Gallery

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Massive stone blocks hover in the air above a desolate landscape, seeming to crack under an internal strain. Hebrew letters peel off into the void.

These are the tablets of the covenant given to Moses by God on Mt. Sinai, as depicted by Schmuel Bak, a Jewish painter born in 1933. Unlike earlier painters, Bak shows the tablets in isolation: They are not protected by Moses’ embrace or gazed upon in wonder by the Israelites camped at the base of Mt. Sinai. Instead, Bak paints them at the moment God tells Moses, “Go down at once! Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely; they have been quick to turn aside from the way that I commanded them; they have cast for themselves an image of a calf, and have worshiped it, and sacrificed to it, and said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!’” (Exodus 32:7–8).

According to Exodus, when Moses took the two tablets of the covenant down the mountain and saw the people dancing around the golden calf, he broke the tablets and threw the pieces at the foot of the mountain (Exodus 32:19). But Bak is illustrating a midrash, or rabbinical commentary, on that story, not the event as described in Exodus. According to a number of early rabbis, the letters disappeared from the tablets before Moses smashed them—some say out of sorrow for the sins committed by the people or, others suggest, to avoid embarrassing Moses.