Matthew Poole Commentary - Exodus 34:1 - 34:1

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Matthew Poole Commentary - Exodus 34:1 - 34:1


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EXODUS CHAPTER 34



God commands Moses to hew two tables of stone like the former, wherein he promises to write, Exo_34:1. Moses goes with these tables up to the mount, Exo_34:4. God descends in a cloud, Exo_24:5. He proclaims his name, Exo_34:6,7. Moses worships, Exo_34:8,9. God making a covenant with the people, commands them not to make a covenant with their enemies, Exo_34:10-12; bids them beware of molten gods, Exo_34:13-17. The feast of unleavened bread, Exo_34:18. To rest on the sabbath day, Exo_34:21. Other laws, Exo_34:22-26. Moses wrote these words, Exo_34:27. The time of Moses’s abode on the mount. Exo_34:28. Moses’s face shining, Exo_34:29, is covered, Exo_34:33-35. He acquaints the people with what the Lord told him, Exo_34:31,32.



The first tables were made immediately by God, who of his own mere grace and good pleasure, and without man’s merit or contrivance, entered into covenant with Abraham and his seed. These tables must be made by Moses, partly in token of God’s displeasure for their sin, and partly to signify, that though the covenant of grace was first made without man’s care and counsel, yet it should not be renewed but by man’s repentance. And as the tables of stone signified the hardness of their hearts, so the hewing of them by Moses might signify the circumcision and ploughing up of their hearts, that they might be fit for the receiving of God’s mercies, and the performance of their duties.



The words that were in the first tables; to show God’s reception of Israel into his favour, and their former state, and that the law and covenant of God was neither abolished nor changed by their sin.