Scripture Daily

Context No. 20 of 4322 · Exodus

Context · Reflection

Exodus 34:1-7: in context

1The LORD said to Moses, “Chisel two stone tablets like the first. I will write on the tablets the words that were on the first tablets, which you broke. 2Be ready by the morning, and come up in the morning to Mount Sinai, and present yourself there to me on the top of the mountain. 3No one shall come up with you or be seen anywhere on the mountain. Do not let the flocks or herds graze in front of that mountain.” 4He chiseled two tablets of stone like the first; then Moses rose up early in the morning, and went up to Mount Sinai, as the LORD had commanded him, and took in his hand two stone tablets. 5The LORD descended in the cloud, and stood with him there, and proclaimed the LORD’s name. 6The LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, “The LORD! The LORD, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness and truth, 7keeping loving kindness for thousands, forgiving iniquity and disobedience and sin; and who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, and on the children’s children, on the third and on the fourth generation.”

This comes right after the worst rupture in the story so far. While Moses was up on Sinai, Israel had made a golden calf and worshipped it, and Moses, coming down and seeing it, had thrown down the stone tablets of the covenant and broken them. This passage is the mending. God tells Moses to cut two new tablets and climb the mountain again, and then God does a rare thing. He passes by Moses and says his own name aloud, describing his own character.

The words became some of the most repeated in the Hebrew Bible. The LORD, merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abundant in loving kindness and truth, forgiving wrong, and yet by no means clearing the guilty, carrying the weight of a parent's sin down through the generations. Mercy and justice are named in the same breath, and neither one cancels the other.

Israel came back to these lines whenever it needed to remember who God is. Moses quotes them to God himself to win pardon after the next rebellion (Numbers 14:18). The psalms recite them (Psalm 103:8). Jonah throws them back in a sulk, angry that God really is this forgiving, even to Nineveh (Jonah 4:2). Later Judaism counted thirteen attributes of mercy here and set them in prayer. After a betrayal as serious as the calf, the first thing God insists Israel get right is his own character. When someone has failed me, do I let them find out what I am actually like, or only what I am like angry?

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