The Covenant at Sinai

In the third month after leaving Egypt the Israelites camped in the wilderness in front of Mount Sinai (Exodus 19:1–2). Through Moses, Exodus says, God offered them a covenant: if they kept it, they would be his own possession among all peoples, “a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation”. The people answered that they would do all that the Lord had spoken (Exodus 19:3–8).

On the third day, the account goes on, there was thunder and lightning, a thick cloud and the sound of a trumpet, and the mountain smoked and shook (Exodus 19:16–19). God then spoke the Ten Commandments, which begin by naming him as the one who brought Israel out of Egypt (Exodus 20:1–17). The people were afraid and asked Moses to speak to them in God’s place (Exodus 20:18–21). Moses wrote down the words, built an altar, read “the book of the covenant” aloud and sprinkled the blood of the sacrifices on the altar and on the people as “the blood of the covenant” (Exodus 24:3–8). He then went up into the cloud on the mountain for forty days and forty nights (Exodus 24:15–18) and was given two stone tablets “written with God’s finger” (Exodus 31:18).

While he was away the people asked Aaron for gods to go before them. Aaron made a calf from their gold earrings and built an altar in front of it (Exodus 32:1–6). Moses pleaded for the people on the mountain (Exodus 32:11–14), came down, broke the tablets at the sight of the calf and destroyed it (Exodus 32:19–20). About three thousand men were killed by the Levites (Exodus 32:26–28). Moses offered to be blotted out himself if the people could not be forgiven (Exodus 32:30–32). He cut two new tablets and went up again, and there, the text says, the Lord passed before him and proclaimed himself “a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger” (Exodus 34:1–7). After another forty days the words of the covenant, “the ten commandments”, were written on the new tablets (Exodus 34:27–28).

Deuteronomy repeats the commandments. It has Moses tell the next generation that the covenant at Horeb, its name for the mountain, was made “with us, even us, who are all of us here alive today” (Deuteronomy 5:1–22). The churches number the ten differently: the Catholic Catechism notes that Catholics and Lutherans follow Augustine’s division, and the Orthodox and Reformed that of the Greek Fathers (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2066).

Jeremiah promised a new covenant, unlike the one made when Israel was led out of Egypt (Jeremiah 31:31–34). The New Testament takes up both the promise and the words of Moses: at the Last Supper Jesus calls the cup “my blood of the new covenant” (Matthew 26:27–28), and the letter to the Hebrews contrasts the fire and trumpet of Sinai with Mount Zion and “Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant” (Hebrews 12:18–24).