It is obvious that these differences leave the main body or substance of the Decalogue, as a revelation of law, entirely untouched; not one of them affects the import and bearing of a single precept; nor, if viewed in their historical relation, can they be regarded as in- volving in any doubt or imcertainty the verbal accuracy of the form presented in Exod. We have no reason to doubt that the words there recorded are precisely those which were uttered from Sinai, and written upon the tables of stone. In Deut. !Moses gives a revised account of the transactions, using throughout certain freedoms, as speaking in a hortative manner, and from a more distant point of view; and, while he repeats the com- mandments as those which the Lord had spoken from the midst of the fire and written on tables of stone (Dent, v, 221, he yet shows in his very mode of doing it that he did not aim at an exact reproduction of the past, but wished to preserve to some extent the form of a free rehearsal. This especially appears in the addi- tion to the fifth commandment, "as the Lord thy (iod commanded thee," which distinctly pointed back to a prior original, and even recognised that as the perma- nently existing form. The introducing also of so many of the later commands with the copulative and tends to the same result; as it is precisely what woidd be natural in a rehearsal, though not in the original an- nouncements, and came from combining with the legis- lative something of the narrative style. Such being plainly the character of this later edition, its other and more noticeable deviations — the occasional amplifica- tions admitted into it, the substitution of desire for cov- et,w'uh respect to a neighbor's wife, in the tenth com- mand: and of the deliverance of Israel from Egypt, for the divine order of procedure at the creation, in the fourth — must be regarded as slightly varied and ex- planatory statements, which it was perfectly comtietent for the authorized mediator of the covenant to intro- duce, and which, in nature and design, do not materially differ froin the alter-Uioiis sometimes raac'e by inspired
TEN COMMANDMENTS
273
TEN COMMANDMENTS
writers of the New Test, on the passages they quote from the Uki (see Fairbairii, HeriHen. Manual, p. 354 sq.). They are not without use in an exegetical re- spect; and in the present case have also a distinct his- torical value, from the important evidence they yield in favor of the Mosaic authorship of Deut. ; since it is in- conceivable that an^^ later author, fictitiously person- ating Moses, would have ventured on making such al- terations on what had been so expressly ascribed by Moses to God himself, and which seemed to bear on it such peculiar marks of sacredness and inviolability ( Hiivernick, Introduction to the Pentateuc/i, § 25 ). — Fairbairn.
III. Soui'ce. — The circumstances in which the ten great words were first given to the people surrounded them with an awe which attached to no other precept. In the midst of the cloud, and the darkness, and the Hashing lightning, and the fiery smoke, and the thim- der, like the voice of a trumpet, Moses was called to re- ceive the law without which the people would cease to be a holy nation. Here, as elsewhere, .Scrii)ture unites two facts which men separate. God, and not man, was speaking to the Israelites in those terrors, and yet in the language of later inspired teachers, other instrumental- ity was not excluded. Buxtorf, it is true, asserts that Jewish interpreters, with hardly an exception, maintain that "Deus verba Decalogi per se immediate locutus est" {Visg. de Decal.). The language of Josephus, however (.4«A xv, 5, 3), not less than tliat of the New Test., shows that at one time the traditions of the Jew- ish schools pointed to the opposite conclusion. The law was "ordained b}' angels" (Gal. iii, 19), "spoken b\' an- gels'' (Heb. ii, 2), received as the ordinance of angels (Acts vii, 53). The agency of those whom the thoughts of the Psalmist connected with the winds and the flam- ing fire (Psa. civ, 4, Heb. i, 7) was present also on Sinai. The part of Moses himself was, as the language of Paul ((Jal. iii, 19) affirms, that of "a mediator." He stood " between" the people and the Lord " to show them the word of the Lord" (Deut. v, 5), while they stood afar off to give form and distinctness to what would else have been terrible and overwhelming. The "voice of the Lord" which they heard in the tiiiinder- ings and the sound of the trumpet, "full of majesty," "dividing the flames of fire" (Psa. xxix, 3-9), was for him a divine word, the testimony of an eternal will, just as in the parallel instance of John xii, 29, a like testi- mony led some to say " it thunilered," while others re- ceived the witness. No other words were proclaimed in like manner. The people shrank even from this near- ness to the awful presence, even from the very echoes of the divine voice. The record was as exceptional as the original revelation. Of no other words could it be said that they were written as these were written, engraved on the tables of stone, not as originating in man's contrivance or sagacity, but by the power of the Eternal Spirit, by the "finger of God" (Exod. xxxi, 18; xxxii, 16). See Bath-Koi,.