Exodus34chapter 34

Exodus 34:1-3

The second set of tables is cut by Moses, where Exodus 32:16 says the first set was the work of God. What goes on them is the same writing, so the covenant that was broken is restored in its own words rather than replaced by easier ones. The mountain is fenced again as it was at Exodus 19:12 and 19:13, and this time even the flocks and herds are kept back from grazing before it.

Exodus 34:4-5

Moses rose up early and carried the stones up himself, which is the work God assigned him after the first pair lay broken at the foot of the mount. The LORD came down in the cloud and proclaimed the name, which is the answer to the request of Exodus 33:18 and the promise of 33:19. God shows Moses his glory by telling him who he is.

Exodus 34:6

God's own description of himself opens with mercy and grace, and the order of the words carries the sentence. The rest of the Old Testament quotes or echoes this line more often than any other statement about God, at Numbers 14:18, Nehemiah 9:17, Psalm 86:15, Psalm 103:8, Psalm 145:8, Joel 2:13, Jonah 4:2 and Nahum 1:3. It is spoken over a nation that had just made a calf, which is why it stands here and not back at chapter 20.

Exodus 34:7

The phrase forgiving iniquity occurs here for the first time in Scripture, and three words for sin stand behind it, iniquity and transgression and sin. The same sentence says that God will by no means clear the guilty and visits the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation. Exodus 20:5 and 20:6 set those two things side by side in the reverse order, and neither passage explains how they are held together.

Exodus 34:8-9

Moses hears mercy proclaimed and asks at once for the thing he has been asking since chapter 32, that God go among the people. His ground is the very sentence God had used to explain his distance, that they are a stiffnecked people, at Exodus 32:9 and 33:3 and 33:5. He takes the reason for judgment and makes it the reason for mercy, which is the shape Derek Prince and Dutch Sheets both point to when they teach intercession as standing in the gap.

Exodus 34:10-11

The covenant is made again on the far side of the calf, and the first thing promised is marvels such as have not been done in all the earth. Driving out the six nations runs back to Genesis 15:16, where God told Abram his seed would return when the iniquity of the Amorites was full. The work is called a terrible thing, which in the English of 1611 means a thing that puts men in fear rather than a thing that is wicked.

Exodus 34:12-13

Verse 10 has God making a covenant and verse 12 forbids Israel to make one, so the same word carries the promise and the prohibition two verses apart. The danger named is a snare, which is a trap a man walks into rather than one he chooses. Israel is told to break the altars and the images and cut down the groves, so the order is to remove the apparatus and not merely to stay away from it.

Exodus 34:14

Exodus 20:5 had God calling himself jealous, and here the word is given as a name, whose name is Jealous. The picture behind it is marriage rather than envy, which is why the next two verses speak of going a whoring and of taking their daughters for sons. Hosea and Jeremiah build long stretches of prophecy on the same figure.

Exodus 34:15-16

These two verses lay out a sequence rather than a single act, running from a treaty to their sacrifices, to an invitation, to eating, to marriage, and at last to sons who go a whoring after their gods. No step in that chain is a decision to change gods, and the last step falls on a generation that made none of the earlier ones. 1 Kings 11:1 to 11:8 tells the story of a king who walked the whole sequence.

Exodus 34:17

The word molten occurs first at Exodus 32:4, of the calf, and it comes back here in the one commandment the renewed covenant repeats on its own. Of the ten words given in chapter 20, this is the one the people had already broken while Moses was up the mountain receiving them. The renewal names the failure instead of passing over it.

Exodus 34:18

From here to verse 26 the terms of the renewed covenant repeat what Exodus 23:14 to 23:19 had already given, so the second tables carry the same law as the first. The feast is fixed to Abib because that is the month they came out, which Exodus 13:4 states and Exodus 12:2 had made the head of the year. The calendar is anchored to an event rather than to a season.

Exodus 34:19-20

The claim on the firstborn goes back to the night in Egypt, where Exodus 13:2 said sanctify unto me all the firstborn and used the word sanctify for the first time in Scripture. The ass is redeemed with a lamb or else its neck is broken, so an unclean animal lives because a clean one dies in its place, and the same verse says all the firstborn of thy sons thou shalt redeem. Israel's sons are kept on the terms the passover set.

Exodus 34:21

The sabbath is restated with the obvious exemption closed, since earing time and harvest are the two seasons a farmer would say he could not spare a day. The word sabbath first occurs at Exodus 16:23, in the manna chapter, four chapters before the commandment at 20:8, so the practice was taught by events before it was given as law. Here it is repeated at the point where keeping it costs a crop.

Exodus 34:22-23

With unleavened bread at verse 18 this makes the three annual feasts, and verse 23 counts them, thrice in the year. The feast of weeks is the one Acts 2:1 names when the Spirit falls, since Pentecost is the Greek name for the fiftieth day counted from the wave sheaf. The feast of ingathering at the year's end is the one Leviticus 23:34 calls tabernacles.

Exodus 34:24

The command of verse 23 empties the farms and the borders three times a year, and this verse answers an objection nobody has raised yet. God undertakes to keep the land while the men are away, saying that no man shall desire it. Obedience is asked at the point where it looks like a risk, and the risk is the thing God says he will carry.

Exodus 34:25-26

The passover rules of Exodus 12:8 to 12:10 are restated in a line, no leaven with the blood and nothing left until morning. The ban on seething a kid in its mother's milk stands here for the second of three times in the Torah, with Exodus 23:19 before it and Deuteronomy 14:21 after. Rabbinic law from the Mishnah onward reads that threefold repetition as the ground for keeping meat and milk apart, a ruling worked out in the tractate Chullin of the Babylonian Talmud. Christian commentators have more often read the line as a ban on a particular Canaanite practice, and the two readings have long stood side by side.

Exodus 34:27-28

Moses is told to write, which Exodus 17:14 had first commanded of him over Amalek. The forty days without bread or water repeat the first ascent at Exodus 24:18, and Deuteronomy 9:9 and 9:18 count both fasts. Verse 28 says he wrote upon the tables, and readers have long divided over the subject, since verse 1 has God saying I will write and Deuteronomy 10:2 and 10:4 say the LORD wrote, while the nearest noun in verse 28 is Moses.

Exodus 34:29-30

when Moses came down from mount Sinai: Moses comes down the mountain a second time carrying tables, and this time nothing gets broken. The shining is on the skin of his face and he does not know it, so the one man who cannot see the glory is the man carrying it. Israel had been afraid of the mountain at Exodus 20:18 and 20:19 and asked that God not speak to them directly, and now the same fear meets them on a man's face.

Exodus 34:31-32

Moses calls them back rather than letting the fear stand, and the order of return is Aaron and the rulers first, then all the children of Israel. Aaron made the calf in chapter 32, and he is the first man named coming near again. What Moses does with the light on his face is deliver commandments, so the glory is put to the work of getting the words to the people.

Exodus 34:33-35

The order in the text is that Moses speaks first and puts the vail on afterward, and he takes it off again whenever he goes in before the LORD. Paul takes the scene up at 2 Corinthians 3:7 to 3:18, where he writes that the vail lay over the reading of Moses and that in Christ it is taken away. He ends with unveiled faces beholding the glory of the Lord and being changed, which is the New Testament reading this chapter for itself.