The words aseret hadivarim in Exodus 34:28 do not mean ten commandments. They mean ten words. The ten words are: ki1 al2-pi3 hadivarim4 ha'eleh5 karati6 itcha7 b'rit8 v'et9-yisrael10. In English these words are translated as: for in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel. This is what G-d commanded Moses to write on the tablets. It's clear as day. Go back and look for yourself.
ML/NJ
Yes, and I’m glad I was corrected earlier about who chiseled the second set. It actually helped.
Why would the Israelites be using a language like Proto Hebrew if God didnt use Proto Hebrew to etch the ten commandments?
Why would they be using Proto Sinaitic before that if God didnt use that for the Ten Commandments?
Why would God use a language to etch the Ten Commandments Moses didnt understand?
Nothing points to MT, Aramaic Hebrew, or even Paleo Hebrew being used for the Ten Commandments. But it points to God using the language people then could understand just like we have English translation Bibles and the Greek LXX being the dominant means of facilitating the scriptures long before that.
Here’s more:
Secondly, since we don’t know what language specifically the “Ten Commandments” were written in, and I gave options in the title, we can at least understand that God would know what languages Moses knew so it stands to reason He would etch the 10 commandments with a language that Moses would know and be able to continue using for the Torah.
So based upon that it is either God etched in an unknown language or more likely would use a language Moses knew when he wrote the Torah (the Torah that God also gave Moses) and the language that Moses would understand the moment Moses looked at the tablets.
So since Paleo Hebrew stretches back to Proto Sinaitic and there would be Egyptian Hieroglyphics before that, I imagine it’s one of the two or something in between on the tablets.