Clay Lane

The Copy Book

A Library of History and Literature in English

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985

Stone Tablets and a Golden Calf

Even as Moses is in the presence of God receiving the Ten Commandments, the people down below are already breaking the first of them.

Moses has brought the Israelites out of servitude in Egypt into the hard wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula. God has given them manna to eat and water from dry stone, but their hearts fail them when Moses goes up into the quaking, cloud-capped, lightning-crowned Mount Sinai, and does not return for over a month.

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Picture: © Adergham2017, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.. Source.

986

‘Who is on the Lord’s Side?’

Moses comes down from Mount Sinai with a constitution for a holy nation, to find it already broken.

The Israelites have tired of waiting for Moses to come down from Mount Sinai, and have made themselves a golden calf for a god in place of the God of Moses. But Moses now has returned, bearing two stone tablets inscribed with a law for his people, and he is not pleased to see it has been broken already.

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Picture: © Derek Harper, Geograph. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.. Source.

987

Heaven on Earth

Since the Israelites could not bear seeing Moses go to the mountain, the God upon the mountain came down to the Israelites.

Moses’s long absences on Mount Sinai are putting too great a strain on the Israelites, so instead of demanding that Moses come to the mountain, God comes down to Moses, meeting him in a makeshift temple at the mountain’s foot.

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Picture: © Berthold-Werner, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0.. Source.

988

Moses and the Twelve Spies

Spies are sent out to scout the Promised Land, but their report shows that Israel is not yet ready to inherit it.

After fleeing slavery in Egypt, the Israelites have been living in the empty wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula. On Mount Sinai itself, God has met with their leader Moses and given his people a law to live by and a promise of a land of their own. In the meantime, however, life in the desert is punishingly hard.

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Picture: © noa hen, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.

989

The Kiss of the Eternal

Moses is allowed to look upon the Promised Land for the first and last time.

Moses has brought the Israelites to the very borders of Canaan, the land promised to them by God, but with their prize in sight the Israelites have fallen prey to doubt, disconcerted by the Canaanites’ fortresses and warriors. For that, all Israel has been forced to wait even longer in the wilderness.

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Picture: © Roman Haselsberger, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0.. Source.

990

Moses and the Burning Bush

A reluctant Moses is sent back to Egypt on a delicate diplomatic mission.

A Hebrew boy has been adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter Bithiah, and brought up to be an Egyptian prince named Moses. But to save the life of one of his own Israelite people, he has committed murder, and has been forced to flee the country with Bithiah.

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Picture: From the Kaufmann Haggadah (14th century), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.