jacob, and tell the children of Israel; ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bare you on eagles' wings, and brought you unto myself. Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine: and ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation” (Exo_19:3-6). A solemn purification with washing of the body and the clothing for two days, according to the customs of primitive religion, was ordered; and “bounds” were set round the mountain (which its steep and isolated character rendered feasible); man or beast, on pain of death, was forbidden to pass beyond them. On the morning of the third day a terrible thunderstorm raged on the mountain, which was hidden in a thick black cloud. A trumpet-call summoned all the people to the base of the mount: “And mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly. And when the voice of the trumpet sounded long, and waxed louder and louder, Moses spake, and God answered him by a voice. And the Lord came down upon mount Sinai, on the top of the mount; and the Lord called Moses up to the top of the mount: and Moses went up” (Exo_19:18-20). Moses with Aaron ascended the mountain of terrors and mystery, and returning delivered to the people the great Ten Words, the charter of true religion, inculcating for ever true conceptions of God's character and His claims upon man.
The scenic character of the description of Jehovah's descent upon Sinai and His converse with Moses finds a parallel in many rhetorical passages of the Psalms and Prophets, and is doubtless to be explained similarly. In these any signal event in which the hand of God is discerned is depicted as accompanied by disturbances in the elements and by convulsions of nature. In the light of such, it seems reasonable to regard the narratives recounting the delivery of the Law at Sinai as a dramatic picture, the details of which are not to be pressed. The Divine communications made to Moses were presumably internal rather than external; and were imparted through the avenues of reflexion and conscience rather than by the outward hearing. Yet it is not impossible that in the locality where the events are placed there may really have occurred natural phenomena which are reflected in the narrative. To the race and in the age to which Moses belonged, all that was startling or exceptional in nature unmistakably manifested Divine power; and lightning and tempest, in particular, were associated by the Hebrews with Jehovah's presence. Consequently the storms that occasionally burst round the top of Sinai may easily have impressed the spirit of the Israelite leader with a sense of God's nearness; whilst the thunder may have been to him something more than a mere symbol of the Divine voice.1 [Note: G. W. Wade, Old Testament History, 115.]
On August 12th, I left Tokyo by train and arrived in the evening at Karuizawa, where I had duties in connexion with a summer school which was being held for missionaries. On the night of my arrival, I lay down to sleep with my face near a window from which there was a good view of Mount Asama, an active volcano, eight thousand feet in height, and about ten miles away. Warning had been given by specialists that there were signs in the mountain of impending activity.
It can be easily imagined how startled the people were when, near midnight, there was a sharp earthquake and a terrible explosion. I was suddenly wakened, and on looking from my window witnessed a sublime spectacle, made all the more mysterious and awe-inspiring by having as its setting the background of night.
Like a mighty giant in struggle the great mountain was in agitation. A great black column of smoke, shot straight up into heaven, was unfolding and spreading at the top. The glow of fires could be seen at the mouth of the crater. At times, blue and fitful flames appeared and vanished at different points against the blackness and smoke. There was a thunderous noise in the crater, continuous for more than an hour, the sound of which was uncanny and terrible, far more so indeed than the roar of a hurricane at sea. Presently a storm-cloud formed and stood by the side of the column of volcanic smoke. Supposedly, it was produced by dynamic cooling of the air undergoing expansion in ascending from lower to higher levels in the atmosphere. At any rate, the storm cloud was there, and lightnings began to play on the face of the cloud and thunderings were heard from within. The roar of the volcano and the noise of thunder answered each other as deep calls unto deep. The grandeur of the scene was such as to defy description.
The spectacle called to mind certain words of Scripture. The next morning, I opened the Bible at Exodus (Exo_19:1-25) and was astonished to find there, as well as in Deuteronomy (Deu_4:1-49; Deu_5:1-33) and in Hebrews (Heb_12:1-29), language used descriptive of phenomena closely resembling those which I had witnessed. I read of “thunders and lightnings,” of a “thick cloud upon the mount,” of Mount Sinai “altogether on a smoke,” of the “Lord descending upon it in fire,” of the “smoke thereof ascending as the smoke of a furnace,” and of the whole mount “quaking greatly” (Exod.). The account in Deuteronomy I found to be not less exact and particular. “The mountain burned with fire unto the heart of heaven, with darkness, cloud, and thick darkness. And the Lord spake unto you out of the midst of the fire; but ye saw no form; only ye heard a voice” (Deu_4:11, R.V.). “These words the Lord spake unto all your assembly in the mount out of the midst of the fire, of the cloud, and of the thick darkness, with a great voice” (Deu_5:22). The language of Hebrews is certainly based on these accounts. “For ye are not come unto a mount that might be touched, and that burned with fire, and unto blackness, and darkness, and tempest, and the sound of a trumpet, and the voice of words.” And also, “So fearful was the appearance that Moses said, I exceedingly fear and quake” (Deu_12:18-21). In fact the correspondence was so close as to include even the official regulations at Karuizawa, for I was told the next morning that the governor of the province had set bounds about the mount, in view of the increased activity of the volcano, though some had broken through and gazed upon the sight at their own peril.
