There's a detail in Exodus 34 that most of us read right past, and once you see it, you can't unsee it.
Go back to the first set of tablets. The text is careful to tell us who made them: "the tables were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, graven upon the tables" (Exodus 32:16). Moses didn't quarry the stone or shape it. He received two tablets "written with the finger of God" (Exodus 31:18) and carried them down the mountain.
You know what happened next. The calf. The dancing. "Moses' anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount" (Exodus 32:19).
Now read the Lord's first words in chapter 34:
"Hew thee two tables of stone like unto the first: and I will write upon these tables the words that were in the first tables, which thou brakest." (Exodus 34:1)
Hew thee. This time, Moses cuts the stone.
The first covenant came down as a pure gift: God's stone, God's writing. The second one asked something of the man carrying it. God would still do the writing, because no human hand could do that part. But Moses had to bring the stone.
The Climb with Blank Stones
I keep picturing Exodus 34:4: "And he hewed two tables of stone like unto the first; and Moses rose up early in the morning, and went up unto mount Sinai, as the Lord had commanded him, and took in his hand the two tables of stone."
He climbed that mountain carrying blank rock.
Anyone who has tried to come back after breaking something sacred knows what that climb feels like. You aren't carrying anything impressive. You've done the small, unglamorous work: the apology, the bishop's office, the first honest prayer in months, the decision to go back to the temple. You've shaped the stone as well as you could, and it is blank. You can't write on it yourself. All you can do is carry it up and hope He'll meet you.
Elder Jeffrey R. Holland once put it in words that read like a commentary on this verse:
"So if you have made covenants, keep them. If you haven't made them, make them. If you have made them and broken them, repent and repair them. It is never too late so long as the Master of the vineyard says there is time." (The Laborers in the Vineyard, April 2012)
Repent and repair them. That is Moses with a chisel at the foot of the mountain.
And God does meet him. What happens at the top is the part I think we miss.
What God Said the Second Time
Back up one chapter. After the calf, after Moses' remarkable plea, "if thou wilt forgive their sin—; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book" (Exodus 32:32), Moses makes one of the boldest requests in the Old Testament:
"I beseech thee, shew me thy glory." (Exodus 33:18)
On the second trip up the mountain, God answers that request. Here is how He shows His glory:
"And the Lord passed by before him, and proclaimed, The Lord, The Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth." (Exodus 34:6)
Moses asked for glory, and God described His mercy.
Look at the sequence. The first time on Sinai, Israel heard thunder, saw lightning, and backed away in terror (Exodus 20:18–19). The first tablets came wrapped in fire and smoke. Only after the covenant had been shattered, after a stiffnecked people had proved exactly how stiffnecked they were, did God stand next to Moses in the cloud and say, in effect: This is My name. This is who I am. Merciful. Gracious. Slow to anger. Overflowing with covenant love.
The phrase "abundant in goodness" carries the Hebrew word hesed, the loyal covenant love that Elder Matthew S. Holland recently described, following President Nelson, as "loyal, untiring, inexhaustible" (Forsake Not Your Own Mercy, October 2025). It wasn't absent from the first giving of the law; the Ten Commandments promise "mercy unto thousands" (Exodus 20:6), and that mercy is hesed. But there it was a clause tucked inside a commandment. Here, after the failure, God makes it His name.
God's fullest description of Himself on Sinai comes after the failure, not before it.
I don't think that's an accident. You can't fully reveal mercy to people who don't yet know they need it. Israel had to learn what they were capable of before they could hear what God was capable of.
And the God who passed before Moses proclaiming mercy was Jehovah, Jesus Christ, the same Lord who would one day write His law not on stone but "in fleshy tables of the heart" (2 Corinthians 3:3).
The Name That Echoes
Once you know this passage, you start hearing it across the whole Old Testament. Prophets and psalmists keep returning to Exodus 34:6 the way we return to a hymn we know by heart.
