Exodus 34:27-28

"And Jehovah said unto Moses, Write thou these words: for after the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with thee and with Israel And he was there with Jehovah forty days and forty nights; he did neither eat bread nor drink water. And he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten commandments."

"Write these words ..." The words which Moses was commanded to write were "these words," the reiteration of God's instructions just repeated. Moses did not write the Ten Commandments on the tables; for God stated specifically in Exodus 34:1 that God Himself would write the same words that had been written on the first tables. Many discerning scholars have pointed out that the subject of the last sentence here is not Moses, but God. As Rawlinson explained:

"It has been argued from this last sentence that Moses wrote the words on the second tablets; and it would be natural so to understand the passage, had nothing else been said on the subject. But in Exodus 34:1, we are told that "God said, I will write upon these tables," and the same is repeated in Deuteronomy 10:2, where it is distinctly declared that "He (God) wrote on the tables according to the first writing." We must therefore regard "he" in this passage as meaning "the Lord," which is quite possible according to Hebrew idiom."[25]

"The ten commandments ..." mentioned at the end of Exodus 34:28 cannot possibly refer to the list of regulations just repeated in Exodus 34:10-26; because, as Clements admitted, "There are not, in fact, even ten of them!"[26] Despite this, however, Clements went ahead and claimed that they were referred to "as ten commandments," thus overlooking the fact that Moses, to say nothing of God, would never have so designated them. What is referred to, of course, is the actual Ten Commandments written on the first tables, which were here said to have been written again on the second tables. Dummelow, Gordon, Keil, Fields, and, in fact, all responsible commentators, except the die-hard critics, are unanimous in the understanding of Exodus 34:28 as an affirmation that God did what He said he would do in Exodus 34:1. How could it be supposed to be otherwise?