The Form and Function of the Luchot

Scant information is provided by the Torah on the form that the Luchot, generally translated as the “tablets of the law,” took. Basic questions are unanswered. What material was used to fashion the Luchot? What do we know about their shape? How many commandments were engraved on each tablet? These questions have been entertained throughout the ages by theologians, scholars, and artists. The desire to picture the Luchot goes beyond general curiosity, as the form of an object may give us insight into its function.

Before considering the various opinions relating to the form of the Luchot, it is critical that we acknowledge the degree to which assumptions have been impacted by external cultural influences. The widely held assumption that the Luchot were a set of square or rectangular tablets has traditionally been envisioned along two slightly different lines: some assume four right angles, as in Michelangelo’s Moses and the most recent logo of the Israeli rabbinate;¹ others imagine rounded tops with two right angles at the bottom, as in Rembrandt’s paintings, the art of Marc Chagall, and the Bnei Akiva logo. The problem is that neither picture resonates well with the limited biblical data, nor is either well supported by the rabbinic literature discussed below. In this essay I present an alternative paradigm for understanding the form of the Luchot which resolves many of the conundrums posed both by the biblical text and by statements found in rabbinic literature.

The Opinion of Rav Hanina

JT Shekalim 6:1 records the tradition that the Ark of the Covenant contained four Luchot: two broken tablets and two replacement tablets. The number of commandments engraved on each is disputed. The opinion of Rav Hanina, that each Luchot contained five commandments, has gained general acceptance in popular culture largely on account of artistic masters, but is better explained by the two subsets understood to lie beneath the Ten Commandments — man’s relationship with God, and man’s relationship with his fellow man.² The Sages adduce this two-part division from the parallel content of the two sets: for example, the sixth commandment, proscribing murder, appears opposite the first commandment’s affirmation of God’s ongoing involvement in history, since murder is a sin against both man and the God who gives him life. The dual structure is further evidenced by a string of connecting letter vavs linking the second set of five commandments in the version of the Decalogue in Deuteronomy.³ Ibn Ezra offers additional substantiation, noting that the commandment to honor one’s parents, closing the first set, derives from God’s involvement in the creation of man, just as the sin of coveting, closing the second set, ultimately stems from a lack of respect for humanity apparent in the act of murder.

The Opinions of the Rabbis and Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai

JT Shekalim 6:1 presents dissenting opinions, with the anonymous Rabbis maintaining that each Luchot featured all ten commandments — raising the question of why there would have been a need for two identical sets. Stephen Gabriel Rosenberg suggests we consider the 18th-century BCE Code of Hammurabi, whose 282 laws were engraved on both the front and back of a single stela;⁴ since the Torah records that the Luchot were written on both their sides; on the one side and on the other were they written (Ex. 32:15), Rosenberg posits that “Luchot” refers to the two faces of a single stone. R. Shimon bar Yochai’s assertion that each Luchot contained twenty commandments can work according to this approach as well.

Meshullam Margaliot addresses the question of why there might have been a need for two identical sets by citing the ancient Near Eastern practice of placing copies of treaties between parties of unequal status in the temple of the vassal — as with the two surviving copies of the Treaty of Kadesh between Ramses II and Hattusili III.⁵ Margaliot posits that the two sets of Luchot kept in the Holy of Holies represent the two parties to the agreement, God and Israel — a reading consistent with the idea that the Luchot functioned as a treaty reflecting the ethical-moral parameters of that relationship.

The Opinion of Rav Simai

The Jerusalem Talmud includes a fourth opinion: Rav Simai maintains that each Luchot featured a total of forty commandments, summed up with the word tatruga, Greek for quadrangle⁶ — implying that all four sides of the Luchot featured all ten commandments, an altogether different picture from the one commonly depicted in popular iconography. While historically this approach did not gain the most traction, it has the capacity to resolve both the biblical ambiguities and the enigmatic rabbinic data.

