Who wrote the (second set of) ten commandments?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

Within a few verses Exodus 34 names two different writers of the second set of tablets. Exodus 34:1 has YHWH announce, in the first person, 'I will write upon these tables the words that were in the first tables,' and Deuteronomy 10:2, 10:4 confirm divine authorship: 'he wrote on the tables, according to the first writing.' But Exodus 34:27-28 reads: 'the LORD said unto Moses, Write thou these words... And he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten commandments.' In the natural flow of v. 28 the subject of 'he wrote' is Moses — the same Moses who in that verse 'was there with the LORD forty days,' ate no bread, and drank no water.

The apologetic case, advanced by Archer and (more cautiously) by Sarna and Stuart, hinges on the ambiguous antecedent of 'he wrote' in 34:28. They argue the subject reverts to YHWH from 34:27a ('the LORD said'): v. 27 commands Moses to write the surrounding covenant stipulations, while v. 28 reports YHWH writing the Decalogue itself onto the stone — matching 34:1 and Deuteronomy 10:4. Hebrew narrative pronouns are frequently underdetermined, and the strong claim of Deuteronomy 10:4 gives the reading external support, so it is not desperate. It should be noted that not all conservative commentators take this line: John Durham's WBC volume, for instance, reads Moses as the writer in 34:28, which shows that even within the traditional camp the pronoun is not uniformly resolved in YHWH's favor.

The grammar leans toward Moses without being decisive. Both Exodus 34:1 (YHWH writing) and 34:28 (the disputed clause, wayyiktov) are plain qal active forms with explicit subject-object syntax; neither uses a causative hiphil that would mean 'caused to be written.' The absence of a hiphil is not itself proof, however, since Hebrew narrative routinely shifts to an unmarked new subject without any morphological flag — the antecedent question is contextual, not morphological. On the contextual reading, the nearest and most natural subject in v. 28 is Moses, the continuous actor of the clause sequence (he was there; he ate not; he drank not; he wrote). To make YHWH the subject one must reach back over Moses to v. 27a, against the narrative momentum. Sarna's JPS commentary candidly registers the ambiguity rather than resolving it cleanly.

The sharper observation is what 'these words' in 34:27 actually denotes. The covenant content of Exodus 34:11-26 — often called the Ritual or Cultic Decalogue (festivals, firstlings, no leavened bread with blood, the boiling-a-kid prohibition) — differs markedly from the Ethical Decalogue of Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5. Yet 34:28 calls what is written 'the ten commandments' (literally 'the ten words,' aseret ha-devarim). Goethe already flagged this discrepancy in the 18th century (in his 1773 essay distinguishing the Decalogue of Exodus 34 from that of Exodus 20), and Wellhausen made it a standard datum: Exodus 34 likely preserves an older, independent covenant document in which Moses himself inscribed the tablets, later harmonized to the Sinai Decalogue tradition.

The broader redactional picture is consistent. A cluster of texts assert divine authorship of the tablets — Exodus 24:12, 31:18 ('written with the finger of God'), 32:15-16 ('the writing was the writing of God'), and Deuteronomy 10:1-5 — reflecting the Priestly and Deuteronomistic interest in the tablets as a direct divine artifact. Exodus 34:27-28, on the older reading defended by Propp and Dozeman, preserves a Mosaic-authorship notice from a J/E-related stratum that the divine-authorship framing only partially overwrote. The result is a text that, read straight, has both God (34:1) and Moses (34:28) inscribe the same stones. Friedman's source-divided text assigns the divine-authorship notices and the Mosaic-authorship notice to different hands, accounting for the seam.

Where the critical reading lands: partially harmonizable. The pronoun-antecedent reading is grammatically available and is reinforced by Deuteronomy 10:4, so a reader committed to harmony can land on divine authorship throughout; but it strains the syntax of v. 28 and ignores the Ritual-Decalogue problem. Source criticism explains both the ambiguity and the conflicting claims as the seam between an older Mosaic-authorship tradition and the dominant divine-authorship tradition.