Exodus - Lesson 27

Dr. Carmen Imes 
Exodus 
OT605-27 
Golden Calf
Lesson Transcript

As we learned at the end of chapter 24, Moses stayed up on the mountain for 40 days and 40 nights, which was apparently long enough for the Israelites to get into some mischief. They seemed to have quickly forgotten God's commands and start making up a new way of relating to the divine realm. So let's read a bit of what happens while Moses is up on the mountain, and then we'll consider some historical and literary dimensions of this story about the golden calf.

When the people saw that Moses was so long and coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don't know what's happened to him. Aaron answered them, take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons, and your daughters are wearing and bring them to me.

So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. And then they said, these are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.

When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, tomorrow there will be a festival to Yahweh. So the next day, the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. Afterward, they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry.

Wow, what a scene. What made them do this? Well, one of the questions that first comes to my mind is why a calf idol? Of all the shapes they could have made, why did they choose a calf? There is a fair degree of evidence of the worship of calves in ancient Mesopotamia. And so here are a few examples.

We have a 12th century bronze bull from Samaria. So this would have been in the land before they got there. But this is housed in the Israel Museum.

It's not large, but it is a calf. It's in the shape of a bull or calf. The other thing that we have here is from Ashkelon, and it's a 16th century clay house for this little calf to fit into.

The statue was discovered in a temple in Ashkelon, and the horned calf symbolized the young and energetic storm god. So it's possible that what they think they're making is the the storm god or Baal as we later come to know him. One another thing that's very curious is why Aaron capitulates to this.

Aaron was closer than anyone else to the presence of Yahweh. He got to experience God halfway up the mountain and eat and drink in his presence. And what makes him think that he can make an idol and then the very next day have a festival to Yahweh? So what does Aaron think he's doing when he's making this idol and proclaiming this festival? Is he just a pushover or is there something more going on here? It's possible that Aaron thinks he's making a visual representation of Yahweh.

This is the god who brought you out of Egypt. You didn't see him, but I'm going to show him to you. And so that the calf itself represents Yahweh.

It's also possible that he thinks he's making a visual representation of Yahweh's transport or his mode of transportation. So on this slide I have a picture for you of the storm god, Adad, and you can see he's standing bareback on the top of a bull. So possibly Aaron thinks it's compatible with the worship of Yahweh because this is just the thing that's carrying Yahweh and we can still worship him.

Or maybe he's introducing a new deity to Israel like Baal of Canaan. The point of the Exodus story was to demonstrate Yahweh's superiority over other gods. So this act, whatever Aaron thinks he's doing, ruins everything.

It breaks the first command. No other gods, no making idols. He gets at it right away.

It's a sad moment and it makes God very angry. So when we rejoin God and Moses on the mountain and hear what they have to say about this, we can see that it's high, there's high emotion. Then Yahweh said to Moses, go down because your people whom you brought up out of Egypt have become corrupt.

This sounds just like a couple arguing over the dinner table about their children. Your son skipped school today. You can hear the wife say to the husband or vice versa.

God says to Moses, your people whom you brought out of Egypt have become corrupt. They've been quick to turn away from what I commanded them and have made themselves an idol cast in the shape of a calf. They have bowed down to it and sacrificed to it and have said, these are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.

Yahweh has been eclipsed by this idol. I have seen these people, Yahweh said to Moses, and they are a stiff necked people. Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them.

Then I will make you into a great nation. This is an interesting proposition that God is giving to Moses. Let me at them.

They have already broken the covenant and worshiped another God. And so it is well within God's rights to wipe them all out. They've already violated the covenant they agreed to.

And he's offering to Moses that he'll make a whole new nation just out of Moses. And you can imagine this would be an enticing offer. Wow, I'm going to be the king of a new nation.

There'll be all my people. They will accept my authority. Won't this be great? But Moses has learned.

He's learned since his first encounter with Yahweh at Mount Horeb. He has come to understand God in a deeper way through the events that happened in Egypt. And so he appeals to God and he seeks God's favor and intercedes saying this.

Yahweh, why should your anger burn against your people whom you brought out of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians say it was with evil intent that he brought them out to kill them in the mountains and wipe them off the face of the earth? Turn from your fierce anger, relent, and do not bring disaster on your people. Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac, and Israel to whom you swore by your own self. I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky.

And I will give your descendants all this land I promised them. And it will be their inheritance forever. And on the basis of this prayer, this prayer that takes seriously the reputation of God among the nations, Moses clearly understands his role as the one who bears God's name.

These people bear your name. If you wipe them out, your reputation is on the line. And because he prays in line with God's own purposes, it says Yahweh relented and did not bring on his people the disaster he had threatened.

The word in Hebrew is actually the same word that's used in other places to mean repent. God repented. But let me hasten to say, it's not because God sinned.

It was well within God's rights to wipe them out. But the word repentance means to change direction and go the other way, to change your mind about something. And as mysterious as it is, the text tells us that God changed his mind.

He relented from his plan or repented from what he had planned to do. And so they were saved. Moses turned and went down the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant law in his hands.

