"The great event in chapter 24 is the climax of the Book of Exodus."413
24:1-8 The remaining verses in this section contain God's directions to Moses personally. He, Aaron, Aaron's two eldest sons, and 70 of the elders of Israel were to ascend the mountain to worship God. God permitted only Moses to approach Him closely, however.
Moses first related the content of God's covenant with Israel orally, and the people submitted to it (v. 3). Then he wrote out God's words to preserve them permanently for the Israelites (v. 4). The altar he built memorialized this place as where God had revealed Himself to His people. The 12 pillars were probably not part of the altar but separate from it. They probably represented the permanent relationship of the 12 tribes with God that God established when He made this covenant.
"In the ceremony to be performed, the altar will represent the glory of the Lord, whilst the pillars will represent the tribes of Israel; the two contrasting parties will stand facing each other."414
The 12 pillars may also have served as memorial standing stones to commemorate the occasion (cf. Gen. 31:45).415The young men (v. 5) were probably assistants to Moses chosen for this special occasion to serve as priests (cf. 19:22, 24).
"In the blood sprinkled on the altar [v. 6], the natural life of the people was given up to God, as a life that had passed through death, to be pervaded by His grace; and then through the sprinkling upon the people [v. 8] it was restored to them again, as a life renewed by the grace of God. In this way the blood not only became a bond of union between Jehovah and His people, but by the blood of the covenant, it became a vital power, holy and divine, uniting Israel and its God; and the sprinkling of the people with this blood was an actual renewal of life, a transposition of Israel into the kingdom of God, in which it was filled with the powers of God's spirit of grace, and sanctified into a kingdom of priests, a holy nation of Jehovah (19:6)."416
"The throwing of half of the blood of the offerings against the altar, which represented the Lord, and half on the people, or that which represented them, signifies a joining together of the two contracting parties (communio), and symbolized the execution of the deed of covenant between them.
"Between one blood-throwing and the other, the content of the covenant was finally and solemnly ratified by Moses' reading from the Book of the Covenant and by the people's expression of consent."417
This ritual constituted the formal ratification of the Mosaic Covenant by which Yahweh adopted Israel as His son (cf. Gen. 15).
"In all such ceremonies the oath of obedience [v. 7] implied the participants' willingness to suffer the fate of the sacrificed animals if the covenant stipulations were violated by those who took the oath."418
"Virtually every sovereign-vassal treaty incorporated a list of deities before whom the solemn oaths of mutual fidelity were sworn. These witnesses' could not, of course, be invoked in the case of the biblical covenants, for there were not gods but Yahweh and no higher powers to whom appeal could be made in the event of covenant violation. The counterpart of this is not lacking, however, for the ceremony of covenant-making described in Exodus 24 clearly includes witnesses' to the transaction. These are in the form of the altar, which represented Yahweh, and the twelve pillars, which represented the twelve tribes. Although there is no explicit word to the effect that these objects were witnesses as well as representations, the use of inanimate objects in that capacity elsewhere certainly allows for that possibility here."419
There is some disagreement among the commentators about the meaning of "the Book of the Covenant"(v. 7). Most take it to mean the "Bill of Rights"that God had just given (20:22-23:33). Some feel it included "the whole corpus of Sinai laws."420Others hold that, ". . . it denotes a short general document, a kind of testimony and memorial to the making of the covenant."421I prefer the view that it refers to the covenant stipulations God had made known to the Israelites at this time including the Decalogue and the "Bill of Rights."This seems most consistent with other references to this book in the text.422
24:9-11 The ratification ceremony concluded with a meal (vv. 9-11), not a picnic lunch but a sacrificial meal (v. 5).
"They ate and drank' describes a covenant meal celebrating the sealing of the covenant described in vv. 3-8."423
We must understand the statement that the leaders of Israel saw God (v. 10) in the light of other passages (33:20-23; Isa. 6:1; John 1:18). Perhaps they only saw His feet or more exactly a representation of part of God in human form (cf. Isa. 6:1; Rev. 4:2, 6). The pavement of clear sapphire contributed to the vision of God as the supra-terrestrial sovereign.
". . . what Moses and his companions experience is a theophany of the Presence of God, not a vision of his person, and what they see, bowed before even that awesome reality, is what could be seen from a position of obeisant prostration, the surface on which his Presence offered itself. . . . The reference in v 10 may therefore be a double one, calling up the deep dark blue of an endless sky and the building materials of legendary divine dwelling-places."424
God in mercy did not consume the sinners before Him. Rather He allowed them to eat in His presence thus symbolizing the fact that He was taking on responsibility for their safety and welfare (cf. Gen. 31:44-46).425
"We have argued that the awkward surface structure of the narrative [in chapters 19-24], which results in the non-linear temporal ordering of events, can be explained when one takes into account the sequence structure of the narrative, particularly the use of the literary device called resumptive repetition. As a result of this literary device we have demonstrated that the narrative contains two different perspectives of the theophany. First, there is the perspective of Yahweh which emphasizes the preparation and execution of the covenant as well as highlighting the holiness of God, which is a key to understanding the relationship that exists between Yahweh and His people. Second, there is the perspective of the people, which is elaborated upon in the two resumptive narratives in 20, 18-21 and 24, 1-8. The first resumptive narrative in 20, 18-21, which elaborates in detail the fear of the people, serves as a preface and introduction to the Decalogue and Covenant Code. In addition, it also acts as a causal link between the fear of the people and their sinful acts below the mountain in Exod 32. The second resumptive narrative in 24, 1-8 elaborates in detail the ratification of the covenant and also leads into the subsequent ascent of Moses to the mountain where he receives the rest of God's regulations."426
