Four hundred and thirty years earlier there had been a night. An old man had cut animals in half and laid the bleeding pieces across from each other, the way you sealed a covenant in that world: the two parties walked together between the pieces and said, without words — so may it befall me if I break my word. But when it grew dark, Abraham fell asleep and did not walk through. God went alone. A smoking oven and a flaming torch passed between the carcasses, one-sided, irrevocable. Only God bound Himself. May I be torn apart, said the fire, if I ever let this people go. And that same night He had already told Abraham what was coming: centuries of slavery, a land that was not theirs, his descendants in chains. He knew it already, then. And He signed anyway — with His own life as collateral.
And for centuries He listened to it. The crack of the whips, the boys in the Nile, the groaning that rose from the clay ovens. I have seen the misery of My people, He said, I have heard their cry, I know their sorrows. And then He broke through the wall: ten plagues, a sea torn open, and a desert into which He led them before Him like a bridegroom bringing his bride home. At the mountain He came down — in fire, in smoke, in thunder that shook the ground — and it was not a threat but a homecoming. At last, after four hundred and thirty years, He was going to let Himself be seen; He looked forward to it. Heaven bent down over a band of runaway slaves, because He could no longer bear to stay at a distance.
But the bride shrank back. The mountain burned, and she trembled, and cried out to Moses: you speak with us, and we will listen — but do not let God speak to us, or we will die. You go to Him. This God is too holy, too great, too fatally near. And so they stayed standing, at a safe distance, while the Bridegroom waited above them with open arms. And yet He married them. Moses read out the covenant, and with one voice the people swore: everything YHWH has spoken, we will do. Blood was sprinkled, over the altar and over the people, the blood of the covenant, and the elders ate and drank before the face of God the way you eat and drink at a wedding feast. Signed, in blood. And then Moses climbed the mountain to fetch the marriage document: two tablets of stone, written by the finger of God.
For forty days he stayed away. Forty days the bride camped under a mountain that kept on smoking, and somewhere in those days she decided her Bridegroom up there must surely have been consumed by His own fire. And while the summit still smoldered, she took the gold out of her ears — the bridal gold He had given her to carry out of Egypt — and had an image cast from it. Not a foreign god; that is precisely the sting of it. An image of Him, of YHWH: a god you could actually see and hold and carry along, a god who would never fall silent for forty days in a cloud. She even called it a feast to YHWH. And she danced. Under the wedding canopy, with the covenant blood still wet on her hands, the bride chose a doll of gold over the living God who stood with open arms on the mountain — a doll that would never be too holy, never too great, and never say no.
And now He stands there. Alone. On His own wedding day, traded in for a lump of melted-down jewelry. Equated with a calf. The God who had gone alone like a fiery furnace between the pieces, who for centuries had carried the groaning, who had come down because He finally wanted to let Himself be known — stands on the mountain with the covenant in His hand and the bride dancing around a cast image at His feet. Talk about desecration — and about a God deeply worthy of pity.
And then He makes the offer that sounds mild at first hearing and breaks the heart at the second. Go on, He says to Moses. Leave from here, you and the people you brought up out of Egypt — no longer My people, but your people. Go to the land I swore by oath to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, for I have sworn it, after all. I will send an angel before you and drive out the enemies Myself; no Canaanite will place the slightest obstacle in your path. Here, the whole promised land, flowing with milk and honey, on a silver platter. Except — and now falls the sentence that lands harder than any plague ever did — I Myself will not go with you, for you are a stiff-necked people, and I might consume you on the way. Take the house, says the Bridegroom, take the dowry, take everything I have promised; but in that same house I will no longer live. He keeps His word — not a letter of the covenant He sealed in blood and fire does He take back — but He cannot bring Himself to go on living beside her. And even in that "I might consume you" there is still care: He keeps His distance for her sake, so that His holiness and her stubbornness need not share one desert with deaths as the result.
And the offer breaks the bride. When they heard these hard words, they went into mourning, and no one put on an ornament anymore. The same hands that had taken off their gold to cast a doll from it now take off everything that glitters, in grief. The people that had gathered its earrings to make a god it could see discovers here that it does not want the golden things, but Him — that a land of milk and honey without the Bridegroom is not a home but a grave with a view.
