What Does Exodus 20:13 Mean?

Now when all the people saw the thunder and the flashes of lightning and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking, the people were afraid and trembled, and they stood far off and said to Moses, "You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, lest we die." Israel's response to the direct divine speech of the Decalogue is terror: the thunder, lightning, trumpet, and smoking mountain that accompanied YHWH's speech produced fear that the people cannot continue receiving direct divine communication.

The covenant community that accepted the covenant in principle (verse 8, "all that the LORD has spoken we will do") now requests that the direct divine voice be filtered through Moses. The theophany is too overwhelming for direct continued reception.

The "lest we die" reflects the theology already established in chapters 19-20: direct contact between YHWH's unapproachable holiness and unprepared/sinful humanity is lethal. The people are not being faithless in their request: they are being accurate: YHWH himself established the death-penalty for breaking through the mountain's boundaries (Exodus 19:12-13). The request for Moses as intermediary is the appropriate covenantal response to YHWH's transcendent holiness. The elect community cannot sustain the weight of direct divine glory without the mediator's governance of the encounter.

Hebrews 12:19 cites Israel's "do not let God speak to us" as the character of the Sinai approach that contrasts with the New Covenant's approach to the heavenly Zion. The community that begged for the mediating distance from the divine voice at Sinai is the contrast to the community that approaches "the spirits of the righteous made perfect...

Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel (Hebrews 12:23-24). What Sinai's terror made unapproachable, Jesus' mediation makes accessible: the same God, the same holiness, but a better mediator with sprinkled blood rather than boundaries-and-death-penalties.