Golden Calf

Was the Tabernacle constructed only in response to the golden calf? Rashi and Nachmanides’s disagreement on this fundamental question highlights the structural problem in the second half of the book of Exodus, created when the compiler of the Torah interwove the E and P sources.

Targum Onqelos usually offers a straightforward Aramaic rendering of the biblical verse. The Palestinian Targums (=Targum Yerushalmi), in contrast, offer more expansive, midrashic renderings of the verse. Numbers 24:1, in which Balaam looks to the wilderness, offers us a further glimpse into a world with multiple Targumic traditions.

Originally, the golden calf story was just one among many incidents in which the Israelites sin and antagonize YHWH in the wilderness. Later scribes expanded the story as a critique of northern worship sites and also added the Decalogue, with the first few laws being composed as a point-by-point response to Israel’s sin.

Northern Israel worshipped El/YHWH in the form of a golden bull. The Bible mocks this graven representation of the divinity by describing it as a calf.

Rachel steals teraphim from her father Laban; Michal uses them to save her husband David from her father Saul; Micah includes them in the shrine he builds on his property. What are they and how do they function in these stories?

Jeroboam makes two golden calves, and sets them up at Dan and Bethel. Post-exilic biblical scribes revised this archetypal act of apostasy by introducing a new version of the same sin set in a more ancient period: Aaron's Golden Calf at the foot of Mount Sinai.

Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of a statue made of four metals in Daniel 2 was composed using Persian and Greek historiographic imagery. The crushing of the statue by a stone mountain alludes to the story of the golden calf, and is a message of hope to the Judeans that God will eventually crush their Greek oppressors.

Atop the kappōret, the ark’s cover, sat the golden cherubim, which framed the empty space (tokh) where God would speak with Moses. Drawing on the connection between the word kappōret and the root כ.פ.ר (“atone”), and noting how the golden calf episode interrupts the Tabernacle account, the rabbis suggest that the ark cover served as a means of atoning for the Israelites’ collective sin.

Many scholars, traditional and academic, believe it was worship of another god, the first commandment in the Decalogue, but what Aaron actually claims about the calf points to a different collection of laws.

The story of the Golden Calf overtly describes a religious sin in the wilderness generation, but aspects of the story also evoke the (later) behavior of King Jeroboam I of Israel. Ancient readers would have understood these resonances as having political ramifications.

The golden calf is a Jewish version of the “fall” of Adam and Eve in Christian tradition.

The Talmud has God congratulating Moses for shattering the Tablets, however, a midrash criticizes him for venting his anger, quoting the verse, “Anger resides in the bosom of fools” (Ecclesiastes 7:9). Was his act commendable or lamentable? 

Exodus versus Deuteronomy

The Torah describes the Levites as a landless Israelite tribe who inherited their position by responding to Moses’ call to take vengeance against sinning Israelites. This account masks a more complicated historical process.

And Moses’ decision to break the tablets

The well-known rabbinic principle of אין מוקדם ומאוחר בתורה (there is no chronological order in the Torah) is often understood to be a hermeneutical solution to a textual, peshat problem. The principle, however, should be understood as midrashic, formulated to highlight other reasons for which biblical accounts could have been juxtaposed.

“YHWH said to Moses: ‘Come up to me on the mountain and stay there so that I might give you the tablets of stone and the teaching and the commandment that I have written to teach them.’”—Exodus 24:12