And Moses does something unexpected. He pitches a tent, outside the camp, far from the camp that had defiled itself, and calls it the tent of meeting. Whoever sought YHWH had to leave the city, leave the unclean behind, go out into the desert — and there, outside, the pillar of cloud came down at the entrance, and God spoke with Moses. And here stands a sentence that holds you fast: face to face, as a man speaks with his friend. Not with thunder this time, not with fire on the mountaintop, but the way two friends talk at the end of a day. The God who had dismantled an entire empire and whose wrath could consume a nation bent down to a conversation between man and man.
And that very friend, who stood closer to God than any human before him, will not settle for the dowry. Moses sees through it. He sees that behind this generous offer hides a wounded heart, and he refuses to let the Bridegroom get away with a house instead of Himself. Almost boldly he seizes the moment. You charge me to lead this people, he says, but You have not let me know whom You are sending with me. And then, with everything at stake, the sentence with which he pushes the whole dowry back across the table: if Your face does not go with us, do not carry us up from here. He does not want the land without the Presence; he does not want the victory without the Victor; he would rather have the desert with Him than the milk and honey without Him. For, he says, how else will it ever be known that I and Your people have found favor in Your eyes, except by this, that You Yourself go with us? Only in this way are we distinguished from every other people on the face of the earth. There falls, once more, the incomparability of the people, and Moses sees its source with piercing clarity: not anything in Israel, but the Presence of God in its midst. Take that away, and Israel is just another tribe like all the rest, with a land and an army and nothing more.
But underneath his refusal lies something the bride herself had not managed. Moses chooses the Bridegroom over everything the Bridegroom can give. He has understood what a human being finds so hard to believe: that the house is nothing without the Man, that the gift is nothing without the Giver. A land is only a land; a land where He lives with you is a home. That is why he pushes the milk and honey back — not out of piety, but because he has tasted again that God Himself is life, the spring from which everything wells up, and that every gift from His hand is no more than a droplet splashed from that spring. Whoever has the spring has everything. Whoever has everything without the spring stays thirsty.
And then, as if the hunger has only grown larger through all this pleading, Moses asks the boldest question in the whole Torah. He, who spoke with God face to face as with a friend, who had come closer than any human before him, asks for more: show me, please, Your glory. Let me see You — not Your back in the cloud, not Your voice in the tent, but You, Your full splendor, Your face. It is the deepest longing a human being can know, and it does not arise when you stand far from God but precisely when you have drawn closest to Him. The more you taste of Him, the sharper the hunger to see Him as He is.
And God refused the half, and gave the other half, and the other half was more than a human being can bear. I will let all My goodness pass before you, He said, and I will proclaim the Name YHWH before you — but My face you cannot see, for no one can see Me and live. And He showed him a place on the rock. There is a cleft, He said; stand in it. When My glory passes by, I will set you in the cleft and cover you with My hand until I have passed by; then I will take My hand away, and you will see My back — but My face will not be seen.
And so Moses stayed behind, in a cleft of rock, waiting for a God who would pass by: with the promise of His goodness, of His Name, of a glimpse of His back — but not of His face. It is the posture of all faith before the last day: near enough to hear His goodness, too far to see His face; enough to live on, too little to be satisfied. The longing Moses spoke in that cleft would keep echoing through Scripture for centuries — in every psalm that thirsts for God, in every soul that seeks His face — until the day a Man would look His friends in the eye and say: whoever has seen Me has seen the Father. But that lies ahead. Here, in the cleft, with God's hand still over him, Moses waits for the Name. And the Name comes.
ExpertFace and Back
One Hebrew word carries this whole chapter: panim, "face" — which means at once countenance, presence, and nearness. And it stands in Exodus 33 in a puzzling tension. In verse 11 God speaks with Moses "face to face (panim el panim), as a man speaks with his friend"; nine verses later that same God says: "My face (panai) you cannot see, for no one can see Me and live" (33:20). The same chapter confirms both the deepest nearness and the utter unapproachability. That is no contradiction but the core of who God is: closer than a friend, and at the same time so holy that His unveiled countenance would consume a human being. "My back (achor) you will see" — a human being may trace where God has been, follow the tracks of His goodness, without being able to look Him straight in the face. To believe is, until the last day, to recognize God by His back.
ExcursusThe Longing to See Him
"Show me Your glory" is not Moses' last word on seeing God; it is the first of a long, yearning conversation that runs through all of Scripture. The psalms pick it up: "my soul thirsts for God, for the living God — when shall I come and appear before God's face?"; "Your face, Lord, I seek." The longing that began in the cleft becomes the fundamental longing of every believing heart: not God's gifts, but God's face.
