When the Golden Calf story takes place, they are waiting for Moses to return from the mountain with the Ten Commandments, which explicitly prohibit depicting God in a physical form. One might argue this story is out of place because the Ten Commandments were given in a prior text, in Exodus, Chapter Or we can resort to the Rabbinic interpretive dictum, ein mukdam um'uchar batorah, "there is no earlier or later in the Torah" see Rashi on Exodus While this teaching solves the chronology problem, it tells us little about the meaning of the story.
For a better understanding, let's take a closer look at the text. When the people insist that Aaron make a god who will go before them, they give this reason: "for that man Moses, who brought us out from the land of Egypt — we do not know what happened to him" Exodus Why are Moses's whereabouts so important to them? Why are they so dependent upon Moses? Perhaps the people depend heavily on Moses because it is just recently that they have been freed from slavery and they still feel a need for the kind of dictatorial rule they had experienced under Pharaoh.
Since Pharaoh was considered a god in Egypt, perhaps they considered Moses a god. When Moses is not available they feel God is absent: they become frightened and disoriented, and need a physical representation of a deity.
As we know, Moses was not good at delegating, so he may have encouraged the people's dependency. Leaders often are tempted to make their organizations overly dependent upon them. For Moses, it took the wisdom of his father-in-law Yitro to help him delegate and develop a governing structure see Exodus What about Aaron?
Why is he incapable or unwilling to help the Israelites deal with Moses's absence without giving in to their desire for an idol? Although he is High Priest, Aaron demonstrates a lack of leadership for which there are several possible explanations:. Another perplexing aspect of the story is the extraordinary level of anger expressed by God over the Golden Calf incident. God tells Moses he will destroy the people, saying, "Now, let Me be, that My anger may blaze forth against them and that I may destroy them" Exodus Shouldn't God have anticipated how challenging it would be for the Israelites to rely on an invisible God who utilized an almost superhuman representative to communicate the new way of doing things?
Shouldn't God have understood that without Moses to reassure them, the people would revert to old, familiar methods of worship to help them cope with crisis of Moses's absence? For me, God, as portrayed in the Tanach, is a complex personality. Sometimes God just doesn't seem to get it. Perhaps God expects that after the extraordinary deliverance from Egypt the Israelites would understand and obey God's word.
But given their long subjugation, this expectation may not have been realistic. God, in this way, is not very different from many of us who are parents. We expect our children to know how to behave because we have told them what to do, but sometimes we do not understand the complexity of what we are asking. Here, God is angry because the people do not comprehend how the Eternal is truly different from other gods that are worshipped.
In the first three months, the children of Israel left Egypt and went to Horeb in the wilderness of Sinai. Horeb is another name for Mount Sinai. This period of years represents the time it takes for a new generation to arise Numbers Biblical description According to the biblical story, Moses departed to the mountain and stayed there for 40 days and nights in order to receive the Ten Commandments and he did so twice because he broke the first set of the tablets of stone after returning from the mountain for the first time.
The Ark of the Covenant is a chest that held tablets engraved with the Ten Commandments. According to the Hebrew Bible, the ark was constructed by the Israelites while they were camping out in the Sinai Desert, after they fled Egypt. One day, when he was in the desert, Moses heard the voice of God speaking to him through a bush which flamed but did not burn. God asked Moses to lead his people out of slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land. Moses was at first reluctant, thinking that the Israelites would not believe he had heard the word of God.
Why was Moses not allowed to enter the Promised Land? Moses was not allowed to enter the Promised Land because when God told him to speak to a rock so that it would send out water for the Israelites to drink in the desert, Moses struck the rock with his staff instead. In another exegesis, Moses had ascended to the first heaven until the seventh, even visited Paradise and Hell alive, after he saw the Divine vision in Mount Horeb.
Jerusalem Post Lite. March of the living. Kabbalat Shabbat. Shapers of Israel. Maariv Online. Maariv News. Tools and services. JPost Premium. Ulpan Online. JPost Newsletter. JPost News Ticker. Our Magazines. Learn Hebrew. RSS feed. Digital Library. Promo Content.
0コメント