The Moses Legacy - Adam Palmer [20]
‘So you’re saying that the tablets of stone might actually contain this Testament of Moses, not the Ten Commandments?’ asked Mansoor.
‘That’s what it says in the Bible. But, there’s a problem with that, because the Testament of Moses is much too long to be written down on a couple of tablets of stone. It would have needed more like a dozen tablets to record that much detail.’
‘Then what could it be?’ asked Mansoor.
‘The clue to that comes from what happened next. According to the Bible, the Israelites were getting restless over the amount of time Moses was spending up the mountain. They thought Jehovah had abandoned them. So they melted down all the gold they had brought with them from Egypt and turned it into the Golden Calf, to worship the cow goddess, a local god of the region. And when Moses finally came down from the mountain, he saw the people worshipping the Golden Calf and blew his top – smashing the tablets in his anger. Then after he calmed down a bit, he got the Israelites to repent for their sins and then he went back up the mountain with another pair of blank stone tablets to get the commandments all over again.’
‘But he didn’t break the second lot of stone tablets,’ said Gabrielle.
‘No, those were the ones that ended up in the temple in Jerusalem. But let’s get back to what happened at Mount Sinai. When Moses went up the mountain a second time, in Exodus 34, he actually got an alternative version of the Ten Commandments. Not completely different: the first and second commandments are the same – and the fourth commandment of the old ones becomes the fifth in the new version. But the others are different.’
‘So are you saying that it’s those alternative commandments that are the real Ten Commandments?’ asked Gabrielle.
Daniel’s eyes were wide with excitement as he spoke. ‘Exactly. The Bible even says that it’s the commandments in Exodus 34 that are the Ten Commandments. Whereas the official Ten Commandments from Exodus 20 were never referred to as such. Also, it says that these alternative Ten Commandments were written on tablets of stone. On the other hand, the official Ten Commandments from Exodus 20 were never written in stone. They were merely spoken out loud by God.’
Mansoor was leaning forward keenly. ‘But if that is the case, then the Ten Commandments that you tried to compare to the stone fragments back in Cairo were the wrong ones.’
‘Exactly. What I should have compared to the stones was the alternative Ten Commandments – the ones in Exodus 34.’
And with that, Daniel opened his bag and took out the copy of the Hebrew Bible that he had brought with him, as well as a photo of the assembled stone fragments. Finding a perch on a large rock, he sat down and began making a comparison while Mansoor and Gabrielle looked on in silence.
‘Ki loh tisht-hazeh le’El aher ki Yehova Qana shemoh El qana hu. “For you shall not bow to another God because Jehovah, jealous is his name, a jealous God is he.” Now, if we look at the first line on one of the stone tablets, which is just about visible, it has the word El, the generic name for God, which we recognize by the symbols for the ox and the shepherd’s crook – that is, a silent placeholder for a vowel and the consonant “L”. Then a few words later we see God’s personal