What Does Exodus 23:27 Mean?

The covenant-ratification ceremony of chapter 24 is introduced by this verse's notice of Moses' report: he communicated all the LORD's words and all the ordinances to the people, and the people responded with unanimous agreement. The "all the words" includes the Decalogue (chapter 20), the altar-law (20:22-26), and the Covenant Code (chapters 21-23): the full body of foundational covenant legislation. The "all the people answered with one voice" is the covenant's most dramatic unanimity moment: six hundred thousand men with one voice accepting the entire covenant framework.

The "we will do" response is the covenant community's most fundamental self-commitment. It is not "we will try" or "we understand" but "we will do": a performative utterance that matches the covenant's demand for rather than intellectual agreement but enacted obedience. The Passover's "do this" and the covenant's "we will do" are the covenant community's two foundational performative commitments: the Passover is the community's annual enacted memory; the "we will do" is the community's perpetual ethical charter. Both are enacted, rather than believed.

James 1:22 addresses the gap between "we will do" and actual doing: "be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves." The covenant community's Sinai unanimity, "all the words which the LORD has said we will do", is the model of the covenantal commitment that James calls the new covenant community to actualize.

The gap between the unanimous "we will do" at Sinai and the golden calf forty days later (chapter 32) is the canonical warning that verbal covenant commitment and persistent covenantal obedience are not the same thing. James insists that the new covenant community must be what the Sinai community promised to be but repeatedly failed to become.