Shabbat Parashat Yitro - 5786

Shabbat Parashat Yitro - 5786

Rabbi Hal Miller

  Moshe said to God, the people will not be able to ascend Mount Sinai for You

  have warned us saying bound the mountain and sanctify it. [Shemot 19:23]

In verse 21, God tells Moshe to descend the mountain and warn the people not to approach Mount Sinai. But in verse 12 God had told Moshe to warn the people that if they approach the mountain they will die. Our verse now is Moshe asking God why he needs to descend and warn them again. In the next verse, God reiterates to Moshe that he must go back down and warn them. It would even seem that in this last verse God might be getting a little perturbed with Moshe. Why did Moshe feel the need to ask in our verse and why did God repeat the directive?

Rashi follows Onkelos that the people had already been warned in 11-12 over the three-day period, thus knew they did not have permission to ascend the mountain, and that lack of permission is why Moshe claimed they were "not able".

Rashbam strongly disagrees that "lo yuchal" means that the people did not have permission since it does not comport with the simple meaning, and that permission would be irrelevant to whether or not they were able to ascend at all. He writes that there is nothing wrong with repeating warnings, especially given both the seriousness of the consequences here and the proven tendency of the people to ignore warnings and go about violating directives anyway. At the same time, Rashbam does see small differences in the various warnings here. He understands our verse [23] not to be Moshe making a statement of complaint about the repetition from verse 12, rather as asking for clarification regarding whether the people were allowed to approach close enough to see, or whether they had to stay far back where they already were. In verses 22 and 24 God is clarifying for Moshe to allow only Aharon to approach a little closer, but specifying that the Kohanim and rest of the people are to stay back.

Or HaChayim takes a similar approach, that Moshe was seeking clarification. He makes two points as alternatives. The first is that since in verse 22, God was warning about the Kohanim, the rest of the people might have thought that the warning no longer applied to them, so God reiterated that the prohibition still applied to everybody. The second point is that "the initial warning in 12-13 said 'you shall set boundaries' but did not specify when that should take place, so now God is telling Moshe to do it now."