After Sinai, wherever the Israelites went, the Ten Commandments went with them as a reminder of their covenant with God. The stone tablets were placed in a special box called “the ark of the covenant,” and the Book of the Law was kept beside it. Moses said,
…[the Lord] wrote on the tablets, in the same writing as before, the Ten Commandments that the Lord had spoken to you on the mountain out of the midst of the fire on the day of the assembly. And the Lord gave them to me. Then I turned and came down from the mountain and put the tablets in the ark that I had made. And there they are, as the Lord commanded me.” (Deuteronomy 10:4-5)
When Moses had finished writing the words of this law in a book to the very end, Moses commanded the Levites who carried the ark of the covenant of the Lord, “Take this Book of the Law and put it by the side of the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God….” (Deuteronomy 31:24-26)
Many years later, Solomon built the temple and placed the ark there. Solomon said,
“I have built the house for the name of the Lord, the God of Israel. And there I have provided a place for the ark, in which is the covenant of the Lord that He made with our fathers, when He brought them out of the land of Egypt.” (1 Kings 8:20-21)
These ways of describing the covenant should not be forgotten. They help us to identify the covenant given through Moses. We may summarize what has been learned, especially from Exodus 34:27-28, in four points:
- With whom? God made a covenant with Moses and Israel.
- What? That covenant was called the Ten Commandments.
- Where? That covenant was given at Mount Sinai.
- When? That covenant was given soon after Israel’s exodus from slavery. As 1 Kings 8:9 says, “The Lord made a covenant with the people of Israel, when they came out of the land of Egypt.”