This will be short and to the point. It is late, and I am tired. But I wanted to read a bit before going to bed.
The "Ten Commandments" are said to be the most famous bit of legislation in the world. They are ten laws or requirements of man by God in order to stay in a good relationship with God. Notice I am using a capital G to indicate the one god as expressed in both Jewish and Christian tradition.
But if you read the Ten Commandments very carefully you will see a change in narration perspective between the first two commandments and the next eight commandments.
The opening of the commandments appears to be God directly addressing the people. Notice the use of first person as the narrator. "I am the LORD your God... ...no other gods before me. I the Lord your God... ...those who reject me... ...love me and keep my commandments."
Those are from the first two commandments. By the third commandment, we have a shift to third person. We go from I and me to His and He representing God.
It would seem that God spoke the first two commandments directly to the Israelites, which caused them great fear and concern, and the rest most likely were delivered to them by Moses.
Either the first two were deemed by God to be so important He wasn't going to risk them being misspoken or misunderstood by having Moses relay them, or He wanted the added emphasis of speaking them Himself to embed them in the minds of the people who heard Him.
Now this brings us to another point that this author does not explore, but is always in the front of my brain. Did God, in fact, ever speak directly to humans, and if He did, does he still do so now?
I have always thought that one could communicated directly with God the Father, but only through the mystery of the mind. It would appear that in this incident the people heard from God not through the workings of their minds, but through actual auditory sounds received by their ears. The scriptures, in fact say, that the sound of God speaking to them was terrifying. They even told Moses that he should be the one to communicate with God because if they listened to God they would die (Exodus 20:19 KJV).
If God did speak to the Israelites, was there a reason why He chose not to at some point? Or does He still?
I wouldn't claim to be worthy of a direct communication with God, but I'd dare say this group of Israelites weren't either.
Am I missing something here? Is there an evolution in the way God communicates with His creation? Or is there an evolution in what we will believe as fact verses fantasy. Are some of the stories within the ancient writings mere collections of even more ancient oral traditions from different traditions?
Were the ancient writings contrived over time to set the stage for explaining the favored positioning of a peoples who would dare to call themselves "God's Chosen?" Will we, or can we, ever know?
