Help Me Find A Story About The Ten Commandments

June 21, 2007 3:25 PM

I am trying to find the title and author of a short science fiction story. The story centered around Moses returning from Mt. Sinai and finding the Israelites worshiping the golden calf. In the biblical version he breaks the tablets and later goes back to get another set. In this story, the Israelites realize the error of their ways and gather all the pieces. [more below]

So they spend the next 2000 years trying to put them back together. The world evolves differently but finally a computer (robot?) is built that can handle the task. It does and then battles with another robot (Satan?) to determine if it should tell the world what is really on the tablets.

I am pretty sure it was a short story in one of the sci-fi digests from pre-1994.

Thanks!

posted by mshellenberger to Media & Arts (7 answers total)

Best answer: Here's one that popped up about a computer's reconstruction of the tablets, it's part of a larger collection of 'Bible Stories for Adults' by James Morrow
posted by pupdog at 3:33 PM on June 21, 2007

Best answer: Possibly a better link to the same book.

I know I read this at one point, but can't remember the actual title of the story, and the web isn't as helpful as it could be. It's possibly 'Spelling God with the Wrong Blocks', that's in that book, but I can;t verify that they go together.
posted by pupdog at 3:41 PM on June 21, 2007

Response by poster: pupdog-

That HAS to be it! The description on the author's site was much closer to what I recall. I could have sworn I read it while still in college.

Anyway, I searched for over an hour all over google...how did you find this?
posted by mshellenberger at 3:44 PM on June 21, 2007

I think the combination that won was 'sf moses tablets robot', but it sounded familiar to me too.
posted by pupdog at 3:48 PM on June 21, 2007

And if it actually is 'Spelling God with the Wrong Blocks', that was in Fantasy and Science Fiction in '87 and a Nebula Award collection in '89, so you definitely could have read it earlier.
posted by pupdog at 3:51 PM on June 21, 2007

I own this book, and after flipping through it, I think the story you mean is the one called "The Covenant".
posted by leesh at 5:20 PM on June 21, 2007

It is #31 "The Covenant" - originally published in Aboriginal Science Fiction in 1989, and then again later that year as part of the wonderful alternate-history anthology What Might Have Been?. I think the computerized Satan may be from another story.
posted by ormondsacker at 8:23 PM on June 21, 2007