They were inscribed on both sides, front and back. The tablets were the work of God. The writing was the writing of God engraved on the tablets.

When Joshua heard the noise of the people shouting, he said to Moses, suddenly Joshua appears. He was waiting partway down the mountain for Moses. And now he's rejoined as Moses goes down.

He said to Moses, there's the sound of war in the camp. And Moses replied, it's not the sound of victory. It's not the sound of defeat.

It's the sound of singing that I hear. When Moses approached the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, his anger burned. And he threw the tablets out of his hands, breaking them to pieces at the foot of the mountain.

And he took the calf that people had made and burned it in the fire and ground it to powder, scattered it on the water and made the Israelites drink it. He said to Aaron, what did these people do to you that you've led them into such great sin? Before we listen to Aaron's response, I think it's worth pausing to reflect on the significance of the moment of idolatry. Idolatry betrays a desire to domesticate the divine and approach God on our own terms.

As God's image, God's Selem, we are God's concrete representatives in the world. And when we worship idols, we abdicate our God-given role. There's a reason why there's no idol in the temple of Yahweh or in the tabernacle of Yahweh.

It's because God has made humans as his image. Idolatry is the inverse of our creation purpose. So rather than subduing creation, we submit to it.

By making a calf, it's exalting this animal that we're supposed to be subduing and worshiping it as greater than we are. Psalm 115 verses 1 through 8 and Psalm 135, 15 and following talk about the idolatry and say that we become like what we worship. So it's no wonder that God describes the people as being stiff-necked, just like the golden calf that they're worshiping.

They can't turn their heads anymore. They're bent on doing evil. I love the way Christopher Wright talks about this and I shared a piece of this in an earlier session, but I'm going to reiterate it here because it's a good moment to do so.

Since idolatry diminishes the glory of God and since humans are made in the of God, it follows that idolatry is also detrimental to the very essence of our humanity. Idolatry is radical self-harm. It is also radically terribly ironic.

In trying to be as God, in the original temptation and rebellion, we have ended up becoming less human. If you worship that which is not God, you reduce the image of God in yourself. If you worship that which is not even human, you reduce your humanity still further.

So Moses confronts Aaron and he says, what were you thinking? And Aaron responds like many do when they're caught in the act and he tries to minimize his role in the event. Don't be angry, my lord. And Aaron answered, you know how prone these people are to evil.

They said to me, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don't know what's happened to him. So I told them, whoever has any gold jewelry, take it off.

So far this is a pretty accurate retelling of what happened. Then they gave me the gold and I threw it in the fire and out came this calf, which completely de-emphasizes his role. If we go back and compare, he made it into into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool.

Aaron was very much involved in designing this idol. It didn't just come out that way. It was not some miracle.

Moses saw the people were running wild and Aaron had let them get out of control and so become a laughing stock to their enemies. So he stood at the entrance of the camp and said, whoever is for Yahweh, come to me. And all the Levites rallied to him and he said to them, this is what Yahweh, the God of Israel says, each man strap a sword to his side, go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.

We didn't find any blood when we read the passage about what they're supposed to do when they get to Canaan, but we are going to find blood here. This is where God tells them to pick up a sword and kill people and it's their own people. It's people who have been bent on the worship of this golden calf.

We already learned in the book of the covenant that the penalty for worshiping false gods is death. So this is not some random fit of temper on Moses' part. He is carrying out what God said his will was at Sinai.

And so the Levites did as Moses commanded and that day about 3,000 of the people died. This is the word thousand again, we've talked about numbers before. This could be 3,000 or it could be three military units of the people who died.

Either one could fit the context and maybe the death of 3,000 is more likely in this case because it's men, women, and children who participated. Then Moses said, you have been set apart to Yahweh today for you were against your own sons and brothers and he's blessed you this day. So he's speaking here to the Levites who were willing to zealously carry out the punishment that God prescribed for idolatry.

So then Moses says to the people, you've committed a great sin, but now I will go up to Yahweh, perhaps I can make atonement for your sin. So he ascends the mountain again, he confesses what great sin these people have committed, making themselves a god of gold, but he says now please forgive their sin. And if not, then blot me out of the book you have written.

Moses says, if you're not going to forgive these people, this is over. He understands the future is untenable without forgiveness. We're not going to get 10 steps towards the promised land through the wilderness if God is unwilling to forgive us.

We won't survive. And the Lord struck the people with a plague because of what they did with the calf, but then Moses negotiates and intercedes some more so that God will forgive them. We're going to pick up the rest of that story in our session on the presence of God in chapters 33 and 34.

For now, what I want to notice is the placement of this really sad story in the book of Exodus. It functions literarily in a really interesting way because we've already seen chapters 25 to 31 is where the tabernacle instructions are given. Then we have the golden calf and we might imagine, oh, it's over now.

We've already broken the covenant. The tablets are shattered. I guess this is, I guess we're finished.

But then we see God reiterate his commitment, his covenant commitment to Israel, and we have a repetition of all the tabernacle information. Chapters 35 to 40 are the carrying out of the tabernacle instructions. And again, if you've done a Bible read through and you've gotten to chapter 35, you think, I thought I read all this already.

