God, A People and A Land

The story of the Old Testament is a story of how God, under the name Yahweh, chose an insignificant people, the descendants of Abraham, to be his own people and promised them a land. The Book of Exodus opens with this people of God's predilection as slaves in the land of Egypt. God called Moses to lead this people out of Egypt, through the Reed Sea and out into the desert. In the third month after leaving Egypt they arrived at the foot of Mount Sinai. There God made a covenant with them: Yahweh would be their God and they would be God's people. It was here at the foot of this mountain that the Israelites became a people. Up to this they had been slaves of the Pharaoh of Egypt, now they were God's own people, and the living God would guide and teach them.

God could not be seen but worked through a chosen representative, Moses. God spoke to Moses and Moses spoke to the people. It was on Mount Sinai that God gave to Moses the Ten Commandments, the basic law by which the people were to live. This law made known the demands of the liberating God on the Israelites and sketched in broad outline the structure of their society, which should be liberating, too. The people are to be assimilated to God and not God to the people.

To show that the law came from God, the Bible tells us that it was written on two tablets of stone, "inscribed by the finger of God" [Exod 31:18]. This law is to be found in two books of the Bible, the first version in the book of Exodus [20:1-17], and the second in the book of Deuteronomy [5:6-21].