The Golden Calf (Exodus 32-40)

[Exodus 32]

Suppose you're an Israelite. For 20 generations your forebears were held in forced-labor slavery in the punishing climes of Egypt. A guy and his brother turn up, name of Moses and Aaron, and convince the Pharaoh to release you and your 600,000 brethren from slavery. But it’s certainly not because these two guys are very persuasive - far from it. It's because they enjoy the backing of a celestial psychopath who hurls ten successive plagues and famines through the nation, annihilating a substantial portion of the population there and bringing your former master the Pharaoh to his knees.

Following the instructions of this obviously very dangerous supernatural potentate - a deity who casually and often describes himself as vengeful and jealous - you depart Egypt for a wilderness at the doorstep of a new homeland he’s promising you - Canaan. Before he allows you to proceed, however, he descends from the skies as a smoking pillar and puts on a Pink Floyd laser-light show while announcing elaborate, often bloody rules of conduct you’ll all be required to follow as his chosen people. A pair of his most important commandments, by the way, are not to worship anybody but him, and not to make statues to worship.

Dandy, marvellous. And then he – Yahweh – has Moses go up into the mountains to meet him personally (or smoke-pillar-ly, as the case may be) and receive an inscription of these laws in stone.

Well: then what? Because Moses doesn't turn back up for a few days. In fact it's more than a month. What to do? Well - be fair, what is there to do? Clearly the best option now is melt to down all the gold earrings in camp, rework them into the shape of a calf, and start praising it and sacrificing animals to it.

Now sure, this guy Yahweh can create half a trillion frogs or locusts with the wave of a hand, part a sea or rain down fire from the sky, kill possibly a quarter of a nation in the form of all its first-born males in the course of one night, and so on, et cetera, blah blah blah: but be reasonable here. You haven’t heard from the guy in six weeks. It’s high time for your people to entrust their general welfare and common future to a little statuette y'all slapped together in the course of an afternoon.

--It is actually Moses’ brother Aaron who carries out the calf-casting: and you would think of all people he would be the first to object to it. It was through Aaron himself, after all, that God turned the entire Nile river into blood. But when asked by the Israelite mob to cook up a new god… since the old god hasn't been working out for the last 47 days… he sets-to without hesitation.

And when that calf is ready everybody sets up an altar and makes some burnt sacrifices and conducts a merry old feast, even going so weirdly far as to thank the statue for freeing them from Egypt. The statue didn't even exist when they got freed from Egypt.

Meanwhile on Mount Sinai, the God/Moses confab continues. "Hey, Moses," God says, "seems that back at the foot of the mountain your countrymen just gave up the worship of me and have turned instead to a cow statue. So give me a moment to myself right now if you don't mind - I'm very upset here - while I go slaughter them. Obliterate the whole lot.

"But you're still a good guy as far as I'm concerned, Moses, so I'll set you up with another family that you can build into a mighty nation."

Moses appeals to Yahweh's vanity. "Well hey, God, if you killed all of them, wouldn't that just be egg in your face? I mean, what would the Egyptians say about you, going to all this trouble rescuing the Hebrews just to lead them up into the mountains and mass-murder them? Your credibility would be wrecked."

"Oh," God sighs, "I suppose you're right."

Moses comes down the mountain, and as he nears the bottom he's met by his lieutenant Joshua, who says that from the sound of it there's a war rally going on in the camp further on.

"That's no war rally!" Moses exclaims. "It is an unauthorized party!"

And when he reaches the foot of Sinai like the parents returning from vacation at the end of a teen summer-movie sex farce, and sees everybody singing and prancing around that golden calf, he dashes the two covenant tablets he's been given to the ground - then burns and pulverizes the calf, spreading the gold dust into the water supply to force everyone to drink it. Kind of like Goldschlager, I guess, but more drinkable.

But the natives appear restless, and recalcitrant. So Moses calls out, "Who's with me?" And the tribe of Levi steps forward en masse. "Great, Levites. Now wade back into camp with your swords drawn and start killing people." Which they do, cutting down 3000 Israelities before the sun goes down.

This seems to quell things.

The next day Moses goes back up the mountain to God and he says, "Look, I'm so embarrassed; I can hardly believe what these idiots have been up to. Please forgive them - but if you can't, then condemn me along with them."

God says not to worry: it's okay. Although he will ultimately hold everybody to account for what they've done.

