Did God or Moses write the Ten Commandments on the second tables?

God wrote the ten commandments on the tables, as he had said he would. Moses wrote down a different set of ‘words’. In Exodus 34:10-26 God renews the covenant after the golden calf and sets out its terms: no covenant with the peoples of Canaan, no idols, the feasts, the firstborn, the firstfruits. Then he says, “Write thou these words: for after the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with thee and with Israel” (34:27). Moses had done the same with the earlier laws, writing them in “the book of the covenant” (24:4, 7). That was Moses’ writing.

Verse 28 turns to the tables of stone. The Hebrew says only ‘and he wrote’ (wayyikhtov), without naming the writer, as Hebrew narrative sometimes does when the reader is expected to know who is meant. The chapter has already told us: “I will write upon these tables the words that were in the first tables” (34:1). Deuteronomy, telling the same event in Moses’ own voice, is clearer. There Moses speaks of himself as ‘I’: “I made an ark of shittim wood, and hewed two tables of stone”, and went up the mountain. But the writing is done by ‘he’, the Lord who had said “I will write on the tables”: “he wrote on the tables, according to the first writing, the ten commandments”, and “the Lord gave them unto me” (Deuteronomy 10:2-4). The first tables had been “written with the finger of God” (Exodus 31:18), and the second were to be “like unto the first” (34:1). Keil and Delitzsch and Gill both take the Lord as the writer in Exodus 34:28.

Jewish interpreters were already divided. The medieval commentators Rashbam, Ibn Ezra and Nachmanides took God as the one who wrote in Exodus 34:28, while the midrash Exodus Rabbah has Moses write the second tables. Many modern scholars read the grammar of verse 28 as pointing to Moses, and some critical scholars think it once referred to the laws of 34:11-26. As the text stands, verse 1 and Deuteronomy 10:4 name God as the writer.