Your Not BrokenYou are Human

(1)Thereupon the LORD said to me, “Carve out two tablets of stone like the first, and come up to Me on the mountain; and make an ark of wood.(2) I will inscribe on the tablets the commandments that were on the first tablets that you smashed, and you shall deposit them in the ark.”(3) I made an ark of acacia wood and carved out two tablets of stone like the first; I took the two tablets with me and went up the mountain.(4) The LORD inscribed on the tablets the same text as on the first, the Ten Commandments that He addressed to you on the mountain out of the fire on the day of the Assembly; and the LORD gave them to me.(5) Then I left and went down from the mountain, and I deposited the tablets in the ark that I had made, where they still are, as the LORD had commanded me.

ועשית לך ארון עץ, “you will make for yourself a wooden ark.” Rashi explains that this is not the Holy Ark constructed by Betzalel when he made the Tabernacle about 3-4 months later. The meaning of the instruction in our verse is that the Tablets would be housed in the ark made by Moses until the time when the Tabernacle would be built and inaugurated. [at this point in time G’d had not even instructed Moses to build a Tabernacle. Ed.] After the Tabernacle was built, the ark constructed by Moses now would house the broken pieces of the first set of Tablets. Nachmanides comments that our sages do not appear to agree with Rashi’s explanation (Baba Batra 14 and Menachot 99) .The opinion expressed in the Talmud is that both the second set of Tablets and the broken pieces of the first set reposed in the same ark (i.e. the ark constructed by Betzalel).