As a down payment on which, he sets off a wee little plague.


[Exodus 33]

Well, God says to the Israelites, get packing into this land you've been promised. Only now I won't walk among you, because I would destroy you if I did.

Hearing this, the Hebrews remove all their finery and ornamentation in contrition. God says, "That's right, you don't deserve to wear finery after what you did. Now excuse me while I go contemplate your punishment." Which seems hardly all-knowing, that God needs a time-out to go think....

And about that part where God can't "walk among" the Hebrews without destroying them - I can't make out if that means God needs an anger management coach, or if the light of his righteousness would simply burn down anyone in his vicinity as sinful as these Israelites. I think it's more like the latter, since Moses, seeking some reassurance of God's favor after this discouraging announcement, asks that he (Moses) at least be allowed to get a peek at him (God). Since, you know, he won't walk with them and all.

(Really the whole thing comes across as pretty weird. For a short chapter, I've sure spent a long time reading and re-reading two translations of Exodus 33 here.)

Now Moses does a lot of "conversating" with God, but we now learn that this is done in the Tent of Meeting/Tabernacle, pitched a little ways outside town. When Moses enters the Tent of Meeting, a pillar of smoke descends from the sky and hovers outside the door - and the two talk through the flap, I guess.

But now Moses is asking to see God directly, in human form. And sure, God says, you can get a peek - just not my face. No man can see my face and live.

So, awkwardly, God situates Moses in a rock cleft with a narrow space to look out upon, and God strides by that opening in something like the way of a celebrity waving off paparazzi - with a palm outstretched to block his face from view.

Strange, strange.


[Exodus 34]

God orders: Moses, re-carve the covenant tablets you broke, and come up the mountain to talk to me first thing tomorrow morning.

Which sounds like an all-nighter in the offing if I've ever heard of one. Whew.

And when Moses dutifully appears atop Mount Sinai the next day, God starts the meeting by re-listing his own good qualities. I am compassionate and gracious, kind and forgiving, slow to anger (!), but when I choose not to forgive somebody I do it to the third and fourth generation, etc.

Moses prostrates himself and begs that God go forward in the Hebrews' midst with them up into Canaan. Cooly, coyly, God repeats the old business about how he'll drive from Canaan the Amorites, Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites; but whether he will "go in the midst of the Hebrews", whatever that really means exactly, he ain't saying.

--Make no covenants, God goes on to say, with any of the peoples of Canaan. They worship other gods and it'll lead you astray to get mixed up with them. Instead, "tear down their altars, smash their pillars, and cut down their sacred posts," (24:13) because my very name is "Jealous" (elsewhere translated "Impassioned") and I don't want you sharing in those people's sacrifices, or taking for wives any heathen women who'll preach pagan idolotry to your kids.

Then God offers up a Whitman's Sampler of random laws. Actually this forms another set of ten commandments, sometimes called the "ritual decalogue" in contradistinction with the familar "ethical decalogue" (aka, "the regular ten commandments".

(And then to confuse things further, the regular ten commandments themselves will get repeated in the book of Deuteronomy - with slight changes, of course.)

So the "ritual" ten commandments are:

(1) Make no molten gods. ...As you may recall us having rather recently discussed.

(2) Observe Passover by eating flatbread for seven days each year in the month of Abib.

(3) Every first-born male born among you must be sacrificed to me, except for first-born-male asses and humans; these can be redeemed by the sacrifice of a proxy animal (a sheep).

You know, something like the way rich Civil War draftees paid poor people to fight in their place.

(4) And then we get a quote which should stand in block capital letters in front of every church everywhere:

"NONE SHALL APPEAR BEFORE ME EMPTY-HANDED." (Exodus 34:20)

Because God needs your sheep and your goat hair and dolphin skins - and your Visa card number, expiration date, and CVV2 security code.

(5) "Six days you shall work, but in the seventh day you shall cease from labor even at plowing time and harvest time." (24:21) Which clearly means you're not allowed to dial a telephone number after sundown on Friday, duh.

(6) All males must gather to observe the Feast of Weeks, the first fruits of the wheat harvest, and the Feast of Ingathering. Frankly, these holidays seem to have slipped somewhat off the radar screen sometime in the last couple millennia.

(7) Do not make animal sacrifices to me with leavened breads (because animal sacrifices are accompanied by cereal offerings: see Leviticus coming up).