And it receives an answer, in stages. What was refused to Moses — the face — is touched in the New Testament: "no one has ever seen God; the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has made Him known." The invisible One receives a face in a man of flesh and blood. And the promise reaches further still, to the very last page, where it is written of the redeemed: "they will see His face." The cleft in the rock is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of a longing that will only be satisfied at the sea of glass.
HeartThe Gifts or the Giver
There is a question hidden in Exodus 33 that is sharper than it looks, and it is aimed at you. God offered Israel everything it had asked for — the land, the enemies defeated, milk and honey — except one thing: Himself. And the people went into mourning. They did not want the inheritance without the Father.
The question is whether we feel that too. For it is entirely possible to seek God for His gifts — His blessing, His protection, His help with our plans — and to keep Him Himself at a distance meanwhile. Then God has become a means, a supplier of good things, and not the end. Moses shows what a heart looks like that has been healed of that confusion: rather the desert with Him than the promised land without Him. Rather the cleft and a glimpse of His back than all the milk and honey in the world without His nearness. The deepest question of faith is not "what can God do for me?" but "do I want Him?" — and whoever honestly notices that the answer is not yet automatically yes may pray exactly what Moses prayed: show me Your glory, until I want You for Yourself.
ExcursusA Wounded God Who Does Not Change?
This book speaks freely of a moved God — a wounded Bridegroom, a Father whose heart turns over within Him. Does that square with the confession that God is unchangeable? Yes — and precisely there lies its strength.
"Unchangeable" does not mean unmoved, but steadfast: God does not waver in His being, His character, and His promises, and He needs creation for nothing. And when the church through the centuries confessed that God is "without passions," it did not mean "without feeling," but only that God, unlike us, is not overtaken or held hostage by feelings from outside. What He feels does not come over Him; it wells up out of His own, unchanging Heart.
And that Heart truly feels. When it "grieved God to His heart" that He had made humanity (Genesis 6:6), that was real sorrow — and at the same time no surprise: He knew before all time that this pain would come, and more besides, and He created anyway. Like parents who, knowing full well that troubles will come, still long for a child out of love: love looks past the expected difficulties toward the goal. And such love keeps, the whole way through, feeling personally involved — moved at the rebellion ("forty years I loathed that generation," Psalm 95), distressed in the distress ("in all their distress He was distressed," Isaiah 63:9), and genuinely glad in the joy ("He will exult over you, He will be silent in His love," Zephaniah 3:17).
That is the heart of it: only a love that does not give way can truly be grieved; an indifferent love feels nothing. The "wounded Bridegroom" is thus no God who is diminished by betrayal, but a God whose devotion is so unshakable that unfaithfulness truly matters. The Old Testament scholar H. G. L. Peels summed it up tersely: God is "no abstraction, no sum of attributes; He is a Thou" — a living Counterpart, whose love is holy love. And the deepest proof is the cross, where the Son truly took the wound upon Himself: no God who was overwhelmed by the world, but a God who voluntarily entered the suffering in order to save.
And therefore we may, when we see how God is grieved, feel with Him — not with a pity that condescends to a victim, for God is no victim, but with the compassion of a child who cannot stay cold at the grief of his Father. Whoever cannot do this lacks no insight into God's greatness, but empathy.
Where this book, then, calls God "wounded" or "moved," it never means a changeable or needy God, but the opposite: the steadfastness of a love so real that it feels — and so great that it carries.
*A note on the source text. The covenant between the pieces and the foretold slavery — Genesis 15:12-17 (with 15:13). The terror at the mountain and "you speak with us" — Exodus 19–20 (20:18-19); the covenant sealing with blood and meal — Exodus 24:3-11; the golden calf and "a feast to YHWH" — Exodus 32. Then Exodus 33: the refusal "I will not go up in your midst" — 33:1-5; the tent of meeting and "face to face" — 33:7-11; "if Your face does not go" and being distinguished from the nations — 33:15-16; "show me Your glory" — 33:18; the cleft, the hand, and the back — 33:20-23. The four hundred and thirty years, following Exodus 12:40 / the promise to Abraham. In the excursus on God's being moved: Genesis 6:6; Psalm 95:10; Isaiah 63:9; Zephaniah 3:17; cf. 2 Peter 3:9; Romans 2:4; and H. G. L. Peels, Wie is als Gij? (2007). The divine Name rendered as YHWH.*
Four hundred and thirty years earlier there had been a night. An old man had cut animals in half and laid the bleeding pieces across from each other, the way you sealed a covenant in that world: the two parties walked together between the pieces and said, without words — so may it befall me if I break my word. But when it grew dark, Abraham fell asleep and did not walk through. God went alone. A smoking oven and a flaming torch passed between the carcasses, one-sided, irrevocable. Only God bound Himself. May I be torn apart, said the fire, if I ever let this people go. And that same night He had already told Abraham what was coming: centuries of slavery, a land that was not theirs, his descendants in chains. He knew it already, then. And He signed anyway — with His own life as collateral.
