How God Spoke to Moses
As we have seen, the Tabernacle was erected and left standing for the first time on the 1st of Nisan, 2449. From that time on, whenever God wished to transmit any of the Torah’s laws to Moses, He first called out to Moses to meet Him in the Tabernacle. Moses heard this call audibly—not just mentally—but miraculously, it was not heard by anyone else. Each time God called out him, He did so affectionately, repeating Moses’ name (“Moses, Moses!”) as He had done at the burning bush, thus preparing him for the address that followed. When God wished to cover several topics in the same communication, He paused in order to give Moses time to absorb each topic before proceeding to the next. (These pauses are indicated by the spaces between paragraphs in the written text of the Torah.) In so doing, God demonstrated the proper and effective way to teach. Since, once the Tabernacle was erected, it was chiefly there that God spoke to Moses, it was also called the “Tent of Meeting.”
When God spoke with Moses in the Tent of Meeting, God spoke to him in the same thundering voice He used at the Giving of the Torah; nevertheless, the sound of the voice miraculously stopped at the entrance of the Tabernacle and was not heard outside of it. God’s voice “descended” from heaven and issued from the space between the two cherubs atop the Cover of the Altar in the inner chamber of the Tent of Meeting, and Moses heard it while standing in the outer chamber of the Tabernacle.
God instructed Moses to address the people in a manner that would inspire them to value His commandments and to inform them that He was giving them His commandments for their sake and in their interest, out of His love for them. He further instructed Moses to report back to Him as to whether the people accepted His commandments, as he had at the Giving of the Torah.