(8) The lamb you eat for Passover must be consumed by morning.

(9) The first fruits of the ground (all plant agriculture, then? Excluding hydroponics, of course) must be sacrificed to me.

(10) Do not boil a kid goat in its mother's milk. Which is important. Because, come clean - you know you've been tempted.

This transmission of laws takes Moses 40 days and nights to receive, during which time he eats and drinks nothing. By my math, that comes to about one starvation-hallucinated commandment every four days....

Returning from the mountain, Moses is so far from appearing nearly dead that instead his coreligionists are veritably assaulted by the "radiance" of his face. In fact for awhile afterward he literally needs to wear a veil...?


[Exodus 35]

Moses gathers everybody together to proclaim:

Keep the Sabbath. And tend to no fires during the Sabbath, for not only does the LORD insist you use no telephones that day, but that you also be cold.

God needs gifts, right now - gold, silver, copper, blue or purple or crimson yarn, linen, goat hair, ram skins, dolphin skins, acacia wood, lighting oil, spices and incense, and lapis lazuli and other stones.

Make: the Tent of Meeting/Tabernacle (but Moses has already been using that?), the Ark of the Covenant, the sacrifical table and its utensils and its bread of display, the lampstand, the incense altar, the anointing oil, the Tent-of-Meeting entrance screen, the burnt-offering altar, the laver (washbasin), the hangings (ceremonial decorations?), the screen for the gate of the court outside the Tent of Meeting, the sacral apparel for the priests which is certainly not to exclude the holy breastplate and ephod... and, don't forget, a whole mess of tent pegs to pin this place down.

And thus convened the First Annual Sinai Regional Arts and Crafts Festival.

We close the chapter with a repeat shout-out to the craftsmanly skills of Bezalel and Oholiab, whom we heard of earlier in Exodus 31.


[Exodus 36]

Whoa, this last stretch of the book is a slog.

Exodus 25-30 were completely swamped with long instructions on how to construct various relics and implements for ceremonies and sacrifices. Now Exodus 36-40 repeat, excruciatingly, pretty much the same information, just swapping out the command form ("Make an ark...") for the declarative ("They made an ark...").

And so they make the Tent of Meeting, which, it must not be overlooked, incorporated ten 28-cubit-by4-cubit cloth strips with fifty blue-wool loops along each cloth's longer edge, clasped to the 50 blue-wool loops of the next cloth with 50 gold clasps....

Wake up, wake up! Don't worry, I won't summarize all of this. Couldn't possibly. Geeeaaugh.

But there's the tent, and a tent enclosing the tent; and, in the inner tent, an elaborate acacia-wood tabernacle platform of many many planks with many many sockets.


[Exodus 37]

Bezalel builds the Ark of the Covenant of acacia wood overlaid with gold. Also the table and lampstand and incense altar...


[Exodus 38]

...and burnt-offering altar, and laver, and the decorated linen fence for a 100-by-50-cubit enclosure. I suppose the enclosure is for meetings (ie, "Tent of Meeting") but also to use as a waiting room for all the folks dropping by with animals to sacrifice (again, see Leviticus coming up).

Then, a pretty nigglingly precise accounting of how many talents of each sort of precious metal were used in these overlays and in the casting of sockets. One could make a little joke at this point referencing the stereotype of Hebraic stinginess? But I will maintain some propriety. Plus I put no stock into that stereotype: it's just that some passages like this one, and the one in Genesis 23 when six or eight paragraphs went into describing the price Abraham haggled out for a burial site for his wife, kind of make you pause and scratch your head.


[Exodus 39]

And then all the the pretty pretty clothes get made for the priests: blue, purple, and crimson yarns for their main garment, with a gorgeous little ephod overlaid (that's a sort of apron) whose own lovely colored yarns are braided with beaten strands of gold, and display the engraved names of the sons of Israel on embedded lapis lazuli stones; and my goodness, there's also the gold breastpiece, which to call fabulous is hardly doing it justice, and the pretty robe studded with little bells and dangling yarn pomegranates, and then also the tunic and frontlet: oh. but. this. outfit. was. to. die. for.

As, indeed, are many a fatted bull and yearling lamb going to be finding out.


[Exodus 40]

God tells Moses to set up all this stuff on the first day of the first month. And yea verily it is done, and yea verily there is much repetition of how it is done.