Exodus chapters nineteen through twenty four describe Israel encamped before Mount Sinai, Moses ascending amid thunder, lightning, and thick cloud to receive instruction, and the giving of the Ten Commandments followed by an extended body of law the text presents as the terms of a covenant between God and the people. Where the Exodus itself is a story of rescue, Sinai is a story of obligation, and Jewish theology has long treated this second moment as the more decisive of the two: a people freed from slavery becomes, at Sinai, a people bound by mutual agreement, not merely liberated but constituted.
The covenant form itself, complete with historical preamble, stipulations, and blessings and curses for keeping or breaking the terms, resembles treaty documents known from the wider ancient Near East, a parallel scholars of the biblical text have long used to illuminate how the passage would have been understood by its early audience regardless of when it was composed. The text is careful to record that the people heard the divine voice but saw no form, a detail later Jewish and Christian commentary read as grounding the prohibition on images that follows among the commandments themselves, and rabbinic tradition further holds that the entire law, written and oral alike, was implicit in what was given at the mountain even though it was worked out by later generations of teachers.