Exodus 31:18: How Were the Tablets Inscribed with the Finger of God?

Readers of the New Testament know that "God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth" (Jn 4:24). But this same incorporeal argument for God is in the Old Testament: "But the Egyptians are men and not God; their horses are flesh and not spirit" (Is 31:3). Clearly God and spirit are balancing concepts in the Hebrew poetic device called synonymous parallelism. How, then, can Moses describe God as having fingers to write on the tablets of stone?

Since God is not corporeal in the sense that he has bodily form (Is 31:3; Jn 4:24), all references to parts of the body such as fingers are what we call anthropomorphisms--something about the divine person more graphically told in human terms.

The finger of God is also a figure of speech known as synecdoche, wherein a portion of the divine person is used to denote some larger aspect of his person or characteristics. In this case God's power is being indicated by his finger.

In a similar way, when the magicians bowed out after the third plague, they stated, "This is the finger of God [or of a god]" (Ex 8:19). Clearly, by their use of the word finger they meant they had been outmaneuvered by a supernatural power that was at work, not by some kind of cheap trickery or quackery.

Some have argued, on the alleged bases of Egyptian parallels such as chapter 153 in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, that "finger of God" refers to Aaron's staff. This theory also presupposes an artificial distinction between the singular and plural forms for finger and cannot be supported. The statement of these Egyptian magicians, therefore, attributes to God the power they had just observed in the third plague.

God's power is again symbolized as the "work of [his] fingers" in creating the world, according to the psalmist (Ps 8:3). What is more, it was by the same "finger of God" that Jesus claimed to have cast demons out of individuals in Luke 11:20. We may be confident, then, that the term finger of God refers to his power.

The use of this expression in connection with the writing of the Ten Commandments on the two tablets of stone is most interesting, for while we do not believe in a mechanical view of dictation for the Bible, nevertheless this passage certainly indicates that here is one passage that is in some ways markedly different from the other portions of Scripture, which are nonetheless just as inspired. It must mean that this passage came, in some way, through the direct intervening power of God. Perhaps we are to envision something approximating the handwriting on the wall at Belshazzar's Babylonian feast in Daniel 5:5. Some have likened it to a bolt of lightning which engraved the stones by a supernatural power.

The truth is that no one knows the method for sure, but we do know it is as much a product of the direct power of God as Jesus' miracles or his creation of the world. This part of the law known as the "Two Tablets of the Testimony" was the result of the direct intervention of God, most graphically described as the "finger of God."