Shalom and thank you for your question! You ask who wrote the second set of Tablets? The short answer is – Moses. This answer needs to be understood though, since Moses did not make them up! In general it must be understood that Moses is the narrator of the Pentateuch, even the part that describes his own passing. All of it was dictated to him by G-d.
Moses received the first tablets from G-d, on Mount Sinai a few months after the Israelite nation left Egypt. The Ten Commandments, more accurately called the Ten Sayings, were revealed by the Almighty Himself to the people. However the spiritual revelation was very intense. Exodus chapter 19:18 describes the spectacular event. “The L-rd descended upon it (Mount Sinai) in fire, and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of the furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly.” The Divine voice penetrated the whole earth and there was no echo, the commentaries explain. No bird tweeted and no cow lowed… (Chassidic teaching explains that this process changed the physical world to make it more receptive to spirituality.) This was so literally awesome that the people’s souls left their bodies after the first two Sayings and were immediately restored by G-d. The people therefore requested that Moses receive the rest of the Sayings directly from G-d himself and transmit them to the people. These Ten Sayings are like chapter headings for the six hundred and thirteen commandments for the Jewish people. Moses ascended the mountain for forty days and nights to learn the whole Torah from G-d. The Tablets were formed in such a way that the letters were carved out completely, yet the middle sections of letters that were square or circular miraculously remained suspended and did not fall out. Exodus 32:16 states clearly:
” And the Tablets were the work of G-d, and the writing was the writing of G-d, graven upon the Tablets.”
The second Tablets were different. They were given to the people after they had sinned with the golde calf and Moses had prevailed upon G-d to forgive them. The verse in Exodus 34:27 states: “The L-rd said to Moses “Inscribe these words for yourself…” and in verse 28 there the Torah text continues to describe the process of Moses receiving knowledge of the entire Torah as follows: “He was there with the L-rd for forty days and forty nights; he ate no bread and drank no water, and he inscribed upon the tablets the the words of the covenant, the Ten Commandments.” These Tablets were made of sapphire, which came from a quarry that G-d showed Moses which was just behind his tent. Why did Moses have to carve out the second Tablets by himself? The commentaries explain this with a parable: There was a King who betrothed a maiden to be his wife. The King had to make a trip before the wedding and while he was away, the servant girls of the betrothed maiden behaved immodestly and people assumed that the betrothed maiden had also misbehaved. The man who was to serve as best man at the wedding wanted to save the situation. He knew the King would not be able to go through with the wedding if the bride had been disloyal. (It would then possibly be in a legal category of adultery.) So the best man tore up the betrothal contract and told the returning King that there was no issue, since there was no contract. The King proceeded to investigate and found out that his fiancee was innocent of the charges and instructed the best man to prepare a new contract. However, “Since you tore up the first, you must write the second ones yourself.”
Moses broke the first Tablets, and many reasons are given for this, and therefore the L-rd told him to carve the second ones himself.
The second Tablets teach us a tremendous lesson among many ideas. There is nothing more whole than a broken heart. The repentance of the people – their return to G-d after the disloyal act of worshipping the golden calf, (they had miscalculated the time that Moses was supposed to return from the mountain and thus thought that he had betrayed them,) actually brought them to a higher spiritual level than ever before, and with the second Tablets came the gift of the body of Oral Law.
It is a wonderful life lesson for us to learn. Something broken can lead to a greater fusion. Much depends upon our attitudes
