Tables of Stone and Tables of the Heart: The Law Written by the Finger of God
Old Testament: Exodus 31:18
And the Lord, when he had ended these words in mount Sinai, gave to Moses two stone tables of testimony, written with the finger of God.
Old Testament, also: Ezechiel 36:26
And I will give you a new heart, and put a new spirit within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and will give you a heart of flesh.
New Testament: 2 Corinthians 3:3
Being manifested, that you are the epistle of Christ, ministered by us, and written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in the fleshly tables of the heart.
The connection
At Sinai the Lord gave Moses "two stone tables of testimony, written with the finger of God" (Exodus 31:18). The prophets promised a second writing in another material. Ezechiel heard God say, "I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and will give you a heart of flesh" (Ezechiel 36:26), and Jeremias, "I will give my law in their bowels, and I will write it in their heart" (Jeremias 31:33), the promise the Epistle to the Hebrews quotes as the new testament (Hebrews 8:8, 10). St Paul says it has happened. The Corinthians are "the epistle of Christ ... written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in the fleshly tables of the heart" (2 Corinthians 3:3). His phrase joins the two prophecies: the tables of stone are Sinai's, and the heart of flesh is Ezechiel's. St Augustine draws the line from Sinai to Pentecost. Fifty days passed from the first Passover to the giving of the Law, and fifty from the death and Resurrection of the Lamb to the coming of the Holy Ghost, the finger of God: "There it was on tables of stone that the finger of God operated; here it was on the hearts of men. There the law was given outwardly, so that the unrighteous might be terrified; here it was given inwardly, so that they might be justified." The Catechism joins the same two verses under the Spirit's name, the finger of God (CCC 700).
Moral sense
The heart is never left blank. "The sin of Juda is written with a pen of iron, with the point of a diamond, it is graven upon the table of their heart" (Jeremias 17:1), and Wisdom asks for the other writing: "Let not mercy and truth leave thee, put them about thy neck, and write them in the tables of thy heart" (Proverbs 3:3). Moses had to hew the second tables before God wrote on them again (Exodus 34:1), and St John Chrysostom applies it to the soul: "just as Moses hewed the stones and tables, so we, your souls." And what the Spirit writes there, St Augustine says, is charity: "God's law, therefore, is love."
Anagogical sense
What the Spirit writes in a heart of flesh He will finish in the flesh itself. St Irenaeus reads this verse forward to the last day: "If, therefore, in the present time, fleshly hearts are made partakers of the Spirit, what is there astonishing if, in the resurrection, they receive that life which is granted by the Spirit?" And the last writing is God's own name: "He that shall overcome, I will make him a pillar in the temple of my God ... and I will write upon him the name of my God" (Apocalypse 3:12).
The Fathers
St Augustine, On the Spirit and the Letter, 29: "There it was on tables of stone that the finger of God operated; here it was on the hearts of men. There the law was given outwardly, so that the unrighteous might be terrified; here it was given inwardly, so that they might be justified." St John Chrysostom, Homilies on Second Corinthians, VI: "For just as Moses hewed the stones and tables, so we, your souls ... Wide as the difference between the Spirit and ink, and a stony table and a fleshy, so wide is that between these and those."
Warrant
Scriptural. St Paul names the type himself, the "tables of stone" of Sinai set against "the fleshly tables of the heart" (2 Corinthians 3:3), and the Epistle to the Hebrews quotes Jeremias 31:33 as the new testament (Hebrews 8:8, 10). Checked in the Greek: Paul's plaxin lithinais are the plakas lithinas of the Septuagint at Exodus 31:18, and his kardiais sarkinais are Ezechiel's kardian sarkinen (36:26), so one phrase carries both prophecies. In the Hebrew the stone tables, "the tables of thy heart" in Proverbs 3:3 and 7:3, and "the table of their heart" in Jeremias 17:1 are one word, luach. The Septuagint has no Jeremias 17:1 to 4, so that verse rests on the Hebrew. St Augustine draws the whole line, Sinai to Pentecost (On the Spirit and the Letter, 28 to 29). God's writing as judgment has its own entry in The Finger That Writes; this one is the Law written a second time, inside. The verses came to the site from Dunk's search of the Douay for table and heart.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 700.
