Exodus 32:1-6

"And when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mount, the people gathered themselves together unto Aaron, and said unto him, Up, make us gods which shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we know not what has become of him. And Aaron said unto them, Break off the golden rings which are' in the ears of your wives, of your sons and of your daughters, and bring them unto me. And all the people brake off the golden rings which were in their ears, and brought them unto Aaron. And he received it at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, and made it a molten calf: and they said, These are thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt. And when Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation, and said, Tomorrow shall be a feast to Jehovah. And they rose up early on the morrow, and offered burnt-offerings, and brought peace-offerings; and the people sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play."

In the same sentence with his confessing that criticism found it impossible to trace what he called the "development" of this passage, Harford still supposed that the passage reflects "prophetic criticism of Jeroboam's two calves",[1] but, as noted above, all such views are unacceptable. Critics, however, still quote one another, adopting stereotyped "explanations" which have long ago been proved inaccurate and worthless, as did Honeycutt.[2] It is true, of course, that when Jeroboam introduced the golden calves at Dan and at Bethel, that he quoted the exact words used by Aaron in this paragraph; but to distort that truth and make Exodus a quotation of Jeroboam II is ridiculous. It should be remembered that Jeroboam was trying to justify what he did.

"Up, make us gods ..." In this clause, we are confronted with the problem of how to translate [~'Elohiym], which is plural in form but frequently translated in the O.T. as the name of the One God. Even the use of plural verbs here is not decisive, because they might have been plurals of majesty. Johnson noted that the commentators are divided, "because we do not know just what was in the minds of the people."[3] To us, the problem is solved by the fact that Aaron made only one god; and that the people had in mind a plurality is not indicated in the text. Therefore, we believe that the passage should be read "Make us a god." That this is certainly an allowable understanding of the place appears in the ASV marginal note substituting "a god" for "gods." "It here denotes `a god' and should be so rendered."[4]

"Gathered themselves together unto Aaron ..." "Unto Aaron," here, would be better rendered "against Aaron."[5] The New English Bible reads "confronted Aaron." In any case, it is clear that no ordinary gathering occurred. It was a belligerent and demanding mob that descended upon Aaron.

"Break off the golden rings in the ears of wives ... sons ... daughters ... and all the people brake off, etc ..." From this, it appears that "all the people," men and women wore gold rings in their ears. As Esses noted, "As part of the idolatrous practices they had picked up in Egypt, even the sons were wearing ear-rings. Sounds like the 20th century, doesn't it?"[6] The amount of the gold accumulated by this action was fantastic, no matter how it might be calculated. There were at least two million people in the exodus - that's gold rings in 4 million ears, had they weighed only a 1/4 ounce each, would have been 1,000,000 ounces, or 83,333 pounds of gold, Troy - enough gold to have gold-plated Mount Sinai! This sheds light on how that gold calf was made. The usual supposition that it was merely a wooden carving plated with gold appears, therefore, to be an error. The use of the words "molten calf" and "graving tool" in Exodus 32:4 appear to indicate that it was an idol made of SOLID gold. The size of it was nowhere hinted at; God's calling it a "calf' might have been deprecatory, even if the image had been that of a full-size bull.

"These are thy gods, O Israel ..." The Jerusalem Bible should be followed here. It reads, "Here is your god."

"Built an altar before it ... made proclamation ... a feast to Jehovah ..." It is supposed that Aaron thought by such maneuvers to combine the worship of the true God Jehovah with the worship of his golden idol, no doubt adopting the fallacious reasoning by which all idolatry has been "justified" in all ages. If so, the device was futile. No matter how they might have looked at it, their actions constituted the most sinful disobedience and idolatry.

Where did Israel get the idea for making a bull idol? This is a very large question, and space here does not allow a full discussion of it; but to this writer it seems certain that Egypt was the background of this apostasy, and not the Baal-cults of Canaan. Fields has a very instructive dissertation on this, proposing that the idolatry here was a reversion to the pagan idolatry of Abraham's ancestors in Chaldea.[7] And as for the allegation that the Israelites were here worshipping Jehovah "under the symbol" of a golden calf, such a view is impossible of acceptance. Psalms 106:21 says that "they forgot God" upon the occasion of their making that idol, and this means that they were NOT worshipping Him in any sense whatever in the events recorded here.

"They offered burnt-offerings, and brought peace-offerings ..." Both types of offerings here were exactly those that might have been offered by any pagan who had never heard of Jehovah. As a matter of fact, "Both types (with the same Semitic root as the Hebrew) figure in the second millennium texts from Ugarit."[8] Of course, this absolutely forbids the nonsense of dating the passage from the days of Jeroboam.

"The people sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play ..." The expression, "to play" appears innocent enough here, but such was not the case at all. Paul's inspired analysis of this situation (1 Corinthians 10:7-8) is worth a thousand comments from other sources, and he stated that "three and twenty thousand of them committed adultery." It is true that Paul was speaking of a somewhat later incident at Baal-Peor, but the clear intent was that of equating "to play" with a pagan sex orgy, visible both at Baal-Peor and here.

Thus, within the very shadow of the sacred mountain where the Law had been given, the covenant ratified, and at the very moment when Moses was still communing with God upon Sinai, Israel broke the covenant, forgot God, made a molten image, worshipped it, and committed wholesale adultery and fornication. Thus, at one stroke, they violated Commandments I, II, III, and VII. Their breaking of the second commandment was inherent in their calling their idolatrous feast, "a feast unto Jehovah."