Now, God wasn’t happy that Moses broke the tablets with all of this information on them, but he was willing to give it another go: “And the Lord said unto Moses, Hew thee two tables of stone like unto the first: and I will write upon these tables the words that were in the first tables, which thou brakest.“ (Exodus 34:1)

Here is what God appears to have placed on this second set of tablets, appearing in Exodus 34:10-26

• He said: I hereby make a covenant. Before all your people I will perform marvels, such as have not been performed in all the earth or in any nation; and all the people among whom you live shall see the work of the Lord; for it is an awesome thing that I will do with you. Observe what I command you today. See, I will drive out before you the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.

• Take care not to make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land to which you are going, or it will become a snare among you. You shall tear down their altars, break their pillars, and cut down their sacred poles (for you shall worship no other god, because the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God).

• You shall not make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, for when they prostitute themselves to their gods and sacrifice to their gods, someone among them will invite you, and you will eat of the sacrifice. And you will take wives from among their daughters for your sons, and their daughters who prostitute themselves to their gods will make your sons also prostitute themselves to their gods. You shall not make cast idols.

• You shall keep the festival of unleavened bread. Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread, as I commanded you, at the time appointed in the month of Abib; for in the month of Abib you came out from Egypt. All that first opens the womb is mine, all your male livestock, the firstborn of cow and sheep. The firstborn of a donkey you shall redeem with a lamb, or if you will not redeem it you shall break its neck. All the firstborn of your sons you shall redeem. No one shall appear before me empty-handed.

• Six days you shall work, but on the seventh day you shall rest; even in plowing time and in harvest time you shall rest. You shall observe the festival of weeks, the first fruits of wheat harvest, and the festival of ingathering at the turn of the year. Three times in the year all your males shall appear before the Lord God, the God of Israel. For I will cast out nations before you, and enlarge your borders; no one shall covet your land when you go up to appear before the Lord your God three times in the year.

• You shall not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leaven, and the sacrifice of the festival of the passover shall not be left until the morning. The best of the first fruits of your ground you shall bring to the house of the Lord your God. You shall not boil a kid in its mother's milk.

There are a couple of similarities between this set of instructions and those that appeared earlier — for example, prohibitions against idols and against worshipping any other gods. All in all, though, the list in Exodus 34 is radically different from the one in Exodus 20, commanding positive acts unlike anything mentioned in the first version.

Could this be a mistake? Could this just be a set of general commands with the “real” Ten Commandments having been written on the tablets? No, not likely. The verses that follow the above make it clear that what we have just read are, indeed, the Ten Commandments:  

• The Lord said to Moses: Write these words; in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel. He was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights; he neither ate bread nor drank water. And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant, the ten commandments. (Exod. 34:27-28)

It should be noted that this is the only place where the label “The Ten Commandments” is used in the Bible. The other two listings (Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5) are normally referred to as the Ten Commandments, but the actual text doesn’t describe them as such. Some have tried to argue that the above text is separate from the “Ten Commandments” and what is referenced in verse 28 are the original commandments from Exodus 20, thus eliminating the contradiction.

The fact that the commandments in chapter 20 are never referred to as the “Ten Commandments,” though, renders such a harmonization very weak. There is no particular reason to think that what is being written here aren’t the commandments quoted above except a prior commitment to the text being contradiction-free.

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