Our world is secularized to the core; most people are totally oblivious to the spiritual dimension of the universe. But Exodus 34 was written into a world teeming with “gods” and “goddesses,” and as I said earlier, most of them were mean-spirited. To say they had anger management issues would be a gross understatement. Many of them were openly hostile and malignant, lurking in the shadows, just waiting for a chance to pounce. It’s in this kind of a world that Moses learns that Yahweh is compassionate and gracious, and slow to anger. This would have been an incredibly novel view of deity.
