*Chapter xvvii, vv. 2 to 8. Here is a command for the elders to write 'all the words of this law,' and it is very clear that whether Moses, or any one else wrote, that it would be utterly impossible for a few men to carry the ark about, if it were filled with as many stones as would be required to contain the whole of the Pentateuch. The plastered stones would only suffice for a stationary people. Dr. Giles observes:-- 'That the Hebrew legislator should deliver to his countrymen two tables of stone on which the principal heads of the law were engraved, is consistent with all the information which history supplies concerning those early times and the practice of other nations. But if we suppose, a book of such length and bulk as the Pentateuch to have been given at the same time to the Israelites, what becomes of the two tables of stone? Where was the necessity that these, also, should be given? It was not that they might be set up as monuments visible to the whole people, and as exponents of the heads of a law, which the written books would develop more fully, for the two tables of stone were never set up at all; they were kept in the ark of the covenant, and there is no mention made of their ever being taken out, not even when the temple of Solomon was built, when they might, with propriety, have been set up in some public place if this had been the use for which they were originally designed. But no such use is hinted at by the writer, nor were they originally given by God for such a purpose, as is manifest from their size, for when Moses came down from the Mount, he held the two tables in his hand, which he could not have done if they were of the usual size of monuments made to be set up in public. 'But the supposition that the two tables of stone were intended to be set up as monuments is refuted by the fact that other stones were actually set by Joshua, according to a command given by Moses, and that on them was inscribed a copy of the law of Moses. The original injunction of Moses is found in the 27th chapter of Deuteronomy, vv. 1-8.