The only absolutely verifiable and objective Divine Revelation in history, on which all other claimants stand or fall!
That the Revelation was national in character is correct.
But Ex. 20:18-22 is antecedent to the decalogue given in the first of the chapter.
The people were terrified of Elohim and requested that Moses speak to them in God’s stead. Moses went up into the thick darkness and spoke with God and received the message for Israel. He alone received the 10 Commanments and faithfully delivered them to the people.
They didn’t start the idolatry until the very end of the forty day period when they despaired of Moses returning and fell back into former sin patterns.
DeMille made a lot of Scriptural errors but this is not one of them.
I don't really follow the logic here. How is this absolutely verifiable? Generations after the fact, a book says an event happens. This event reinforces the nationalistic identify of being God's chosen people. How do we know what people of the time were thinking? What parent would deny or contradict the priests or holy writings? A single generation after the Torah was first used, the story would be self reinforcing. Any doubt would be silent or silenced. Fast forward to today, thousands of years after the fact, why does this account for absolute verifiability?
That fact simply cannot be repeated too many times.
G-d not only gave us the capacity to believe, but the capacity to reason. BOTH are necessary. The Revelation at Mt. Sinai is something that illustrates this in the most profound way possible. You can believe it, but belief, faith, is a fragile thing. There's always room for doubt (as there MUST be - because without doubt there is no free will, and existence is pointless from a theological point of view). No, here there is a great degree of rationality involved - the event HAD to have occurred, there is NO OTHER RATIONAL EXPLANATION (because, let me tell you, choosing to live according to the words of the Torah is no easy thing, and NO ONE would do so merely to perpetuate a hoax that would only have benefits hundreds or thousands of years later).