Near the end of Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments(1956), Moses climbs Mount Sinai to receive the tablets of the Decalogue from God. He then descends the mountain, only to find the ungrateful Israelites immersed in wild pagan worship of the golden calf.
DeMille was hardly the first to render the stunned and furious image of Moses clutching the twin tablets, their message of the one God preemptively repudiated by its intended recipients, as the defining moment of the Sinaitic experience. Countless artists have done the same. Nor, at least at first glance, does that image seem to stray far from the biblical text. Yet I'd like to argue that it radically flattens and perhaps even misrepresents the Bible's story of the revelation at Sinai.
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