I know no more striking spectacle than that of the unshakeable faith and inexhaustible energy of Moses in the pursuit of a work not his own, in which he executes what he has not conceived, in which he obeys rather than commands. Obstacles and disappointments meet him at each turn; he has to struggle with weaknesses, infidelity, caprices, jealousies, and seditions, and these not merely in his own nation, but in his own family. He has himself his moments of sadness, of disquietude: "And Moses cried unto the Lord, saying, What shall I do unto this people? they be almost ready to stone me…. [Footnote 46] I beseech thee, shew me thy glory."
[Footnote 46: Exodus xvii. 4; xxxiii. 18-20.]
And God answers him, "I will make all my goodness pass before thee. … Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live." And Moses trusts in God, and continues to triumph whilst he obeys Him.
The work of deliverance is consummated; Moses has led the people of Israel out of Egypt, has surmounted the first perils and the first sufferings of the Desert. They advance through the group of mountains in the peninsula of Sinai Passing from valley to valley, they arrive "at the entrance of a large basin surrounded by lofty peaks. Of these the one which commands the most extensive view is covered with enormous blocks, as if the mountain had been overthrown by an earthquake. A deep cleft divides the peak into two.
"No one who has approached the Râs Sufsâfeh through that noble plain, or who has looked down upon the plain from that majestic height, will willingly part with the belief that these are the two essential features of the view of the Israelitish camp. That such a plain should exist at all in front of such a cliff is so remarkable a coincidence with the sacred narrative, as to furnish a strong internal argument, not merely of its identity with the scene, but of the scene itself having been described by an eyewitness. The awful and lengthened approach, as to some natural sanctuary, would have been the fittest preparation for the coming scene. The low line of alluvial mounds at the foot of the cliff exactly answers to the 'bounds' which were to keep the people off from 'touching the Mount.' [Footnote 47]
[Footnote 47: Exodus xix. 12.]
The plain itself is not broken and uneven, and narrowly shut in, like almost all others in the range, but presenting a long retiring sweep, against which the people could remove and stand afar off.' The cliff, rising like a huge altar in front of the whole congregation, and visible against the sky in lonely grandeur from end to end of the whole plain, is the very image of the 'mount that might not be touched,' and from which 'the voice' of God might be heard far and wide over the stillness of the plain below, widened at that point to its utmost extent by the confluence of all the contiguous valleys. Here, beyond all other parts of the peninsula, is the adytum, withdrawn, as if in the end of the world,' from all the stir and confusion of earthly things." [Footnote 48] Such was three thousand five hundred years ago, and such is still, the place where Moses received from God and gave to the people of Israel that law of the Ten Commandments which resound still through all the Christian Churches as the first foundation of their faith and the first moral rule of Christian nations.
[Footnote 48: Sinai and Palestine in connection with their History. By Arthur Stanley, Dean of Westminster, pp. 42, 43. London, 1862.]
The Hebrews, at the moment when the Decalogue became their fundamental law, were in a crisis of social transformation; they were upon the point of passing from the pastoral nomadic condition to that of farmers and settlers. It seems that, at such an epoch, the political institutions of a people would, as the basis of their government, be its most natural and most urgent business. The Decalogue leaves the subject entirely untouched; makes to it not the remotest, the most indirect allusion. It is a law exclusively religious and moral, which only busies itself about the duties of man to God and to his fellow-creatures, and admits by its very silence all the varying forms of government that the external or internal state of society may seem to require. Characteristic, grand, and original, not to be met with in the primitive laws of any other nascent state, and an admirable and remarkable manifestation of the Divine origin of this one! It is to man's natural and his moral destiny that the Decalogue addresses itself; it is to guide man's soul and his inmost will that it lays down rules; whereas it surrenders his external, his civil condition to all the varying chances of place and of time.