Exodus 34:28

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“And he was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights; he did neither eat bread, nor drink water. And he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten commandments.”

Many have misunderstood this verse, believing that “he wrote” is a reference to Moses. They conclude that Moses must have written the Ten Commandments on the stone tablets. The hidden message in this point is to diminish the Ten Commandments, to make them appear to have come from Moses, not God.

Exodus 24:12 shows that this is an incorrect assumption. There, God instructed Moses, “…Come up to Me into the mount, and be there: and I will give you tables of stone, and a law, and commandments which I have written; that you may teach them.” Also, Exodus 31:18 states that God “…gave unto Moses, when He had made an end of communing with him upon Mt. Sinai, two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God.”

Also notice: “The tables were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, graven upon the tables” (Ex. 32:16). These were the stone tablets that Moses later broke (Ex 24:19), when finding the Israelites worshipping the golden calf. God later commanded Moses (Ex 34:1), “Hew…two tables of stone like unto the first: and I will write upon these tables the words that were in the first tables, which you broke.” God (YHVH – “the Lord”) clearly stated that HE would write the Ten Commandments again.

As the Israelites’ forty years of wandering in the wilderness drew to a close, Moses recounted to them the ways that God had miraculously delivered them and provided for them. He stated this in Deuteronomy 5:22: “These words the Lord spoke unto all your assembly in the mount…with a great voice…and He wrote them in two tables of stone, and delivered them unto me.” Here, Moses was referring to the first tablets of stone that God had given him, the ones which he had broken (Ex. 32:19).

In Deuteronomy 10:1-5, Moses went on to repeat to the congregation of Israel that it was God who had twice written the Ten Commandments. Clearly, God, not Moses, recorded this great Law in each case.