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The Ten Commandments

by Norman Tew

 
The usual pictures of Moses holding the tables of the law show two tablets at least 50 cms tall and a couple of centimeters thick.  How heavy would two pieces of stone of that size be?

We are told in Exodus 32:15-16 that God wrote the laws on both sides of the two tablets. (See at the end of this article)

When you read the 10 commandments in Exodus 20 they are not that long.  In the King James Version they are called two tables of stone, but the New King James uses the word "tablets".  The New Living Translation uses the same word and the Contemporary English Version calls then "two flat stones".  This text also talks of Moses having them in his hand, not hands and definitely not arms.

If you go down to verse 19, which records Moses coming down from the mountain and finding the people worshiping a golden calf, it says that he "cast the tablets out of his hands and broke them".  Again you could not throw two great big tables down, a better description would be dropping them.

Maybe this is not an important point but I have for a long time felt that the usual pictures could not be correct.

"And Moses turned and went down from the mountain, and the two tablets of the Testimony were in his hand. The tablets were written on both sides; on the one side and on the other they were written. Now the tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God engraved on the tablets." Exodus 32:15-16 NKJV

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