The Parashat for this past week is called Ki-Tisa, meaning When you Take, which are the first words of Exodus 39:12, when the Lord told Moses, when you take a census of the sons of Israel. The Parashat goes from Exodus 30:11 to 34:35 It is a long one. In Chapter 31 Moses received the 10 commandments. In Chapter 32 Moses comes down Mount Sinai with the two tablets, written by the finger of God. The fact that He Himself wrote them with His finger is stressed and repeated twice. But as Moses comes down the mount, he sees the Golden Calf and what does he do? He casts the tablets down and breaks them (Vs.19)
How could Moses break these tablets that were written by the finger of God? Yet it turned out that God was not angry at him at all. It was, in many ways, a well thought out move, for as Moses came down, the nation of Israel was already breaking the first 3 commandments. By breaking the tablets before they were offered, Moses spared Israel the judgment that would have otherwise been imposed on them.
And something so interesting happened to Moses. Something that did not happen when he first came down. As he went up again to receive the second set of tablets, he seemed to have graduated to a much higher level; this is what the Torah says in Exodus 34:29,35. It came about when Moses was coming down from Mount Sinai (and the two tablets of the testimony were in Moses’ hand as he was coming down from the mountain), that Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because of his speaking with Him.
The Parashat ends with vs.35 the sons of Israel would see the face of Moses, that the skin of Moses’ face shone. So, Moses would replace the veil over his face until he went in to speak with Him.
But Habakkuk gives us much more information about the origin of this beautiful Light that must have shined from Moses. When the prophet described the Second Coming of Yeshua, he tells us in Habakkuk 3:2 that His radiance is like the Light, that He has rays flashing from His hand. The word rays is the same word used for the Light that shone from Moses’ face. The word rays and shone are the Hebrew קֶרֶן (qeren). It is the same word that designates a horn, to show the power behind this Light. And this is why you would see paintings of Moses with horns; but they were not horns but rays of powerful Light.
Moses was transformed when he met God. So was Habakkuk as we will see in this last chapter of his book, and so we can all be transformed by God when we come close to Him, for we all need this Light, coming from the redemptive action of the Messiah, for it comes from His hands, in order for us to see this Light in this dark world.