And for centuries He listened to it. The crack of the whips, the boys in the Nile, the groaning that rose from the clay ovens. I have seen the misery of My people, He said, I have heard their cry, I know their sorrows. And then He broke through the wall: ten plagues, a sea torn open, and a desert into which He led them before Him like a bridegroom bringing his bride home. At the mountain He came down — in fire, in smoke, in thunder that shook the ground — and it was not a threat but a homecoming. At last, after four hundred and thirty years, He was going to let Himself be seen; He looked forward to it. Heaven bent down over a band of runaway slaves, because He could no longer bear to stay at a distance.
But the bride shrank back. The mountain burned, and she trembled, and cried out to Moses: you speak with us, and we will listen — but do not let God speak to us, or we will die. You go to Him. This God is too holy, too great, too fatally near. And so they stayed standing, at a safe distance, while the Bridegroom waited above them with open arms. And yet He married them. Moses read out the covenant, and with one voice the people swore: everything YHWH has spoken, we will do. Blood was sprinkled, over the altar and over the people, the blood of the covenant, and the elders ate and drank before the face of God the way you eat and drink at a wedding feast. Signed, in blood. And then Moses climbed the mountain to fetch the marriage document: two tablets of stone, written by the finger of God.
For forty days he stayed away. Forty days the bride camped under a mountain that kept on smoking, and somewhere in those days she decided her Bridegroom up there must surely have been consumed by His own fire. And while the summit still smoldered, she took the gold out of her ears — the bridal gold He had given her to carry out of Egypt — and had an image cast from it. Not a foreign god; that is precisely the sting of it. An image of Him, of YHWH: a god you could actually see and hold and carry along, a god who would never fall silent for forty days in a cloud. She even called it a feast to YHWH. And she danced. Under the wedding canopy, with the covenant blood still wet on her hands, the bride chose a doll of gold over the living God who stood with open arms on the mountain — a doll that would never be too holy, never too great, and never say no.
And now He stands there. Alone. On His own wedding day, traded in for a lump of melted-down jewelry. Equated with a calf. The God who had gone alone like a fiery furnace between the pieces, who for centuries had carried the groaning, who had come down because He finally wanted to let Himself be known — stands on the mountain with the covenant in His hand and the bride dancing around a cast image at His feet. Talk about desecration — and about a God deeply worthy of pity.
And then He makes the offer that sounds mild at first hearing and breaks the heart at the second. Go on, He says to Moses. Leave from here, you and the people you brought up out of Egypt — no longer My people, but your people. Go to the land I swore by oath to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, for I have sworn it, after all. I will send an angel before you and drive out the enemies Myself; no Canaanite will place the slightest obstacle in your path. Here, the whole promised land, flowing with milk and honey, on a silver platter. Except — and now falls the sentence that lands harder than any plague ever did — I Myself will not go with you, for you are a stiff-necked people, and I might consume you on the way. Take the house, says the Bridegroom, take the dowry, take everything I have promised; but in that same house I will no longer live. He keeps His word — not a letter of the covenant He sealed in blood and fire does He take back — but He cannot bring Himself to go on living beside her. And even in that "I might consume you" there is still care: He keeps His distance for her sake, so that His holiness and her stubbornness need not share one desert with deaths as the result.
And the offer breaks the bride. When they heard these hard words, they went into mourning, and no one put on an ornament anymore. The same hands that had taken off their gold to cast a doll from it now take off everything that glitters, in grief. The people that had gathered its earrings to make a god it could see discovers here that it does not want the golden things, but Him — that a land of milk and honey without the Bridegroom is not a home but a grave with a view.
