Martin Buber The Words on the Tablets (Exodus 20)

The most appealing issue for Buber seems to be whether Moses could have regarded the moral commandments as the totality of the basic prescription of religion, how he could compress all the things important for a new religion and excluding other motives which at the time were of importance, and doing these all somehow apart from his characteristic as a man of the oracles, miracles and heroic strategies ("Moses the sorcerer"). Buber is interested in passage which the new religion has done from the Saga to the fundementals of community life under the rule of God. Buber raises an issue of authenticity of Moses's authorship in creating the Decalogue (defenses it) which he would like to consider demonstrating the rule of the prohibition of statues and images of God. God of Israel in his pre-Sinai image is "a god of way", and seems to be one of the gods at that time who accompany the wandering nomads and the caravans through the wilderness. Even the God of Abraham occasionally makes clouds, smoke and fire a symbol of his manifestation but differs from all solar, lunar and stellar divinities, because remains the invisible One. "He is the history God, which He is only when He is not localized in nature - and precisely because He makes use of everything potentially visible in nature, every kind of natural existence, for His manifestation. (...) Moses must have established the principle of the "image-less cult", or more correctly of the image-less presence of the Invisible, who permits Himself to be seen."

Buber distinguishes tree blocks in the structure of the 10 commandments, which we can summarize as the following:
- GOD
1. prohibition of other Gods
2. prohibition of all sensor representations
3. prohibition of idol-worship, image-worship and magic-worship.

- CONNECTION PART that deals with time: observance of Sabbath (the measure of every 7 days), honoring parents (the national time for generations)

- COMMUNITY LIFE
things that have to be protected: life, marriage, property and social honor
proper attitude: prohibition of envy

Source: On the Bible, Eighteen Studies by Martin Buber, Syracuse University Press 2000, pg.93-117