Now two or three things were riveted upon my mind, when I read afresh the account of the giving of the Law. First, I was convinced that the language described volcanic as well as storm phenomena; secondly, I felt not less certain that the writer had witnessed the phenomena which he described; and thirdly, I was deeply impressed with the fitness of such a scene as the background of Divine legislation. All law is inseparable from the idea of force. The manifestation of God in the awful display of His power in earthquake, volcanic eruption, and storm would certainly give impressive emphasis to ordinances promulgated for the people.1 [Note: S. H. Wainright, in The Expository Times, xxv. 90.]
5. It was fitting that the proclamation of the Ten Words should be accompanied by such sanctions of outward solemnity as those which the religious history of Israel associated with Mount Sinai. The grandeur of the Moral Law was not yet a thing before which in itself the people could be expected to bow. The sentiment of reverence for the truths on which the moral order of the universe is constructed was, at least for the great bulk of them, a sentiment yet to be created. To them thunder and lightning, a mount whose red granite seemed on fire, and a voice speaking to them from out of the darkness, were grander and more awe-inspiring than the great unaccompanied imperative of duty. Before this imperative we may stand in awe, as before a fact which all the thinking of men has never been able to explain away, a fact whose ultimate authority we all recognize when we say “I ought.” But not yet they. We are not, therefore, to say that these things never happened so in their experience, simply because we would not require them to happen so in ours. We shall rather be thankful that to-day we confront the old words with a reverence which goes out to them immediately, and which discovers more grandeur in the simple word “duty” than in all the rolling of the thunder. And it will behove us to be careful that the edge be not again taken off this moral reverence, which has been so slowly and painfully acquired, by the false and lowered standards of materialism which in our time threaten both thought and life.
Who can estimate what the world owes to these portents of Sinai, in the time when Israel was a child (Hos_11:1), and heaven lay about him in his infancy? We are so much occupied with that majestic law, “the rugged grandeur of which towers above the greatest monuments of Egypt, like Sinai itself above the pyramids,” that we forget the intrinsic value of those awful manifestations which preceded its promulgation. But if we have the foundation of all ethics in the Decalogue, we have also, in the portents which preceded, the foundation of that reverence which is the soul of all true ethics, of those
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised!
Our reverence for nature, and our reverence for the God of nature, are both of Hebrew origin; and Sinai is their birthplace. Alas! that there should be so much in these times so utterly at enmity with human joy as to encourage the attempt to abolish and destroy these, by cutting away their roots in that supernatural which is their only basis. But the God of Sinai still lives; and so long as He is acknowledged, reverence will still abide among men, in which, as Ruskin truly says, “is the chief joy and power of life.”1 [Note: J. Monro Gibson, The Mosaic Era, 83.]
Mount Sinai, for all these thousands of years, has been the commanding metaphor for conscience and the law of God. Geographically, the mountain stands like an iron peak, shot up by the desert from its masses of hard and pitiless red rock. Historically, it has been the platform from which the world has received its laws. Disraeli introduces it into his Tancred as the mount of moral vision for the dreamer who is his hero. Bunyan's Pilgrim has it thrust upon his path, precipitous and overhanging, threatening him with its crushing rocks and its deadly flashes of fire. His burden, too, becomes heavier as he goes, but the reason for that seems to be that he is out of the way. Here Evangelist again appears upon the scene. He comes to meet him, drawing nearer and nearer. His coming is deliberate, for he has been watching the man growing worldly in his own pitiful fashion. The question is asked, “What doest thou here?”-the very question which Elijah heard on the road to the same mountain. But here, in a later edition [of the Pilgrim's Progress], the word “Christian” is added, evidently for emphasis. A Christian should never be cowering under Mount Sinai.1 [Note: John Kelman, The Road, i. 33.]
The Maker's Laws, whether they are promulgated in Sinai Thunder, to the ear or imagination, or quite otherwise promulgated, are the laws of God; transcendent, everlasting, imperatively demanding obedience from all men. This, without any thunder, or with never so much thunder, thou, if there be any soul left in thee, canst know of a truth. The Universe, I say, is made by Law; the great Soul of the World is just and not unjust. Look thou, if thou have eyes or soul left, into this great shoreless Incomprehensible: in the heart of its tumultuous Appearances, Embroilments, and mad Time-vortexes, is there not, silent, eternal, an All-just, an All-beautiful; sole Reality and ultimate controlling Power of the whole? This is not a figure of speech: this is a fact.2 [Note: Carlyle, Past and Present.]