Tag: Moses

How Many Times Did Moses Climb Mount Sinai

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Introduction

In the third month, after Israelites left Egypt, they arrived in the wilderness of Sinai, in which they received the law of God, including the Decalogue through Moses. Mount Sinai is the place where Moses communicated with God.

I assume that most readers understand the plot of the story quite simply. For example, Moses climbed Mount Sinai as God commanded, and he fasted for forty days and night to receive the law of God and the stone tablets of the Decalogue. But when Moses went down the mountain, he threw the tablets and broke them because he was outraged as he witnessed Isralietes committing idolatry while he was absent. So he had to go up the mountain again to receive new tablets of the Decalogue.

Honestly, this is how I understood the story in the past, but the actual story is far from it. If you don’t read the text as if you are analyzing it, it is almost impossible to follow the storyline, especially Moses’s move precisely.

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Aaron’s Performance of Signs and People’s Response to It

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Two Intriguing Things about the Story in the last section of Exodus 4

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1. The first thing I want to talk about is the significance of Aaron in the last section of Ex 4. No one is like Moses before and since, but he appeared and disappeared pretty quickly. Unlike Moses, however, the house of Aaron, as priests, had played important roles throughout the history of Israel. But how do we know Aaron is such an important person? There should be some passages that promote Aaron’s importance so that later readers would accept that his descendants should occupy the position of the high priest. The last section of Ex 4 is one of those texts.

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