Jewerly - Exodus 33:1-6

33:1-6 - God is still very angry with Israel for the golden calf incident, but he tells Moses that it’s time for the people to move on from Mount Sinai and onto the promised land. TB suggests that the people had been camped there for about a year at this point. It seems like God’s anger and Him telling the people that it’s time to go to the promised land seems contradictory, but because we have hindsight, we know that wandering in the wilderness for 40 years is the plan, so it makes sense. It seems to me that what actually happens is He says, “it’s time for you guys to move away from this place where you are thriving enough to make golden idols to worship and head into the wilderness for some suffering and reconciliation.”

God has withdrawn his covenant from Israel, but He does promise to send “an angel before thee,” which I think is still pretty good. This angel is going to do a lot of the heavy lifting as far as making Canaan a good place for Israel to live, including driving out the people currently inhabiting the land. I’ve always had a problem with this because I don’t ever think it’s right to force a people out of their homes in order for another group of people to take it over. However, we have the words of Nephi that told us that the people of that land were destroyed in order for Israel to take over the land because they were wicked and that if they had been a righteous people, then that wouldn’t have happened to them, which I find more acceptable.

The angel will be substituting God’s presence because God’s so angry still that he would destroy the people if He were to come near them, and when the people heard this, they were distraught that “they mourned: and no man did put on him his ornaments.” God further commands the people to “put off thy ornaments from thee,” and the people “stripped themselves of their ornaments by the mount Horeb.” I thought it was really weird that the word “ornaments” was mentioned three times in three verses. TB says that this meant their jewelry and that God commanded them to stop wearing their jewelry for a few different reasons.

First, because the jewelry the people were wearing was from what they took from the Egyptians when God delivered them. It was the spoils of war that GOD won for them. Second, they took those spoils of God’s war and used it to make the golden calf, so God was angry about that. Then finally third, all that jewelry was going to be needed to make different parts of the tabernacle when construction finally got started so maybe God was removing it from their lives so that it wouldn’t become another object that they obsessed over. If you’re not going to wear jewelry, then carrying it in the desert becomes a huge chore, plus jewelry is one of those things that people can use to show their social dominance over others. Maybe God was just like “you made a golden calf out of the jewelry I gave you from Egypt and that’s why we can’t have nice things,” and banned it. Makes sense to me.