After receiving the covenant stipulations, Moses needed to climb down the mountain to report to the people. The covenant wouldn’t take effect until they agreed to Yahweh’s conditions. But before Moses left, Yahweh commanded him to bring Israel’s leadership up with him the next time he came. Moses’s brother, Aaron, and Aaron’s eldest sons, Nadab and Abihu, represented the future priesthood.¹ The seventy elders, the same number as Jacob’s household when they moved to Egypt, likely represented the nation as a whole.²

Accepting the covenant would start to remove the barrier separating Israel, and ultimately all of humanity, from Yahweh’s presence. Because of this, Yahweh gave these leaders special permission to climb partway up the mountain afterward. But only Moses could approach the summit, and the rest of the people still couldn’t touch it at all.³

Moses returned to the camp and told the people everything Yahweh had said and all about the covenant stipulations. The people had agreed to obey when Yahweh first proposed a covenant.⁴ But now that they had the full terms, their words carried more weight. Still, verbal acceptance wouldn’t suffice in their culture. So Moses wrote down the covenant stipulation in preparation for the covenant ceremony the next day.