You will be a treasured people, out of all the nations, a kingdom of priests. A priest, in the Hebrew way of thinking, was someone who advocated for the people to God. So if their culture was going to be priests to the whole world (remember the call of Abraham, “You will be blessed to bless”?), they would need to be holy people. In order for this to happen, God is going to give them some guidelines to live by. These guidelines will form them into a priestly people. The Ten Commandments are the foundation of those guidelines.
The Ten Commandments, sometimes referred to as the Decalogue (ten), are divided into two categories.
1. The first four are about a person’s (or group’s) relationship to the God:
• You must have no other gods before me.
• Do not make an idol for yourself.
• Do not use the Lord your God’s name as if it were of no significance.
• Remember the Sabbath day, and treat it as holy.
2. The next six deal with relationships between people:
• Honor your father and your mother.
• Do not kill.
• Do not commit adultery.
• Do not steal.
• Do not testify falsely against your neighbor.
• Do not desire to try to take your neighbor’s house.
Notice the last commandment is not a law to either do or not do something, based on actions, but rather is a command not to feel a certain way. That is hard. It is called coveting. And what is so bad about coveting is that wanting what others have can lead to worse sins, like lying, theft, and murder. It can cause neighbors to hate each other and lead to violence.
What is adultery? It is when a person who is married cheats on their spouse with someone else.
Lastly, there is a pretty stunning description of the seriousness of being in God’s presence. God takes up residence in a unique manner on Mount Sinai. A strict boundary is set up on the perimeter, punishable by death if crossed by anyone other than Moses. God wants to be in their presence once again, but at this point it will only be through Moses. More on that as we move forward.
Reading chapter 21 offered you a sample of the other 603 instructions given in the Halacha.
The next reading, Exodus 32–34, jumps ahead a bit. If you want to quickly read chapters 23 through 31, go ahead. It is a listing of some of the additional laws Moses gave to the people and descriptions of some holy furniture and uniforms for the leaders. But we will come back to that topic. In fact, we will be jumping all over the Torah (or Pentateuch) in the next few chapters, looking at the instructions (laws), customs, and practices that God is instituting with Moses.
Questions for Reflection or Discussion
1. Describe an area of your life where you have tried to do everything yourself and found out it was a lot easier when you enlisted some help.
2. God calls Israel his “treasured possession,” not because they were his favorite, but because he had a special task for them to complete and the laws were guidelines to help prepare them. Can you think of something you contribute to the world that is unique to you? What kinds of guidelines do you follow to prepare you?
The Golden Calf and the Presence of God
Read Exodus chapters 32–34.
Moses is on Mount Sinai in the presence of God a second time; while away the people get anxious and convince Aaron, Moses’s brother, to create a golden calf to worship. When Moses returns and sees this, he does three things:
• He smashes the tablets in a fit of rage.
• He grinds up the golden calf, mixes it with water, and forces the people to drink it.
• He puts together a team of Levite assassins to hunt down the organizers of this event and kill them with the exception of Aaron. Was his hand forced under duress?
Did you find anything comical in Aaron’s explanation? “So they gave it [gold] to me, I threw it into the fire, and out came this bull calf !” (Exod. 32:24). Really? Is Aaron three-years-old?
And then God has his own response, sending a plague to kill those guilty of idolatry.
Part of this story is Moses trying to convince God not to abandon them.
Why should the Egyptians say, “He had an evil plan to take the people out and kill them in the mountains and so wipe them off the earth”? Calm down your fierce anger. Change your mind about doing terrible things to your own people. (Exod. 32:12)
This is a priestly act, advocating for the people, despite their guilt. And he makes an appeal to God’s ego and reputation: “Lord, why does your fury burn against your own people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and amazing force?” (Exod. 32:11).
Then Moses and God point them to their long-term destination. They will return to the land of Canaan with a promise that God will drive out those tribes that are living there. They are known collectively as the “Seven Canaanite Tribes.” You might take some issue with this. What about those tribes? Doesn’t God love them? This is a tension that we will be observing in these stories for the next one thousand years, but particularly in this period, what is called the Wilderness and Conquest of Canaan. Don’t forget the first time we encountered the name Canaan. It was Noah’s grandson who was banished for something shady that happened between Noah and Canaan. So there seems to be a history between the descendants of Noah and those of Canaan. More on that in a later chapter.
Moses creates a meeting place where he talks with God and calls it the Tent of Meeting. A pillar of cloud hovers near the entrance when God is there during the day, and at night it was a pillar of fire (Exod. 13). A firenado?
Tribal Identity
One of the larger themes in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures to start tracking is tribal identity. The scriptures are a religious history of the Hebrew people. Earlier, in our reading in Genesis, we looked at the origin stories: Creation, Garden of Eden, the Flood. In some respects those earlier stories can be considered universal, or accounts that concern all of human civilization. It may be splitting hairs because those stories are within the Hebrew tradition, but even so, they are universal stories.
But when God calls Abraham and Sarah to begin a family-tribenation, the stories become more culturally specific. At this point, we are fully located in the history of one particular tribe among many, that of the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. (In the Episcopal Church we include the women, saying Abraham and Sarah; Isaac and Rebecca; Jacob, Rachel, and Leah. I often take it a step further and include the slave women of Jacob—Bilhah and Zilpah, since they had the children of what became tribal heads.)
The theme of tribal identity is important to revisit because Moses will be introducing laws, rituals, and cultural traditions that will shape that specific tribe. It is in part why the passage you read forbids them to intermarry with other tribes. It takes it to an even more extreme place, “You must tear down their altars, smash their sacred stone pillars, and cut down their sacred poles” (Exod. 34:13). God so vehemently wants to build a culture that is specific to one brand of monotheism that he takes a hardline against mixing cultures, even to the point of intolerance.