Exodus 34

¹ Yahweh said to Moses, ‘Cut two tablets of stone like the first ones and come up to me on the mountain, and I will inscribe on them the words that were on the first tablets, which you broke.

² Be ready by morning, and come up to the mountain of Sinai at dawn; await my orders there at the top of the mountain.

³ No one must come up with you, no one be seen anywhere on the mountain; even the flocks and herds may not graze in front of this mountain.’

⁴ And so Moses cut two tablets of stone like the first and, with the two tablets of stone in his hands, he went up the mountain of Sinai in the early morning as Yahweh had commanded him.

⁵ And Yahweh descended in the form of a cloud, and Moses stood with him there.

⁶ Yahweh passed before him and proclaimed, ‘Yahweh, Yahweh, a God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness and faithfulness;

⁷ for thousands he maintains his kindness, forgives faults, transgression, sin; yet he lets nothing go unchecked, punishing the father’s fault in the sons and in the grandsons to the third and fourth generation’.

⁸ And Moses bowed down to the ground at once and worshipped.

⁹ ‘If I have indeed won your favour, Lord,’ he said ‘let my Lord come with us, I beg. True, they are a headstrong people, but forgive us our faults and our sins, and adopt us as your heritage.’

¹⁰ Yahweh said, ‘I am about to make a covenant with you. In the presence of all your people I shall work such wonders as have never been worked in any land or in any nation. All the people round you will see what Yahweh can do, for what I shall do through you will be awe-inspiring.

¹¹ Mark, then, what I command you today. I mean to drive out the Amorites before you, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, the Jebusites.

¹² Take care you make no pact with the inhabitants of the land you are about to enter, or this will prove a pitfall at your very feet.

¹³ You are to tear down their altars, smash their standing-stones, cut down their sacred poles.[*a],

¹⁴ ‘You shall bow down to no other god, for Yahweh’s name is the Jealous One; he is a jealous God.

¹⁵ Make no pact with the inhabitants of the land or, when they prostitute themselves to their own gods and sacrifice to them, they may invite you and you may consent to eat from their victim;

¹⁶ or else you may choose wives for your sons from among their daughters and these, prostituting themselves to their own gods, may induce your sons to do the same.

¹⁷ ‘You shall make yourself no gods of molten metal.

¹⁸ ‘You shall celebrate the feast of Unleavened Bread: you shall eat unleavened bread, as I have commanded you, at the appointed time in the month of Abib, for in the month of Abib you came out of Egypt.

¹⁹ ‘All that first issues from the womb is mine: every male, every first-born of flock or herd.

²⁰ But the first-born donkey you must redeem with an animal from your flocks. If you do not redeem it, you must break its neck. You must redeem all the first-born of your sons. And no one is to come before me empty-handed.

²¹ ‘For six days you shall labour, but on the seventh day you shall rest, even at ploughing time and harvest.

²² ‘You shall celebrate the feast of Weeks, of the first-fruits of wheat harvest, and the feast of Ingathering at the close of the year.

²³ ‘Three times a year all your menfolk must present themselves before the Lord Yahweh, the God of Israel.

²⁴ ‘When I have dispossessed the nations for you and extended your frontiers, no one will covet your land, if you present yourselves three times in the year before Yahweh your God.

²⁵ ‘You must not offer the blood of the victim sacrificed to me at the same time as you offer unleavened bread, nor is the victim offered at the feast of Passover to be put aside for the following day.

²⁶ ‘You must bring the best of the first-fruits of your soil to the house of Yahweh your God. You must not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.’

²⁷ Yahweh said to Moses, ‘Put these words in writing, for they are the terms of the covenant I am making with you and with Israel’.

²⁸ He stayed there with Yahweh for forty days and forty nights, eating and drinking nothing. He inscribed on the tablets the words of the Covenant – the Ten Words.

²⁹ When Moses came down from the mountain of Sinai – as he came down from the mountain, Moses had the two tablets of the Testimony in his hands – he did not know that the skin on his face was radiant after speaking with Yahweh.

³⁰ And when Aaron and all the sons of Israel saw Moses, the skin on his face shone so much that they would not venture near him.

³¹ But Moses called to them, and Aaron with all the leaders of the community came back to him; and he spoke to them.

³² Then all the sons of Israel came closer, and he passed on to them all the orders that Yahweh had given him on the mountain of Sinai.

³³ And when Moses had finished speaking to them, he put a veil over his face.

³⁴ Whenever he went into Yahweh’s presence to speak with him, Moses would remove the veil until he came out again. And when he came out, he would tell the sons of Israel what he had been ordered to pass on to them,

³⁵ and the sons of Israel would see the face of Moses radiant. Then Moses would put the veil back over his face until he returned to speak with Yahweh.