The Ten Commandments which form the principles upon which the Mosaic laws were based were first spoken by the LORD to all Is'ra-el, and then were written by God Himself on two tablets of stone. In this form they were kept by the Is'ra-el-ites for many centuries.
God said to Mo'ses, "Come up to me on the Mount, and be there: and I will give thee tablets of stone, and a law, and Commandments which I have written; that thou mayest teach them."
Mo'ses then told the children of Is'ra-el that he was going up to the top of Mount Si'nai, where God would talk with him at length, and would give him the laws by which they were to be governed. He also told the people that they were to remain obedient to God under the care of Aa'ron and Hur, who were to take his place while he was absent from them. Mo'ses took with him his servant Josh'u-a, who remained on the side of the mountain while Mo'ses went to the top for communion with God.
The top of Mount Si'nai was still covered with the fiery cloud and with billows of smoke, showing the presence and glory of God. Mo'ses entered the cloud, and held intimate converse with God for forty days and nights. He walked among the flames and smoke without being harmed, and went without food for forty days and nights without losing strength. He was in deep communion with God, listening carefully to the instructions which the LORD gave him, and probably putting into written form the laws which he afterwards read to the people of Is'ra-el. It was a prolonged season of prayer and meditation, and of holy communion with the LORD God. For the entire period of forty days his intimate converse with God was free from interruption. There was nothing to disturb or distract him from the great experience of talking with God.
During this long period of converse with God, Mo'ses was given the two tablets of stone on which it is said that the Ten Commandments had been written by the finger of God. These tablets were to be taken back to Is'ra-el and kept for the instruction of future generations.
But forty days and nights was a long time for Is'ra-el to wait for the return of their great leader. They no doubt thought that God had taken him as He had E'noch many centuries before, and that he would never return to them. They had looked upon him as one who spoke with the authority of God, so now that no one else seemed capable of taking his place they felt that they must have some symbol of God's presence with them.
The Is'ra-el-ites did not intend to forsake the God who had brought them out of the land of E'gypt, who had provided for them so graciously this far in their journey, and who had recently spoken to them from Mount Si'nai, but they did want some visible object to remind them of the presence of the LORD.
They went to Aa'ron and said, "Make us a god that we may worship, and that will go up before us." Aa'ron thought it best to do what the people asked. He did not have the courage to deny the request of the Is'ra-el-ites for a god like those which they had seen in E'gypt, and so he took the first step in a course which led the people into a disgraceful state of idol-worship. It was his intention to hold them to their faith and loyalty to the true God, but he did not realize that they would soon worship the idol itself, instead of the God which it was supposed to represent.
