Exodus 32:1
We wot not what is become of him
The trigger is a missing man and an unbearable wait. The request is for something that goes before them, which is what the pillar had been doing.
Objects of the Bible
The golden calf
Not a rival god. It was given the right name and the wrong shape, and that turned out to be worse.
The request is about absence rather than belief. Up, make us gods which shall go before us, for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him. Aaron asks for the gold earrings of their wives and sons and daughters, which they bring, and he fashions it with a graving tool and makes a molten calf. Then the sentence that makes it worse: these be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.
Scroll down to the story
The movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of The golden calf
- 01
- 02
Exodus 32:2-4
He fashioned it with a graving tool
Aaron does the work himself, and the account says so plainly here and lets him tell a different version twenty verses later.
- 03
Exodus 32:5-6
Tomorrow is a feast to the LORD
The covenant name is used over the calf. Nobody has swapped gods; they have swapped what God is allowed to look like.
- 04
Exodus 32:21-24
There came out this calf
Asked what the people did to him, Aaron says he threw the gold in the fire and the calf emerged on its own. It is the least convincing sentence he ever speaks.
- 05
Exodus 32:30-32
Blot me out of thy book
Moses goes back up to make an atonement and offers himself instead of them, which is refused, and the chapter ends without the matter resolved.
Why it matters
And then Aaron builds an altar before it and proclaims a feast to the LORD, using the covenant name. Nobody in this chapter is trying to change gods. They are trying to get a visible one, and the word used for what follows is play. What breaks the tablets is not idolatry in the abstract but a picture of the right God at the wrong moment, forty days into a covenant that opens by forbidding exactly this. The calf is burnt, ground to powder, strewed on water, and the people are made to drink it.
1 song
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