And Moses does something unexpected. He pitches a tent, outside the camp, far from the camp that had defiled itself, and calls it the tent of meeting. Whoever sought YHWH had to leave the city, leave the unclean behind, go out into the desert — and there, outside, the pillar of cloud came down at the entrance, and God spoke with Moses. And here stands a sentence that holds you fast: face to face, as a man speaks with his friend. Not with thunder this time, not with fire on the mountaintop, but the way two friends talk at the end of a day. The God who had dismantled an entire empire and whose wrath could consume a nation bent down to a conversation between man and man.
And that very friend, who stood closer to God than any human before him, will not settle for the dowry. Moses sees through it. He sees that behind this generous offer hides a wounded heart, and he refuses to let the Bridegroom get away with a house instead of Himself. Almost boldly he seizes the moment. You charge me to lead this people, he says, but You have not let me know whom You are sending with me. And then, with everything at stake, the sentence with which he pushes the whole dowry back across the table: if Your face does not go with us, do not carry us up from here. He does not want the land without the Presence; he does not want the victory without the Victor; he would rather have the desert with Him than the milk and honey without Him. For, he says, how else will it ever be known that I and Your people have found favor in Your eyes, except by this, that You Yourself go with us? Only in this way are we distinguished from every other people on the face of the earth. There falls, once more, the incomparability of the people, and Moses sees its source with piercing clarity: not anything in Israel, but the Presence of God in its midst. Take that away, and Israel is just another tribe like all the rest, with a land and an army and nothing more.
But underneath his refusal lies something the bride herself had not managed. Moses chooses the Bridegroom over everything the Bridegroom can give. He has understood what a human being finds so hard to believe: that the house is nothing without the Man, that the gift is nothing without the Giver. A land is only a land; a land where He lives with you is a home. That is why he pushes the milk and honey back — not out of piety, but because he has tasted again that God Himself is life, the spring from which everything wells up, and that every gift from His hand is no more than a droplet splashed from that spring. Whoever has the spring has everything. Whoever has everything without the spring stays thirsty.
And then, as if the hunger has only grown larger through all this pleading, Moses asks the boldest question in the whole Torah. He, who spoke with God face to face as with a friend, who had come closer than any human before him, asks for more: show me, please, Your glory. Let me see You — not Your back in the cloud, not Your voice in the tent, but You, Your full splendor, Your face. It is the deepest longing a human being can know, and it does not arise when you stand far from God but precisely when you have drawn closest to Him. The more you taste of Him, the sharper the hunger to see Him as He is.
And God refused the half, and gave the other half, and the other half was more than a human being can bear. I will let all My goodness pass before you, He said, and I will proclaim the Name YHWH before you — but My face you cannot see, for no one can see Me and live. And He showed him a place on the rock. There is a cleft, He said; stand in it. When My glory passes by, I will set you in the cleft and cover you with My hand until I have passed by; then I will take My hand away, and you will see My back — but My face will not be seen.
And so Moses stayed behind, in a cleft of rock, waiting for a God who would pass by: with the promise of His goodness, of His Name, of a glimpse of His back — but not of His face. It is the posture of all faith before the last day: near enough to hear His goodness, too far to see His face; enough to live on, too little to be satisfied. The longing Moses spoke in that cleft would keep echoing through Scripture for centuries — in every psalm that thirsts for God, in every soul that seeks His face — until the day a Man would look His friends in the eye and say: whoever has seen Me has seen the Father. But that lies ahead. Here, in the cleft, with God's hand still over him, Moses waits for the Name. And the Name comes.
ExpertFace and Back
One Hebrew word carries this whole chapter: panim, "face" — which means at once countenance, presence, and nearness. And it stands in Exodus 33 in a puzzling tension. In verse 11 God speaks with Moses "face to face (panim el panim), as a man speaks with his friend"; nine verses later that same God says: "My face (panai) you cannot see, for no one can see Me and live" (33:20). The same chapter confirms both the deepest nearness and the utter unapproachability. That is no contradiction but the core of who God is: closer than a friend, and at the same time so holy that His unveiled countenance would consume a human being. "My back (achor) you will see" — a human being may trace where God has been, follow the tracks of His goodness, without being able to look Him straight in the face. To believe is, until the last day, to recognize God by His back.
ExcursusThe Longing to See Him
"Show me Your glory" is not Moses' last word on seeing God; it is the first of a long, yearning conversation that runs through all of Scripture. The psalms pick it up: "my soul thirsts for God, for the living God — when shall I come and appear before God's face?"; "Your face, Lord, I seek." The longing that began in the cleft becomes the fundamental longing of every believing heart: not God's gifts, but God's face.
