In chapter 33, Yahweh is meeting with Moses in the tent of meeting outside the camp, His restricted presence a consequence of Israel’s recent golden bull/revelry idolatry action and its clear breaking of the covenant between them and Yahweh. God tells Moses to continue on the journey into Canaan, He will keep His promise, but due to their stiff-neckedness He can’t be close to them, lest they be destroyed. Moses pleads with God to go with them, and God mercifully agrees, they will get His mercy and confirmation of His presence.
So chapter 34 begins with Yahweh’s instruction for Moses to cut some stone and bring it up to Mt. Sinai, we need some new tablets to put the 10 words on. This is freakin’ fantastic news. God has decided to forgive the Israelites and to accept them again as His covenant people. This is no small thing, the previous covenant was broken, their idolatry had broken it. They have done nothing to earn its reinstatement, God’s mercy carries the weight here.
As expected, if you’re going to have a covenant, some things need to be in place. Much of what we see in this chapter is stuff we’ve seen before because we’ve gone through this process once already. But, it’s being started again and the terms of the covenant need restated, the promises re-established, and the copies of the words for each party put back into practice.
In v. 5, God starts to keep His promise from chapter 33.
The LORD descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the LORD. 6 The LORD passed before him and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, 7 keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”
Yahweh “stands” with Moses (these descriptions are necessary but fallible in that God isn’t likely “standing” or any other physical human behaviors. Understandably, our language and perception is limited in our ability to adequately speak to what God is actually doing). In either case, we should have the sense that God is revealing His presence to Moses, likely some sort of manifestation that confirms who He is without directly being a physical manifestation of God Himself (the idiom from chapter 33 of showing his back is used in Scripture to indicate the revelation of basically nothing at all.)
Repeated names usually indicates terms of endearment, so we could read v. 6 to be something like, “to you I am your dearest friend Yahweh”. What follows is a revelation of His ways, his character, things that describe His essence. And all of these are good news for Israel, both in their content and the fact that God is proclaiming it as part of the reinstatement of the covenant.
We’ve seen the phrase about visiting iniquity on children’s children before and, as then, we risk misunderstanding. The point is not that God is punishing children for the sins of their father. “Fathers shall not be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their fathers; each is to die for his own sin. (Deuteronomy 24).” The point here is that as sin continues throughout the generations, it will continually be dealt with. God is reminding His people that they can’t get away with something just because He already punished a previous generation for it. Which, perhaps with some difficulty, we must digest to understand that the fact that certain behaviors were exampled to us by our parents does not leave us unaccountable when those own behaviors show up in our own lives (think alcoholism, poor marriages, etc.)
Rightly, Moses’ reaction to the presence of God here is to worship. This is good. Then he formalizes the ask. Yes, we are a stiff-necked people, but please Yahweh, be You in the midst of us that we may be forgiven and yet be Your people.” Yahweh agrees. Then the restating of the covenant work begins again.
God makes promises about what He will do. Then He restates how they are to behave, with nothing really new here except a hyper focus on idolatry. We’ll notice this as we progress through the rest of the Torah, the “more” laws that follow are really extensions of behavior Yahweh has already laid out. They already know they aren’t supposed to have other Gods before Yahweh. Now, we find more specific instructions about tearing down Asherah poles, not engaging in interactions that bring the Israelites into temptation to do what they are clearly susceptible to when it comes to foreign gods. Also, no intermingling marriages (note that here, as elsewhere in the Bible, the restriction is never on mingling ethnicities, it’s mixing spiritual belief systems). And the primary concern was ladies coming from Canaan or elsewhere marrying fellas and the ladies having influence on the spiritual beliefs (which speaks to strong faith of ladies and their level of influence). Fellas don’t leave when they marry and Israelite ladies who marry outside of their camp aren’t a threat to the Israelites purity either, that’s why it’s focused just on foreign wives.
They need to keep the feasts, they need to Sabbath, they need to not sacrifice incorrectly. Like I said, not new, it needs re-established, reaffirmed. And the end result are the expected covenant documents, the 10 Words. (There is some debate that the 10 commandments here could refer to the instructions given in chapter 34, which do number 10. However, most agree we’re still talking about the original 10 Words here).
When Moses heads out, his face if shining. It’s almost as if there is now evidence of the glory of Yahweh physically visible without actually revealing Him physically. In fact, that’s exactly what we have. On the rock (Mt. Sinai) God has kept His promise and protected Moses from His actual manifestation (which would likely kill him, just like everyone else) and yet exposed Him to His glory and His name, just as promised in chapter 33. And, the people benefit from it also.