The Giving of the Law upon Mount Sinai
Gustave Doré, 1866 · Exodus 19:18
The passage
And mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the LORD descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly.
Exodus 19:18
About this plate
There is no Moses in this plate, and no tablets. There is a mountain range under a broken, burning cloud, and beneath it a slope covered with people — hundreds of them, tiny, with tents and camels, kneeling, prostrate, huddled in family groups. One lone figure stands at the lower left.
Doré has chosen to illustrate the verse rather than the event. Exodus 19:18 is not about a man on a summit; it is about a mountain smoking like a furnace and the ground shaking. So he draws the mountain at full size and the entire nation at the scale of grass seed.
The people are almost all facing away from us and toward the peak. Almost. Scattered through the crowd, a few have turned their backs on it. At this size you cannot read a face, which is exactly why it works — you are looking at the whole camp at once, the way the verse does.
The lone standing figure at the left is the only person in the picture at anything like human scale. Doré gives him no attributes, and lets you decide.
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