This supposition is rendered still more probable by Exodus 34:27 itself: "And the Lord said unto Moses, Write thou these words (that is, as I understand it, a copy of the words which God had already written ) for AFTER THE TENOR ( al pi, ACCORDING TO THE MOUTH) of these words I have made a covenant with thee and with Israel." Here the original writing is represented by an elegant prosopopoesia, or personification, as speaking and giving out from its own mouth a copy of itself. This supposition removes the apparent contradiction and thus both God and Moses may be said to have written the covenant and the ten commandments: the former, the original the latter, the copy.
In order to reconcile these accounts let us suppose that the ten words, or ten commandments, were written on both tables by the hand of God himself, and that what Moses wrote, Exodus 34:27, was a copy of these to be delivered to the people, while the tables themselves were laid up in the ark before the testimony, whither the people could not go to consult them, and therefore a copy was necessary for the use of the congregation this copy, being taken off under the direction of God, was authenticated equally with the original, and the original itself was laid up as a record to which all succeeding copies might be continually referred, in order to prevent corruption.
But here, in Exodus 34:27, it seems as if Moses was commanded to write these words, and in Exodus 34:28 it is said, And he wrote upon the tables but in Deuteronomy 10:1-4 it is expressly said that God wrote the second tables as well as the first. That God wrote the first tables himself, see proved by different passages of Scripture at the end of Clarke's note at " Exodus 32:35 ". Hew thee two tables of stone like unto the first - In Exodus 32:16 we are told that the two first tables were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God but here Moses is commanded to provide tables of his own workmanship, and God promises to write on them the words which were on the first.
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