Two important functions are mentioned explicitly here by Moshe himself.
The first relates to Israel’s eternal unique status as a chosen nation. Even though Israel was destined to sin and suffer severe exile as a consequence, Moshe maintains that they can be assured that God will never abandon them; the eternal covenant will never be broken: “He will not forget the covenant of your fathers, which He swore to them.” After all “Did ever a people hear God's voice speaking out of the midst of the fire as you have heard, and live?”. As Rabbi Yehuda Halevi emphasises, this mass revelation represents a theological foundation for Christianity and Islam too. While these subsequent religions argue that Israel’s sins led it to be abandoned by God, Moshe – a prophet whose legitimacy they all accept – makes it unambiguously clear that the Jewish nation will never be replaced.
A second fundamental function of the Sinai revelation is also hammered home by Moshe in his introduction to the Ten Commandments: “And you shall guard yourselves very carefully, for you did not see any image on the day that God spoke to you at Horeb from the midst of the fire”. The human imagination has long dreamed up creative speculations as to the image of God and how He can be physically represented. As Moshe describes at length, humans are prone to “lift their eyes up to heaven” and attribute divinity to the celestial bodies, or consider that impressive “beasts of the earth” must be endowed with supernatural powers. The point emphasised by Moshe is that even in the nation’s most direct and intimate encounter with the Divine, no image was seen. God can most accurately be depicted in the negative – what could NOT be seen. The Sinai revelation thereby condemns any subsequent attempt to attribute a form of divinity to any physical image, object or even great sage as a product of human imagination – not the God who revealed Himself to the nation at Sinai.
A third vital function of the Sinai revelation is not mentioned here in Moshe’s recounting, but is stated by God before the initial account of the Ten Commandments in Shemot (19:9): "I am coming to you in the thickness of the cloud, in order that the people hear when I speak to you, and they will also believe in you forever". As analysed in Judaism Reclaimed, the primary purpose of the Sinai revelation was not the Ten Commandments themselves, but rather that – as explained by Rambam – the nation participated in a direct prophetic encounter between God and Moshe. Having witnessed such an extraordinary phenomenon they became aware of their own inability to maintain such a level of proximity with the divine and implored God to communicate with them instead through Moshe. This represented the ultimate authentication and vindication of Moshe’s prophecy through which the Torah was received.
Various questions have been raised over the ambiguity of the Torah’s accounts of the Sinai revelation. Which words, if any, were heard directly by the nation and what was conveyed instead by Moshe? If the collective national memory did not preserve such details, does this not undermine the force and significance of such a revelation?
Bearing in mind the functions of the Sinai revelation that we have identified explicitly within the Torah’s text, we can argue that the content of the Commandments – while obviously important – is not what makes this event so highly-emphasised and unique. Rather it is the implications that this revelation had for the relationship between God and His chosen people. First, we gained actual knowledge that His divinity cannot be represented by anything within the physical world and secondly that our relationship with Him is eternal and non-revocable.
Once the nation had been granted third-party participatory status and thereby witnessed Moshe receiving prophecy, his authenticity as an instrument of God’s word was now beyond doubt. The question of which parts of the Ten Commandments were heard directly from God and which via Moshe’s agency becomes far less significant.
First posted to Facebook 30 July 2023, here.
