Why Did Moses Break the Tablets?

The Ten Commandments were spoken aloud at Sinai before they were ever written down (Exodus 20). Then God called Moses up the mountain to receive them in stone, and Moses stayed there forty days and forty nights (Exodus 24:18). He came down carrying two tablets “written with God’s finger” (31:18).

Down in the camp, forty days was too long. The people went to Aaron and said, “As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we don’t know what has become of him” (32:1). Aaron collected their gold earrings and made a calf, and the people announced, “These are your gods, Israel, which brought you up out of the land of Egypt” (32:4). Aaron even called the next day “a feast to the LORD” (32:5). They were not abandoning God so much as trying to make a version of him they could see and manage, which is exactly what the commandment against images forbids. (Catholic vs Protestant Ten Commandments looks at why some traditions count that command separately.)

The short answer: Moses broke the tablets because Israel had already broken the covenant written on them. While he was on the mountain, the people made and worshiped a golden calf. Coming down and seeing it, Moses threw the tablets to the ground in anger, an act that also declared the agreement broken. God later wrote the commandments again on a second set. The whole story is in Exodus 32–34, and it explains why the commandments are, in the end, a gift given twice. For the ten themselves, see The Ten Commandments: What Each One Means.

Moses knew what was happening before he saw it. On the mountain God told him the people had “corrupted themselves” and threatened to destroy them (Exodus 32:7–10). Moses argued for them, reminding God of his promises to Abraham, Isaac and Israel, and “the LORD relented of the disaster which he said he would do to his people” (32:14). Then Moses started down, carrying tablets the text goes out of its way to describe:

The tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, engraved on the tablets.

Exodus 32:16

Knowing was not the same as seeing:

As soon as he came near to the camp, he saw the calf and the dancing. Then Moses’ anger grew hot, and he threw the tablets out of his hands, and broke them beneath the mountain.

Exodus 32:19

He burned the calf, ground it to powder, scattered it on water and made the people drink it (32:20). What follows is one of the hardest passages in Exodus: the Levites answer Moses’ call and kill about three thousand people in the camp (32:26–28). The Bible does not soften it, and neither should we. The calf was not a small lapse. Within weeks of hearing God speak, Israel had broken the first commandments on the list.

The text gives one reason plainly: “Moses’ anger grew hot.” It is the same phrase God used on the mountain (“that my wrath may burn hot,” 32:10). Moses had talked God out of his anger, and then, seeing the calf himself, lost his own. That is a very human moment, and the Bible lets it stand.

But readers have long seen more in it than temper:

• A covenant torn up. In the ancient world, treaties were written on tablets, and breaking the tablet meant the treaty was void. Israel had broken the covenant within forty days; Moses made it visible.
• An act of mercy. A Jewish midrash (Exodus Rabbah) compares Moses to a messenger carrying a marriage contract to a bride, who finds her unfaithful and tears the contract up so she cannot be judged by it. Breaking the tablets kept Israel from being sentenced under an agreement it had just broken.

Moses himself later remembered it as something done in public, on purpose:

I took hold of the two tablets, and threw them out of my two hands, and broke them before your eyes.

Deuteronomy 9:17

Was Moses wrong? God never rebukes him. When God orders new tablets, he simply mentions “the first tablets, which you broke” (34:1). The Talmud reads that phrase as approval (Shabbat 87a), and the rabbi Rashi noticed that the very last words of the five books of Moses praise what Moses did “in the sight of all Israel” (Deuteronomy 34:12), which he took as a reference to this moment. Jewish tradition still remembers the day with a fast, the Seventeenth of Tammuz.

The story could have ended at the foot of the mountain. Instead Moses went back up and offered himself for the people: “Yet now, if you will, forgive their sin—and if not, please blot me out of your book which you have written” (32:32). God renewed the covenant, and the second tablets begin with a striking line:

The LORD said to Moses, “Chisel two stone tablets like the first. I will write on the tablets the words that were on the first tablets, which you broke.”

Exodus 34:1

This time Moses supplied the stone and God supplied the words (Deuteronomy 10:1–4). And when Moses climbed the mountain again, God did something he had not done the first time. He passed by and proclaimed his own name:

The LORD! The LORD, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness and truth.

Exodus 34:6

The second tablets came wrapped in the fullest description of God’s character in the Old Testament, given to people who had just proved they could not keep the first set. The commandments Israel finally carried into the land were a law given after failure, and after forgiveness. The Talmud adds a tender detail: the broken pieces of the first tablets were kept in the ark alongside the whole ones (Berakhot 8b). Nothing God had written was thrown away.

The second tablets went into the ark of the covenant (Deuteronomy 10:5), and centuries later they were still there. When Solomon brought the ark into the temple in Jerusalem, “there was nothing in the ark except the two stone tablets which Moses put there at Horeb” (1 Kings 8:9).

After that, the trail goes cold. Babylon destroyed the temple in 586 BC, and the ark never appears among the treasures carried away. Several traditions try to fill the gap. Second Maccabees, in the Catholic and Orthodox Bible, says Jeremiah hid the ark in a cave on Mount Nebo (2 Maccabees 2:4–8). The Ethiopian Orthodox Church says the ark is kept at a church in Aksum, where no one but its guardian may see it. Some Jewish traditions place it in a chamber beneath the Temple Mount. No one has produced the tablets, and no archaeological evidence for them has been found.

Jeremiah himself seemed unbothered by the loss. A day was coming, he said, when people “will no longer say, ‘The ark of the LORD’s covenant!’ It will not come to mind” (Jeremiah 3:16), because God would write his law on hearts instead (31:33). Paul picked up the image:

…written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tablets of stone, but in tablets that are hearts of flesh.

2 Corinthians 3:3

The stones may be lost for good. The words were never meant to stay on them.

Why did Moses break the tablets of the Ten Commandments?

Because Israel had already broken the covenant they recorded. While Moses was on Mount Sinai for forty days, the people made a golden calf and worshiped it. When Moses came down and saw it, his anger burned and he threw the tablets down and broke them (Exodus 32:19), showing that the covenant had been broken.

Who wrote the Ten Commandments, God or Moses?

According to Exodus, God spoke the Ten Commandments aloud to all Israel (Exodus 20:1) and wrote them on the first stone tablets “with God’s finger” (31:18). Moses wrote down the other laws God gave him in “the book of the covenant” (24:4–7).

Who wrote the second set of tablets?

Moses cut the stone, and God wrote the words: “I will write on the tablets the words that were on the first tablets” (Exodus 34:1; see also Deuteronomy 10:1–4). Exodus 34:28 says “he wrote,” and a few readers take that to mean Moses, but most Jewish and Christian interpreters read it in light of 34:1, as God.

Where are the Ten Commandments tablets today?

No one knows. They were kept in the ark of the covenant, which was in Solomon’s temple (1 Kings 8:9) and disappears from the record after Babylon destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BC. Traditions place it on Mount Nebo, in Aksum in Ethiopia or beneath the Temple Mount, but nothing has been found.

Was Moses wrong to break the tablets?

The Bible never says so. God refers to “the first tablets, which you broke” without rebuke (Exodus 34:1) and simply has them replaced. Jewish tradition reads that as approval, and many Christian readers see the act as Moses declaring a broken covenant broken before interceding for the people.