Canter Bridge

To enter the world of the Hebrew slaves, finding their way in more sense than just one in the shadow of Mt. Sinai, is to intrude upon an odd world. Even its protagonists—Aaron for example—defy classification. One one hand, he is the spokesman of YHWH’s own prophet. On the other, he responds to the threat of the mob by thinking up some very nice gold bulls to represent YHWH himself before a mob that he might have hoped he could turn into a worshipping congregation.

So too, YHWH, the divine Liberator from slavery in Egypt, the One who had called these ‘children of Israel’ to himself before Sinai, bringing them to him—so he summarizes what must have seemed a more arduous journey—’on eagles’ wings’.

Now Moses, having shattered the God-inscribed charter for this nation-in-the-making upon Sinai’s rocks, is summoned yet again to meet with YHWH on its summit. A second set of the two stone ‘tablets’ is promised, together with an encounter with YHWH, who seems always to exegete his enigmatic, suggestive name by asking people to watch what he does.

The LORD descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name, ‘The LORD.’
The LORD passed before him, and proclaimed,
‘The LORD, the LORD,
a God merciful and gracious,
slow to anger,
and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,
keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation,
forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin,
yet by no means clearing the guilty,
but visiting the iniquity of the parents
upon the children
and the children’s children,
to the third and the fourth generation.’

Like the two stones upon whose surface YHWH’s finger etches a future for this tribe, like Moses two ascents to the holy mountain, YHWH is possessed of two discernible aspects though not simple enough to be symmetrical.

As this rescuing, demanding, life-giving, life-taking deity discloses his identity, we learn that he ‘keeps steadfast love’ to the thousandth generation and visits paternal iniquities upon the sinner’s progeny only to the third and fourth. Likeness and asymmetry, comprehensiveness and selectivity, lavish mercy and restrained justice.

These are the components of the divine temperament that the narrative purposes to insinuate into the reader’s heart and mind. Indeed it is a a preemptive strike on that confusion that might result in the reader’s understanding as prior and subsequent narrative hurtles him into a web of details where violence and forgiveness might seem too random for any order one should wish to impose upon it.

As he had once before Moses descends the mountain, tablets in hand, towards an errant and indomitable people who had waited far too long for their too-absent leader to return from his YHWH meeting.

This time he does not shatter the stone tablets. This time the people is not caught in flagrante delicto as they danced around golden bulls and each other.

A second set of circumstances has, improbably, met with that long-lived compassion which YHWH has claimed as his default prerogative. What follows in the text is law and worship, stone from which Israel would build a house.