The Golden Calf - Exodus 32:1-6

32:1-6 - The whole time that Moses was up on Mount Sinai, 40 days, the people were down below the mountain getting antsy. I’ve always wondered why exactly they were feeling weird about Moses being gone, especially because I believe that there was still God’s cloud of fire up on the top of the mountain where Moses was. If I had seen that, knowing that I had never seen that kind of phenomenon before, I would just think “yeah, Moses is still talking to God” and left it at that. I’m not exactly sure what the people were getting upset about, but hey that’s just me.

The people go to Aaron and tell him that because Moses is still up on the mountain “Make us gods, which shall go before us.” Interestingly, right before Moses goes up to the mountain, God gives the people the Ten Commandments and they agree to those terms, but here we are not even 2 months later and they are trying to break commandment #2, no graven images. Maybe they go to Aaron because he’s Moses’ brother, his second in command so they view him as having the authority in Moses’ absence. Aaron agrees to make the “god” and told the people to bring him all their ‘golden earrings.” It doesn’t seem to me like earrings would be enough gold to make a golden image, but maybe I’m just not familiar enough with the process.

Aaron makes the golden calf and tells the people “tomorrow is a feast to the Lord.” This is the part that’s really interesting to me, TB notes that the translation of “tomorrow is a feast to the Lord” is an incorrect translation, which has led to many scholars concluding that the people wanted a god that they had probably worshipped earlier in Egypt. This has always been my assumption, that the people were looking to recreate a non-Israelite god that they had known before when they were in Egypt, meaning that they were fully reverting back to the idolatry that they had lived with during their enslavement.

The interesting part is that TB notes that the translation of “the Lord” or “god” or even “gods,” is incorrect. The says, “the original Hebrew doesn’t say ‘lord’, Adonai; it say YHWH… Yehoveh, God’s personal name. The people thought they were making a suitable imagine of the God of Israel, Yehoveh, when they built the calf!” This was so interesting to me because, again, I always thought that this was a complete reversion of the people to their idols, a complete rejection of the one true God, but that wasn’t the case at all. Yes, they were wrong to make an image, but what I think was that what they were familiar with, worshipping deity in physical form. They had spent generations worshipping their gods in the form of idols, so they were trying to adapt this new God, this new information about God into what they had known about their previous gods. They were trying to worship this new God in the way that they had worshipped their old gods. It was what they knew.

Additionally, I don’t know why they felt compelled to look for a way to worship their new God at this point, but the thought I had while studying this was that they were probably distressed, I mean after everything that they had been through, all the miracles, and leaving where they knew, maybe they were hungry. But with all this turmoil, maybe they were trying to do what they had always done during times of turmoil, even with the Egyptian gods, they prayed to their gods for intervention. Yes, they were misguided and wrong and should have just chilled out for a minute, but maybe not completely the ill-intentioned, rebels that I had always believed. Maybe they were just trying to do the right thing in the way that they knew how to do it, the wrong way.