My favorite echo is the most reluctant one. Jonah, sulking outside Nineveh after the city repents, quotes this verse to God as a complaint:
"For I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil." (Jonah 4:2)
Jonah ran to Tarshish because he had read Exodus 34. He knew what God would do with second chances, and it made him furious that God would extend them to people he didn't like. In that same conference address, Elder Holland drew on Jonah's story to invite each of us not to forsake the mercy God holds out, even when our troubles are of our own making.
Sometimes the hardest version of this doctrine isn't believing God will give me a second set of tablets. It's watching Him give one to someone else.
Whose Face Shone
Moses came down from Sinai twice with tablets. After the first descent, the text says nothing about his appearance. After the second:
"When Moses came down from mount Sinai with the two tables of testimony in Moses' hand … Moses wist not that the skin of his face shone while he talked with him." (Exodus 34:29)
His face shone the second time. It came after the stones he carved himself, after he heard God's name declared as mercy, and after he stood in the cloud with a God who had every reason to give up on His people and didn't.
He didn't even know it was happening.
The Honest Part
I want to be careful here, because there's a cheap version of this message, and the Restoration won't let us get away with it.
The second tablets were not identical to the first. Joseph Smith's inspired translation of Exodus 34 tells us the Lord said He would write "the words of the law, according as they were written at the first on the tables which thou brakest; but it shall not be according to the first, for I will take away the priesthood out of their midst; therefore my holy order, and the ordinances thereof, shall not go before them" (JST, Exodus 34:1–2). The Joseph Smith Translation of Deuteronomy 10:2 says the same: the new tablets carried everything from the first, "save the words of the everlasting covenant of the holy priesthood" (JST, Deuteronomy 10:2).
Broken covenants have real consequences. Israel received a lesser law, "the law of carnal commandments," administered by the lesser priesthood (see Doctrine and Covenants 84:17–27). The pain of that loss lasted generations.
But look at what the lesser law was. It wasn't abandonment. It was "the preparatory gospel" (D&C 84:26), a schoolmaster to bring a people who couldn't yet bear God's presence to the point where they could (Galatians 3:24). God didn't respond to the broken stones by walking away. He responded with a slower road that still led home, and He proclaimed His mercy right in the middle of that hard news.
That's the honest version. Restoration isn't always instant, and it isn't always identical. But it is always toward Him.
What Went into the Ark
One last detail stays with me, and it comes from outside our canon.
When Moses later retells the story, the Lord's instruction about the new tablets ends with a simple command: "and thou shalt put them in the ark" (Deuteronomy 10:2). The ancient rabbis asked a question I had never thought to ask. What happened to the pieces of the first ones?
The Babylonian Talmud gives their answer (Berakhot 8b; cf. Menachot 99a, Bava Batra 14b). Nobody swept the fragments into the dust at the foot of Sinai. They went into the ark too. Luchot v'shivrei luchot munachin ba'aron: "the tablets and the fragments of the tablets lie together in the ark."
The rabbis used that image to teach something tender. If an old scholar forgot his learning through illness or age, he was still to be honored, because you don't throw away broken tablets. Elsewhere the Talmud adds a detail that moves me. Rav Yosef, one of the teachers who passed on this tradition, later fell ill and lost what he had learned. His student Abaye restored it by reviewing with him the very things Abaye had first learned from Rav Yosef (Nedarim 41a).
This is tradition, not scripture, and I hold it that way. But look at where the ark sat. Its lid was the mercy seat (Exodus 25:21), where once a year the high priest sprinkled the blood of atonement (Leviticus 16:14–15). In the Talmud's picture, the whole tablets and the broken ones lay together in the dark, directly beneath that seat.
The Lord doesn't ask us to pretend the first tablets never existed. He keeps the broken pieces with the whole ones and carries all of it with Him through the wilderness.
If you're standing at the bottom of the mountain right now with pieces of something sacred at your feet, here is what Exodus 34 offers. The first tablets showed Israel God's law. The second showed them God's heart. So pick up the chisel and carry the blank stone up the mountain. He will write on it. And when you come down, He won't make you leave the broken pieces behind. He has a place for them, right where His mercy rests.