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10. Tablets Like the First Ones

¹ At that time the LORD said to me, “Chisel out two stone tablets like the first ones and come up to me on the mountain. Also make a wooden ark. That is, a chest ² I will write on the tablets the words that were on the first tablets, which you broke. Then you are to put them in the ark.”

³ So I made the ark out of acacia wood and chiseled out two stone tablets like the first ones, and I went up on the mountain with the two tablets in my hands. ⁴ The LORD wrote on these tablets what he had written before, the Ten Commandments he had proclaimed to you on the mountain, out of the fire, on the day of the assembly. And the LORD gave them to me. ⁵ Then I came back down the mountain and put the tablets in the ark I had made, as the LORD commanded me, and they are there now.

⁶ (The Israelites traveled from the wells of Bene Jaakan to Moserah. There Aaron died and was buried, and Eleazar his son succeeded him as priest. ⁷ From there they traveled to Gudgodah and on to Jotbathah, a land with streams of water. ⁸ At that time the LORD set apart the tribe of Levi to carry the ark of the covenant of the LORD, to stand before the LORD to minister and to pronounce blessings in his name, as they still do today. ⁹ That is why the Levites have no share or inheritance among their fellow Israelites; the LORD is their inheritance, as the LORD your God told them.)

¹⁰ Now I had stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights, as I did the first time, and the LORD listened to me at this time also. It was not his will to destroy you. ¹¹ “Go,” the LORD said to me, “and lead the people on their way, so that they may enter and possess the land I swore to their ancestors to give them.”

Fear the LORD

¹² And now, Israel, what does the LORD your God ask of you but to fear the LORD your God, to walk in obedience to him, to love him, to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, ¹³ and to observe the LORD’s commands and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good?

¹⁴ To the LORD your God belong the heavens, even the highest heavens, the earth and everything in it. ¹⁵ Yet the LORD set his affection on your ancestors and loved them, and he chose you, their descendants, above all the nations—as it is today. ¹⁶ Circumcise your hearts, therefore, and do not be stiff-necked any longer. ¹⁷ For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes. ¹⁸ He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing. ¹⁹ And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt. ²⁰ Fear the LORD your God and serve him. Hold fast to him and take your oaths in his name. ²¹ He is the one you praise; he is your God, who performed for you those great and awesome wonders you saw with your own eyes. ²² Your ancestors who went down into Egypt were seventy in all, and now the LORD your God has made you as numerous as the stars in the sky.

6. And the children of Israel. Since it is not the design of Moses to specify the stations here, as he does in Numbers 33, but only to mark the place in which Aaron died, I have therefore thought fit to connect what we read here with the preceding narrative. In the death of Aaron, they might recognize the punishment of their own rebellion. But that Eleazar should be substituted in his place, was a sign of the paternal grace of God, who did not suffer them to be deprived of this blessing. This succession, too, was to be a perpetual rule for the future, so that the sacerdotal dignity, according to God’s prescription, should remain in that family.

He here specifies the names of certain places, which he omits in the passage above cited; for he there states that the Israelites went straight from Kadesh-barnea to Mount Hor; and then makes them pass on to Zalmonah and Punon, perhaps because the places had different names, or because they did not pitch their camp in Gudgodah, or Jotbath; although the advantages of the spot might have invited them to stop in a well-watered valley, for it is called “the land of torrents,” through which an abundance of water flowed.

I do not advert to what every reader will readily observe for himself, that in the discourse of Moses the order of the history is inverted; for he says that the Levites were separated from the rest of the people, after the death of Aaron.