The Story of Five Puns: Making Community at Mount Sinai

In Exodus chapter 19, there is a swirl of mixtures and transitions of singulars and plurals in the Hebrew that don't translate into English.  Here, I take you through them --even for those with no Hebrew knowledge-- and show how they tell the hidden meaning of what "community" really means at our "marriage covenant" to God at Mount Sinai.  How do we go from our Jewish identity as associated with family and heritage and affiliation  [the words "House of Jacob" and "Children of Israel" and relating to the "Elders of Israel"] to a Jewish identity as a community [which proceeds from the former phrases to the intermediary stage of "each individual of the nation" and finally to the phrase "nation" by itself?   They are very far from the same thing, as Exodus 19 shows us.  And then how does the Sinai Revelation reinforce the pathos of the situation by immediately reverting from God's "voice" [kol] to the revelation of the Decalogue as "voices" [kolot]?  How do we put aside ourselves as kol --a homonym of two different words, one for "each individual of [the nation]" and "voice [of God"-- as an individual hearing the voice God sends to us but not to others-- in order to be a single nation?