Thread by @JoelBaden

#Exodus 32:1-6

The golden calf

Let’s get the story straight here:

Despite what you may have heard or read, the sin of the golden calf was not idolatry or apostasy.

Come and see.

What is it that prompts the people to make the calf? It’s not the absence of YHWH, who was never just hanging around the camp anyway. It’s the absence of Moses - without whom their access to the deity is eliminated. They don’t need a new god - YHWH hasn’t changed.

What they need is a new conduit to the deity. Specifically, they’re stuck in the middle of the wilderness and need someone, or something, to lead them through. We don’t know what happened to Moses, they say. You don’t replace Moses with a different god. They didn’t worship him.

When they make the calf, the people exclaim, famously, “This is your god, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.” They knew which god did that. There’s no notion anywhere that any other deity might have been responsible for the Exodus. This god is YHWH.

Of course, this famous line, and the entire story, is also a clear allusion to the two golden calves set up in the northern sanctuaries of Dan and Bethel by Jeroboam (1 Kgs 12:28). Those weren’t sanctuaries to some foreign god. They were sanctuaries dedicated to YHWH.

And, most obviously, Aaron pretty explicitly declares “tomorrow will be a festival of YHWH.” Which would be a pretty weird thing to say if they were making a statue of some other deity.

But why a calf to represent YHWH? This puzzled early interpreters so much that they assumed that the Israelites must have been worshipping the Egyptian Apis bull deity, since YHWH isn’t associated with calves or bulls.

The bull and calf, after all, were the emblems of the Canaanite deities El and Baal. More evidence of apostasy and idolatry, then? No: evidence of the way that YHWH was depicted and understood in classically Canaanite terms and images.

Which is totally standard. YHWH is also depicted as a storm god, the imagery of which is entirely taken from Baal. There’s nothing weird about YHWH being conceived of as a calf, especially in the north, where Canaanite influence was always considerably stronger.

The sin of the golden calf isn’t idolatry or apostasy. They intended to worship YHWH. The problem isn’t that they’re worshipping the wrong god. It’s that they’re worshipping the right god in the wrong way.

Readers have long thought that Israel was violating the first of the Ten Commandments. This was especially important for Christian interpreters, who could then claim that Jews had broken and thus given up claim to the fundamental relationship with God.

But we know - those of you who have been following along - that the Ten Commandments weren’t even originally part of this story. Israel didn’t break the first commandment - it broke the first law of the Covenant Code.

Not “don’t worship other gods,” but “don’t make any gods of silver or gold with me” (20:23). That’s precisely what they’ve done here. And within this E story, it’s much more powerful. This is the covenant the whole theophany centered around, that they heard and accepted.

And literally the first thing they do upon Moses’s disappearance for forty days and nights, during which he’s getting the physical copy of those very covenantal laws, is to violate the very first one. No wonder YHWH is angry.

And thus we return to the polemic of the story, against the northern sanctuaries of Dan and Bethel. Those are sanctuaries for YHWH, but they’re doing it wrong. That’s their sin - not idolatry. The polemic here is very precise: those sanctuaries violate YHWH’s primary law.

The whole thing works wonderfully, tying in the Exodus, the Covenant Code, the polemic, the immediate and broader narrative context. It is still Israel’s cardinal sin according to E. But it’s not the sin that so many interpreters, especially early Christian ones, think it is.