In a discussion Tuesday night at Lutheran Family Fellowship, we talked about how the Ten Commandments were given to Israel. I said that I thought Moses was required to write the text of the commandments on the second set of stone tablets, but he wasn’t. God wrote on the second set, just as he wrote the first. (Update: It depends, however, upon how you take the subject “he” in v. 28.) The difference was that Moses had to make the second set of tablets himself, while God had provided the first set that Moses broke. So the overall sequence (with some time between steps for other things) was:
God spoke the Commandments out of the cloud to the entire assembly of the children of Israel at Mt. Horeb (Exodus 20),
God gave Moses the commandments in written form on two stone tablets (Exodus 31:18, 32:15-16), which Moses broke upon seeing the syncretism of Israel (Exodus 32:19),
God had Moses make new tablets, and He wrote upon them the same thing as on the first tablets (Exodus 34:1-2, 4, 28-29).
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