 When Moses lay prostrate before God those 40 days, because God was determined to destroy the Israelites, Moses prayed to God not to annihilate God's own people, whom God freed from Egypt, but to give thought to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and ignore the Israelites' sinfulness, else the Egyptians would say that God was powerless to bring them into the land that God had promised them.The third reading (, "aliyah") and the fourth open portion (, "petuchah") end here with the end of chapter 

In the fourth reading (, "aliyah"), God told Moses to carve out two tablets of stone like the first, come up the mountain, and make an ark of wood.God inscribed on the tablets the Ten Commandments that were on the first tablets that Moses had smashed, and Moses came down from the mountain and deposited the tablets in the Ark.