What Does Exodus 24:5 Mean?

The LORD said to Moses, "Come up to me on the mountain and wait there, that I may give you the tablets of stone, with the law and the commandment, which I have written for their instruction." Moses rose with his assistant Joshua, and Moses went up into the mountain of God. And he said to the elders, "Wait here for us until we return to you.

And behold, Aaron and Hur are with you. Whoever has a dispute, let him go to them." Moses' forty-day ascent to receive the tablets is the covenant's final formation act: the law given orally and written by Moses (verse 4) will now be given inscribed on stone by YHWH himself (verse 12, "which I have written for their instruction"). The stone tablets will be YHWH's own written word: not Moses' transcription but the divine fingers' inscription (Exodus 31:18: "tablets of stone, written with the finger of God").

The delegation of judicial responsibility to Aaron and Hur during Moses' absence is the repeat of the Jethro principle (Exodus 18): when Moses is unavailable, the community needs functioning leadership. "Whoever has a dispute, let him go to them". Aaron and Hur are the designated judges-in-absence.

The delegation is important for what follows: Moses' prolonged absence (forty days) will create the leadership vacuum that the golden calf (chapter 32) exploits. Aaron left in charge of the judicial disputes will soon be left in charge of a theological crisis; his response to the calf-demand will reveal the limits of delegated leadership without the prophet's direct access to YHWH.

"The cloud covered the mountain" and the "glory of the LORD settled on Mount Sinai for six days before YHWH calls Moses into the cloud on the seventh day: the six-day kavod-settling and seventh-day Moses-call is the creation pattern applied to the covenant's written documentation: six days of preparation, the seventh day the sacred event. Moses enters the thick cloud (aranan, the same arafel of Exodus 20:21 where Moses previously entered the divine darkness) and stays forty days and forty nights.

The forty-day period becomes the definitive Moses-on-mountain period, directly paralleled by Jesus' forty-day wilderness temptation (Matthew 4:2) and Elijah's forty-day journey to Horeb (1 Kings 19:8).