Do I have to go through it all again? It's so tedious. But do you see how tremendously important it is that we have it all over again to show this wasn't just a good idea that's now been derailed by the golden calf incident, but God's forgiveness is so complete that we're carrying on. We are now building the tabernacle that God prescribed.

In fact, we could stop to notice that the presence of a tabernacle, the whole idea of a tabernacle implies that there will need to be a means for securing forgiveness from God. That the people will have to have some kind of boundaries that keep them from stumbling into God's presence when they're not in the right state of mind and when they're not in a state of purity. But they're also going to need a system by which they can bring sacrifices to God and make confession and be made right with God.

So the tabernacle, as beautiful as it is, already anticipates that the people are going to sin and they're going to need forgiveness. So the golden calf was a difficult story to read and it did evoke God's anger and Moses' anger, but it does not bring an end to the covenant. Before the incident even occurs, God's given Moses the tabernacle blueprints which implies he has a plan to put things back on track and I think that is beautiful.

We already read the part of this story where Moses breaks the tablets. I want to return to that just to say sometimes people imagine this as a temper tantrum, that Moses is so mad he breaks it and oh man he shouldn't have done that. These were the tablets on which God had written himself, but actually Moses' burning anger is justified.

He feels the same way about this that God feels. It was God whose anger first burned and when Moses sees for himself what's going on, he shares God's assessment of that situation. To break the tablets was not a fit of rage.

It was a ritual demonstration that the people had themselves broken the covenant stipulations. They had already violated the very clear instructions that God had given and so to break the tablets was symbolic of that. There's such a striking contrast in this chapter between the leadership of Aaron and the leadership of Moses and it's worth pointing this out.

Aaron makes no attempt to correct the people. When they come to him and say, make us gods who could bring us out of Egypt or who can go before us, Aaron doesn't try to talk them out of it. He doesn't say, you heard for yourself we're not supposed to make graven images.

Here's the plan. This is what we're going to do to be faithful to God. Remember you signed on.

Remember you were sprinkled with blood. He doesn't say any of that. He just goes along with it.

Okay, bring me your earrings. Meanwhile, Moses, when he's faced with the possibility of having a special status, he refuses Yahweh's offer and intercedes instead. He intercedes for God's mercy for the nation where Aaron is caving into the people's desires.

Aaron tries to redeem the event by dedicating the festival to Yahweh and it seems like he's trying to kind of patch things up where Moses shows genuine concern for God's reputation and he shares God's anger over the incident. Aaron minimizes his own complicity in this event but Moses brings consequences to the idolaters and he binds his own life with the people's life. When he returns to the mountain, he says to God, what a great sin these people have committed.

Now forgive their sin but if not blot me out of the book you've written. He puts his own fate with the fate of the people. He puts his own life on the line by interceding for the people and begging for God's mercy and by doing that, he becomes a model for a kind of leadership that takes God's honor seriously, that takes sin seriously, but also stays in solidarity with the people and tries to walk with them with God.

I think it's a beautiful picture of leadership. Any questions about this event? When it describes God as relenting for destroying the people and also the events of the golden calf that broke the covenant, what does that say about God's sovereignty? How do we fit that into the idea that God is sovereign over history and events? Yeah, good question. There's two main views on how to read this passage, two main approaches, and I'll let people decide for themselves which they feel works better theologically.

So one approach would have a very high view of God's sovereignty and would say God can't change his mind. So what he's doing is testing Moses rather than actually changing. So he lays out this offer to Moses.

I'll start over with you because he wants Moses to intercede and when Moses does and he says, okay, good, we can go on with the plan I already planned, which was not to destroy them, but it was a test of Moses. Another approach is to say, yes, God is sovereign, but he's given people free will and here the people are exercising that will in negative ways and so God can freely choose to punish them for what they have freely chosen. And Moses says, oh, no, no, no, there's another way forward that I think is better for your reputation.

And so although it's within God's rights and it's consistent with his character because he does not leave the guilty unpunished, he could wipe them out, it's also consistent with his character to show mercy and to show compassion. And so Moses is not asking God to change who he is, but it's as if there's two possible ways forward in response to this, a more stringent response and a more merciful response. And Moses appeals for the other possibility and God says, okay, we'll go with that.

And the mystery here is that Moses seems to actually be having an impact on God's behavior, which is frankly a bit terrifying because if this really is true that humans can pray and intercede in a way that changes God's mind, then that puts a huge responsibility on us to actually pray with God's character and God's interests in mind and to not be self-absorbed and distracted and self-interested. So those are the two options. I think you can probably hear that I lean towards the stronger free will option and to take this text at face value, God relented, but I think a case can be made that God knew this was what he was planning and he's testing Moses and Moses passes the test.

Instead of just acting on his own interest, he's acting on God's interest. And I love the difference of this portrait of Moses from what we saw back in chapter three, where Moses is like, I can't go, I'm not qualified, I can't do this. And he's giving all these excuses and now we see him invested.

He's like, no, these are your people. You brought them out, your reputation's on the line. He could have been like, it's your problem, God, I'm going to go find something else to do.

But he's now invested in a way that is really beautiful.