Clay Lane
Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘Clay Lane’
Moses comes down from Mount Sinai with a constitution for a holy nation, to find it already broken.
The Israelites have tired of waiting for Moses to come down from Mount Sinai, and have made themselves a golden calf for a god in place of the God of Moses. But Moses now has returned, bearing two stone tablets inscribed with a law for his people, and he is not pleased to see it has been broken already.
Since the Israelites could not bear seeing Moses go to the mountain, the God upon the mountain came down to the Israelites.
Moses’s long absences on Mount Sinai are putting too great a strain on the Israelites, so instead of demanding that Moses come to the mountain, God comes down to Moses, meeting him in a makeshift temple at the mountain’s foot.
Spies are sent out to scout the Promised Land, but their report shows that Israel is not yet ready to inherit it.
After fleeing slavery in Egypt, the Israelites have been living in the empty wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula. On Mount Sinai itself, God has met with their leader Moses and given his people a law to live by and a promise of a land of their own. In the meantime, however, life in the desert is punishingly hard.
Moses is allowed to look upon the Promised Land for the first and last time.
Moses has brought the Israelites to the very borders of Canaan, the land promised to them by God, but with their prize in sight the Israelites have fallen prey to doubt, disconcerted by the Canaanites’ fortresses and warriors. For that, all Israel has been forced to wait even longer in the wilderness.
A reluctant Moses is sent back to Egypt on a delicate diplomatic mission.
A Hebrew boy has been adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter Bithiah, and brought up to be an Egyptian prince named Moses. But to save the life of one of his own Israelite people, he has committed murder, and has been forced to flee the country with Bithiah.
Pharaoh dismisses Moses’s embassy for the last time, and Moses prepares the Israelites for a hasty departure.
With every miracle shown to him, Pharaoh’s heart has become harder towards the Israelites, and now he tells Moses that his embassy to Egypt’s court is at an end. Moses accepts the decree, knowing that more much is to come.