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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > February 1994

Re-creating the Tablets of the Law

By Alan R. Millard

49 How should we imagine the Tablets of the Law that Moses twice brought down from the mountain? Whether the story is legend or history is irrelevant to this question. However we, are to appreciate the story, we should try to understand these tablets in the context of their time. In Cecil B. de Mille’s film “The Ten Commandments,” an arrow of fire circles and then strikes the rock beside Moses, searing ancient Hebrew letters into the stone. Then the fire gouges out the rock and cuts it into two slabs. Moses marches down the mountain, carrying the slabs […]

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Footnotes

1.

See “Mining the History of the Alphabet at Serabit el-Khadem,” sidebar to “Frank Moore Cross—An Interview: Part III: How the Alphabet Democratized Civilization,” BR 08:06.

Endnotes

1.

Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Exodus (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1967), p. 418.

2.

Giovanni Garbini, History and Ideology in Ancient Israel (London: SCM Press, 1988), p. xiii.

3.

Garbini, History and Ideology, pp. 104, 105.

4.

Garbini, History and Ideology, p. xiii.

5.

See Bob Becking, The Fall of Samaria: An Historical and Archaeological Study (Leiden: Brill, 1992), pp. 114–118.

6.

David I. Owen, “An Akkadian Letter from Ugarit at Tel Aphek,” Tel Aviv 8 (1981), pp. 1–17; letter in Biblical Archaeology Review, January/February 1984, pp. 81, 84 (Queries & Comments, BAR 10:01).

7.

Jaroslav Cerny, “Egypt: From the Death of Ramesses III to the End of the Twenty-first Dynasty,” in Cambridge Ancient History 3rd ed., vol. 2, part 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 606–657, especially section III, “Workmen of the King’s Tomb,” pp. 620–626; Kenneth A. Kitchen, Pharaoh Triumphant: The Life and Times of Ramesses II (Warminster, UK: Aris and Phillips, 1982), pp. 185–205.

8.

Trans. by John A. Wilson in James B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 18–22.

9.

John W.B. Barns, The Ashmolean Ostracon of Sinuhe (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1952).

10.

Benjamin Sass, The Genesis of the Alphabet and Its Development in the Second Millennium B.C. (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1988).