And it receives an answer, in stages. What was refused to Moses — the face — is touched in the New Testament: "no one has ever seen God; the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has made Him known." The invisible One receives a face in a man of flesh and blood. And the promise reaches further still, to the very last page, where it is written of the redeemed: "they will see His face." The cleft in the rock is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of a longing that will only be satisfied at the sea of glass.
HeartThe Gifts or the Giver
There is a question hidden in Exodus 33 that is sharper than it looks, and it is aimed at you. God offered Israel everything it had asked for — the land, the enemies defeated, milk and honey — except one thing: Himself. And the people went into mourning. They did not want the inheritance without the Father.
The question is whether we feel that too. For it is entirely possible to seek God for His gifts — His blessing, His protection, His help with our plans — and to keep Him Himself at a distance meanwhile. Then God has become a means, a supplier of good things, and not the end. Moses shows what a heart looks like that has been healed of that confusion: rather the desert with Him than the promised land without Him. Rather the cleft and a glimpse of His back than all the milk and honey in the world without His nearness. The deepest question of faith is not "what can God do for me?" but "do I want Him?" — and whoever honestly notices that the answer is not yet automatically yes may pray exactly what Moses prayed: show me Your glory, until I want You for Yourself.
ExcursusA Wounded God Who Does Not Change?
This book speaks freely of a moved God — a wounded Bridegroom, a Father whose heart turns over within Him. Does that square with the confession that God is unchangeable? Yes — and precisely there lies its strength.
"Unchangeable" does not mean unmoved, but steadfast: God does not waver in His being, His character, and His promises, and He needs creation for nothing. And when the church through the centuries confessed that God is "without passions," it did not mean "without feeling," but only that God, unlike us, is not overtaken or held hostage by feelings from outside. What He feels does not come over Him; it wells up out of His own, unchanging Heart.
And that Heart truly feels. When it "grieved God to His heart" that He had made humanity (Genesis 6:6), that was real sorrow — and at the same time no surprise: He knew before all time that this pain would come, and more besides, and He created anyway. Like parents who, knowing full well that troubles will come, still long for a child out of love: love looks past the expected difficulties toward the goal. And such love keeps, the whole way through, feeling personally involved — moved at the rebellion ("forty years I loathed that generation," Psalm 95), distressed in the distress ("in all their distress He was distressed," Isaiah 63:9), and genuinely glad in the joy ("He will exult over you, He will be silent in His love," Zephaniah 3:17).
That is the heart of it: only a love that does not give way can truly be grieved; an indifferent love feels nothing. The "wounded Bridegroom" is thus no God who is diminished by betrayal, but a God whose devotion is so unshakable that unfaithfulness truly matters. The Old Testament scholar H. G. L. Peels summed it up tersely: God is "no abstraction, no sum of attributes; He is a Thou" — a living Counterpart, whose love is holy love. And the deepest proof is the cross, where the Son truly took the wound upon Himself: no God who was overwhelmed by the world, but a God who voluntarily entered the suffering in order to save.
And therefore we may, when we see how God is grieved, feel with Him — not with a pity that condescends to a victim, for God is no victim, but with the compassion of a child who cannot stay cold at the grief of his Father. Whoever cannot do this lacks no insight into God's greatness, but empathy.
Where this book, then, calls God "wounded" or "moved," it never means a changeable or needy God, but the opposite: the steadfastness of a love so real that it feels — and so great that it carries.
*A note on the source text. The covenant between the pieces and the foretold slavery — Genesis 15:12-17 (with 15:13). The terror at the mountain and "you speak with us" — Exodus 19–20 (20:18-19); the covenant sealing with blood and meal — Exodus 24:3-11; the golden calf and "a feast to YHWH" — Exodus 32. Then Exodus 33: the refusal "I will not go up in your midst" — 33:1-5; the tent of meeting and "face to face" — 33:7-11; "if Your face does not go" and being distinguished from the nations — 33:15-16; "show me Your glory" — 33:18; the cleft, the hand, and the back — 33:20-23. The four hundred and thirty years, following Exodus 12:40 / the promise to Abraham. In the excursus on God's being moved: Genesis 6:6; Psalm 95:10; Isaiah 63:9; Zephaniah 3:17; cf. 2 Peter 3:9; Romans 2:4; and H. G. L. Peels, Wie is als Gij? (2007). The divine Name rendered as YHWH.*