Exodus Exodus 18
A Gentile priest of Midian hears what YHWH did at the sea, confesses that YHWH is great above all gods, offers sacrifice, and eats bread before God with Aaron and all the elders of Israel. Then he gives Israel the wisdom by which it will order its common life for a thousand years: appoint judges who fear God, deal truthfully, and hate unjust gain. Jethro is the firstfruit of the nations — the first Gentile after the Exodus to confess YHWH, and the man whose ordering wisdom Israel keeps.
Genesis Genesis 31:22-55
Laban names the witness-heap in Aramaic and Jacob names it in Hebrew — the first Aramaic in the Torah — sealing the canon's first patriarchal parity-treaty by mutual suspicion, not affection, and naming God by the dread that guards: the Fear of Isaac.
Exodus Exodus 24:1-18
The Book of the Covenant has been read aloud; now it is cut in blood. Moses throws half the blood on the altar and half on the people and declares, 'Behold the blood of the covenant' — the one verse in the canon where the blood-dashing verb meets the word covenant. Seventy-four men then ascend, behold God with the prophetic-vision verb used of him nowhere else, and eat and drink under a pavement of sapphire. The glory settles as devouring fire; Moses enters the cloud for forty days. And the oath sworn at the foot of the mountain is broken at the foot of the same mountain within those forty days — which is why the blood that ratifies a covenant Israel cannot keep already points beyond itself to 'the blood of the eternal covenant.'