Cylinder Seals

Several years ago, David Peter published an essay on the Luchot whose original suggestion has not received the scholarly attention it deserves.⁷ Peter cites the Midrash that the Luchot were made of sapphire⁸ and uses this as a point of departure for discussing ancient Near Eastern royal cylinder seals, often fashioned from precious stones.⁹ He suggests that the Luchot were not flat tablets but spherically shaped cylinder seals — objects which, when rolled onto a surface, left an impression attesting to the identity of the seal-bearer and the authenticity of the message, their engraved text carved in reverse so that when rolled it would read correctly.

Unlike contemporary Near Eastern cylinder seals, which featured mythological scenes to establish a text’s authority, the Luchot predicate God’s relationship with Israel on morality, opening with words of formal introduction — I am the Lord your God who took you out of Egypt (Ex. 20:2) — while categorically prohibiting any depiction of God, perhaps preempting the expectation that a royal seal feature iconographic images.

Peter cites Exodus 32:15’s description of the Luchot as readable “on the one side and on the other” as meaning that they could be read continuously, from all sides,¹⁰ and notes that the Sumerian word for “finger” — the Luchot being written with the finger of God (Ex. 31:11) — also connotes the stylus used for making impressions on a clay tablet.¹¹ He finds support in the oral tradition: BT Bava Batra 14a states that the Luchot were six handbreadths tall, six wide, and three deep, but the parallel Jerusalem Talmud gives a width of three handbreadths, a discrepancy Tosafot (to BT Menahot 99a) reinterprets along cylindrical lines given the known dimensions of the Ark.¹²

Understanding the Luchot as cylindrical also sheds light on Rav Hisda’s statement in BT Shabbat 70a that their words were legible in reverse, and on the Talmud’s otherwise puzzling word nevuv, “hollow,” used to illustrate this — a word that elsewhere in the Torah appears only in connection with the hollow copper altar,¹³ and once more, in Jeremiah 52:21, describing Solomon’s hollow copper pillars. Most strikingly, Peter points to an otherwise enigmatic, uncontested tradition in the Babylonian Talmud: alongside the two sets of Luchot in the Ark of the Covenant were a pair of silver rods, mentioned nowhere in the Torah and never satisfactorily explained by the classical commentators.¹⁴ Rods are an integral accessory to cylinder seals — an ancient Assyrian cylinder seal with a copper rod inserted in its central cavity offers an outstanding practical model for how such seals were rolled.¹⁵

A Midrash on Song of Songs 8:6 — Let me be a seal upon your heart, like the seal upon your hand — likewise clarifies that this seal “was engraved, like the writing upon the Luchot,”¹⁶ preserving an authentic tradition that unequivocally understood the Luchot as a set of seals, even if this homily does not prove that the plain sense of the verse itself references them.

The Broader Ramifications

Positing a cylindrical form suggests a distinct perspective on the purpose of the Luchot. Under the standard approach, the Luchot are a law code on a microcosmic scale, permanently placed in the Ark as a kind of time capsule or relic; under the covenant/treaty approach, they bear testimony to the agreement between God and Israel. The cylinder-seal model is more theologically consequential still: the primary function of a seal is to attest to the identity and authority of its bearer, and once rolled onto a document it became an official, binding signature.¹⁷ The Luchot were, so to speak, God’s official signature — and the transfer of God’s seal to Moses signifies the transfer of authority, which gets at the very heart of their name, Luchot HaBrit, the Tablets of the Covenant. As in the case of Pharaoh entrusting Joseph with the royal seal, the presentation of the Luchot to Moses represents a fundamental transfer of authority: with their transmission at Sinai, legal jurisdiction over the adjudication of Torah law passed formally from the heavenly domain to the realm of the Jewish people.¹⁸

Perhaps we ought to relinquish our preconceived notions and adjust our mental image of Moses and the Tablets of the Law, from one based on the vision of Michelangelo and Rembrandt, and replace it with a more authentically Jewish icon. Pondering the scene afresh in our mind’s eye conjures images of a sefer Torah.