Moses Upon the Mountain

(Exodus 24:1 -24:18)

Jehovah invited Moses, "Come up and present yourselves to me, and bring Aaron, Nadab and Abihu and the 70 elders of Israel -- but they must worship me only from a distance.  You alone may approach me.  The others must stand back, and the rest of the people may not come up at all.”

When Moses came down from the mountain, he communicated to his people the ordinances and instructions Jehovah had given him, to which the people responded unanimously, "We will abide by all that Jehovah commands us to do!"

Moses wrote down all the pronouncements of Jehovah.  He got up early in the morning to construct an altar at the foot of the mountain.  He also erected 12 standing stones, one for each of the 12 tribes of Israel.  He had the young men of each tribe prepare burnt-offerings and peace-offerings of calves to Jehovah.  Moses drained half the blood from the sacrifices into some basins and sprinkled the other half upon the altar. 

Holding the scroll upon which he had written the contract with Jehovah, Moses read it aloud to the people.  They all responded, "All that Jehovah has asked of us we will obediently do!"  Moses then sprinkled blood from the sacrifice upon the people and proclaimed, “May this blood sanctify the contract you have made with Jehovah."

Moses then went back up the mountain, accompanied by Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, and the 70 elders of Israel.  They actually saw the  god of Israel!  He stood upon a surface that shone like lapis lazuli, blue and brilliant as when the sky is very clear.  Jehovah did not strike down the elders of Israel.   No, they were permitted to glimpse their god, and to eat and drink in his presence.

Jehovah told Moses, "Climb the mountain.  Come up and visit with me.  I will give you stone tablets inscribed with my laws and commandments so that you may teach them to your people.”  Moses set out with his right-hand man Joshua to go up the mountain and meet with Jehovah.  Before leaving, he advised the elders, "Wait here until we return.  Aaron and Hur are with you.   If any matter arises, refer it to them."

Moses ascended the mountain.  A thick cloud covered the summit as Jehovah's vehicle made a landing on it.  The cloud enshrouded the peak for six days.  On the seventh day, Jehovah summoned Moses into the cloud.  Jehovah's vehicle then made a fiery takeoff from the top of the mountain -- which the people of Israel could see from below.  (When Moses had gone into the cloud, when he had gone to the top of the mountain, he was absent for 40 days and nights.)

Notes
1.  Nadab and Abihu were the two oldest sons of Aaron.  Hur, from the tribe of Judah,  was mentioned earlier as a companion of Moses.  (The Bible has little to say about him, although other Hebrew literature speaks about him extensively.)

2.  The construction of an altar probably involved little more than arranging a few large stones, since Jehovah had already prohibited the use of dressed stones.  The standing stones for each tribe of Israel are referred to, in most translations, as columns or pillars, but that would imply that there were dressed and finished stones fashioned into a certain shape.  Rather they would have resembled the standing stones familiar in neolithic monuments like Stonehenge.  However, the stones were probably not of any great size, for the text gives the impression that Moses, an 80 year-old man, raised them during a morning's work.  Even if greater manpower was employed, one would think they still would have been of modest size, a few feet high perhaps.

3.  The sacrifice and the sprinkling of blood, an offensive and disgusting sight, can only suggest to the modern reader a pagan, if not satanic rite.

4.  Moses is writing down the words of Jehovah.  But how?   There were only two types of writing in the Middle East during the 2nd Millennium B.C.  Neither employed an alphabet.  In Mesopotamia, the Hebrew's ancestral homeland, soft clay tablets were inscribed with a wedge-shaped stylus to produce cuneiform writing.  The tablets could be hardened by firing.  In Egypt there was hieroglyphic writing upon papyrus scrolls.  Moses, educated as an Egyptian, would have been literate (unlike the vast majority of the Israelites), and may have had the talents of a scribe who could have written in hieroglyphs or in a simplified, cursive form known as hieratic.   There was a hieratic script known as Proto-Sinaitic that was used by the Semites in Egypt.  (It is considered a precursor of the Phoenician alphabet that evolved centuries later.)   Moses may have used it.  --- One should keep in mind that the Israelites, at this point, did not speak Hebrew, a language not yet developed, but rather a dialect of Aramaic, an important language in the Middle East for many centuries.  Moses, of course, would have been fluent as well in Egyptian.

5.  When Jehovah is seen by his people, he is standing on some sort of floor, surface, pavement, mat?  It is described as being of a jewel-like blue stone that most translations refer to as a sapphire.  This is inaccurate: sapphires, that is, gems of blue corundum, were unknown until the days of the Roman Empire.  It is more likely that lapis lazuli, also a brilliant blue, is meant.  It was a stone used a great deal by the ancient Egyptians.

6.  A cloud covers the holy mountain for six days.  One gets the impression that the mountain is so high that it is in the clouds, but this is obviously not the case since it has been shown that the "mountain" was, of necessity, of very modest height.  The cloud could have been vapor or smoke from the Jehovan airship.  It could have been a smoke screen to prevent the Israelites from viewing the craft and what might be going on around it.  Another possibility is that the cloud could have been an antiseptic mist to protect Jehovah and his people from earthly micro-organisms.  On the seventh day, flame is seen, most likely owing to the Jehovan vehicle taking off.  Moses goes up to the mountain and is gone for 40 days and nights.  It is preposterous to assume that he spent all that time leaning against a rock or crouching in the dirt listening to Jehovah pontificate.  It seems more likely that he, after waiting around for six days, entered Jehovah's vehicle and departed in it -- where? into space, to another planet, to some other place on earth, who can say?  Unfortunately the text, which claims to have been written by Moses, does not give anything like a first person account.  And it is certain that the authors of Exodus didn’t really understand what they were writing about.  But it seems fairly clear to an objective and informed modern that Moses was an extraterrestrial contactee or at least was communing with an advanced human (or humanoid) from outside his own society.

7.  One may reasonable conclude in deciphering the narrative presented here,  that Jehovah was using the mountain as his base of operations.  He was stationed on the top of the mountain for a period of time when, at this point, he was communicating with Moses.  His aerial vehicle, spaceship, whatever, was not there at that time.  He was perhaps there alone and didn’t need his ship or companions.  When he invited Moses for what would be a protracted visit, he summoned his ship to return and it landed upon the summit.  For six days, for whatever reason, it was surrounded by a cloud -- mist, smoke, vapor?  Then, on the seventh day, with Moses aboard, Jehovah’s ship took off in a fiery blast-off witnessed by the gathering of Israelites at the foot of the mountain.