God, after he had published by an audible voice the law of the Ten Commandments, wrote them upon two tables of stone, and gave them to Moses upon Mount Horeb, that they might serve as a memorial of what all who entered into covenant with him were bound to perform. But when Moses, on descending from the mount, found that the whole people of Israel were worshipping the golden calf, he was filled with righteous indignation, and " brake the two tables in pieces before their eyesa." Now this action of his imported,
1. That the covenant which God had made with them was utterly dissolved —
[Repeatedly are the two tables called " the tables of the covenant15;" because they contained the terms on which the Israelites were ultimately to find acceptance before God. But their idolatry was a direct violation of the very first precept of the decalogue, or rather an utter subversion of the whole : and as they had thus broken the covenant on their part, Moses by breaking the two tables declared it to be annulled on God's part. God now disclaimed all connexion with them ; and by calling them " thy people," that is, Moses' people, he disowned them for Ms; and threatened to " blot out their name from under heaven." All this was intimated, I say, by Moses, in this sig- nificant action. A similar mode of expressing the same idea was adopted by Jehovah in the days of the Prophet Zechariah. He took two staves, one to represent the tribes of Judah and Benjamin; and the other, the ten tribes. These he brake, the one after the other, in order to shew that as they were disjoined from each other, so they should henceforth be separated from him also, and that " his covenant with them " both was dis- solved0. Thus far then, we apprehend, the import of this ex- pressive action is clear.
The further light which I shall endeavour to throw upon it, though not so clear to a superficial observer, will to a well- instructed mind approve itself to be both just and important.]
It further imports then,
2. That that mode of covenanting with God was
from that time for ever closed —
[This, I grant, does not at first sight appear; though it may be inferred from the very circumstance of the same law being
a Deut. ix. 10, 15, 16, 17. b Deut. ix. 9, 11, 15.
c Zech. xi. 7, 10, 14.