Exodus 18:1-20:23
Moses and the 611
People long ago noticed something interesting about the Ten Commandments. In the first two commandments, God speaks in the first person, using the words “I” and “Me”: “I am the Lord your God, who took you out of the land of Egypt…” “You shall have no other gods before Me…” and so forth. But after that second commandment, God is spoken of in the third person—not “I” or “Me,” but “the Lord your God,” “He” and “His.”
Thus, the third commandment reads: “You shall not take in vain the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not find guiltless…” etc. The fourth commandment, to keep the sabbath, says, “The seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord your God…”—once again, in the third person. And so the text continues to speak of God in the third person throughout the remaining commandments.
Why the switch?
As the Torah relates, after God had begun speaking at Sinai, the people “trembled and stood at a distance” (Exod 20:15). They went to Moses and demanded, “You be the one to speak to us, but don’t let God speak to us, or else we will die.” Moses tried to reassure them, but they wouldn’t listen: “So the people stood off at a distance, while Moses approached the thick cloud, where God was” (Exod 20:16-18). As a result, the people of Israel ended up hearing only the first two commandments directly from God. All the rest were spoken to them via Moses, since he was the only one who could bear to hear God’s voice.
In keeping with this, a later verse asserts: “Moses commanded us [the laws of] the Torah, to be passed on to Jacob’s descendants” (Deut 33:4). “Don’t you mean God commanded us?” Well, no. Technically, God only commanded us the first two commandments; the rest were given to Moses, who passed them on to us.
This actually explains another, apparently unrelated fact about the Torah. As is well known, every letter in the Hebrew alphabet has, by tradition, a numerical value (since the so-called Arabic numerals, 1, 2, 3, and so forth, were not yet in use to designate numbers). The first letter of torah, the letter tav, has the numerical value of 400. The next letter, vav, designates the number 6; resh, the third letter, stands for 200, and hei, the last letter, equals five. Altogether this makes for a total of 611.
Too bad! If only it had come to 613, that would have matched exactly the number of commandments in the Torah. But actually, this works out perfectly. The first two commandments were promulgated by God, but the remaining 611 came to us through Moses, so the above-cited words of Deut 33:4 could be understood as “Moses commanded us the 611 [the numerical value of the word torah in Hebrew], to be passed on to Jacob’s descendants.”
Incidentally, the mention in Exod 20:15 that the people “trembled and stood at a distance,” has been evoked to explain two different postures of prayer in Judaism. Some Jews today deliberately shake and gyrate when they recite the Amidah (also called the Shemoneh Esreh) while others stand still. Which is proper? Apparently, both are all right, since at Mount Sinai some people “trembled,” while others “stood.”