It was at the foot of Mount Sinai that Moses came before the people of Israel with God's proffer to them of a covenant, whereby they should bear his name and be known as his people. "And he took the book of the covenant, and read in the audience of the people: and they said, All that the Lord hath spoken will we do, and be obedient."[262] Then it was that Moses took of substitute blood and divided it into two portions, one half to be sprinkled on the altar God-ward, and the other half to be sprinkled on the people; and Moses said: "Behold the blood of the covenant, which the Lord hath made with you concerning all these words"--or, as the margin of the Revised Version has it, "upon all these conditions."[263] [262] Exod. 24 : 7. [263] Exod. 24 : 8. Moreover, we are told, in the Epistle to the Hebrews,[264] that Moses sprinkled the blood upon the record, or book, of the covenant, as well as upon the people. It was after this--after the breach and the renewal of the covenant between Israel and God--that the stone tablets on which the covenant itself had a permanent record were encased in a casket, or an "ark,"[265] which was thenceforward guarded sacredly as containing the charter of Israel's nationality, the witness, the evidence, the testimony, of the loving covenant between God and his people. [264] Heb. 9 : 19. [265] Exod. 40 : 20. But you may ask, Did not the tables of stone bear a record of specific commandments, rather than of articles of a covenant? And are not the words there recorded specifically called in the Bible the "Ten Commandments"? Look for yourselves, and see. It is true that our English Bible speaks of the Ten Commandments recorded on these tables of stone; but the word here translated "commandments" is more literally to be rendered "words,"[266] as indeed it is given in the margin of the Revised Version; and it is applicable to any declaration, injunction, or charge, made by one to another. It is by no means to be understood as simply an arbitrary mandate from an absolute sovereign to his subjects. Looking at the Ten Commandments as a set of moral laws covering man's duties to God and to his fellows, they seem strangely defective, when we find among them no command to pray to or to praise God, nor any command to give sympathy or assistance to man. But when we look at them as clauses of a loving covenant, indicating the scope and limits of relations within which a child of God's duties God-ward and man-ward are to be exercised, we find that they are far-reaching and all-inclusive. Looking at them as the tables of the covenant between God and his people in the light of Oriental views of covenanting, we can see a great deal more in the words on those tables than when we look at them as the tables of the commandments,--in the light of our Western ideas of commandings. [266] Exod. 34 : 28.