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.'
Exodus Exodus 23:14-33
The Book of the Covenant does not end with a law. It ends with a journey toward the land and the One who carries the Name into it: three pilgrim-feasts kept before the face of the Lord, and an Angel in whom God's own Name dwells. The same verb sends the Angel, the terror, and the hornet before Israel's face; the same word frames the Name within the Angel and the plague driven from Israel's midst. At the apex stands an Angel who will not bear transgression because the Name is within him — the prerogative the rest of the canon reserves for YHWH alone, carried 'little by little' into a land never fully conquered, and finally given to the Son who is ranked above the angels.
Exodus Exodus 22:18-23:13
The heart of the Book of the Covenant is one sentence said twice: 'for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.' It brackets the whole unit and states the law's spine — Israel, the redeemed oppressed, is forbidden to become the oppressor. The verb of Pharaoh's program against Israel is the very verb God forbids Israel to use against the widow and orphan, and the release it sets in motion reaches, through Jubilee and prophecy, to the year of the Lord's favor that Jesus proclaims at Nazareth.