185: Golden Calf
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From W.B. E.C. Chicago, the Public Radio International, It's This American Life, Armada Glass. And friends, let's begin. Open your Bibles, please, to the Book of Exodus, Chapter 32. God has just brought the Israelites out of Egypt. He's heard their prayers. They're not slaves anymore. They're in the desert. Moses is now up on Mount Sinai, where God is giving them the Ten Commandments. And it is taking a while. And although evidence of God's existence couldn't have been clearer, just days and weeks before, he split the Red Sea for them and they marched across. He drowned Pharaoh's army for them. He punished the Egyptians with boils and locusts and frogs, even though God had done all that. Now they're in the desert, Moses is gone. And it's been a while. And in a certain way, in this moment, the Israelites are just like us, hapless idiots wandering around, wondering what their future will be, where their God is. God even cares. So they go to Moses' brother, Aaron, and ask him to make some gods. He collects some gold, makes the golden calf. God learns about it. And he is not happy. Biblical scholar Pauline Viviano picks up the story from there. God is going to kill everyone. He tells Moses that he's going to wipe him out and Moses intercedes. It's one of the greatest dialogues of the Bible because Moses pretty much convinces God not to destroy the people because if he does so, he'll ruin his reputation as a God. People will say this y'all play God. He just brings people out in the desert to destroy them, so that if he wants to maintain his reputation, he better not wipe them out. God apparently decides that he wants to protect his reputation. Or of course, being God, he has reasons for the whole thing that we will never understand. Whatever. In any case, God has mercy. Only 3,000 people were killed. The golden calf has destroyed. And this turns out to be a lesson that happens again and again in the Bible. It's made over and over and over and over again throughout the biblical text. As soon as you get into the historical books of the Bible, the pervasive or the continuous sin of the people is that they worship other gods. And so constantly every catastrophe is understood in terms of Yahweh punishing his people further their failure to worship him alone. The idea that you would have a God who does not want you to worship other gods, which seems completely normal to us. As best as anybody can tell, at the time of the Bible, God is a brand new idea. The people in that part of the world at that time mostly seem to worship lots of gods. Gods who did not care who else you worshiped. And it turns out that it is not an accident that it's a golden calf in this story that's being worshipped in this key moment in the desert. Here's Professor John Spencer who had the passage on the golden calf and the anchor dictionary of theology. There were many traditions in the ancient Near East where people did indeed worship a calf or a golden calf or a bull. There sometimes were calves that were made out of bronze. There were sometimes calves that had either a silver or a gold alloy put over the outside of them. And probably the story was intended to set the traditions of the Israelite peoples, the ancient Israelite peoples, apart from those who did indeed worship the golden calf. Indeed, at one point in the ancient Near East and ancient Israel, there was a division between the Israelites, between the northerners and southerners, and the northerners went off and continued to worship the golden calf. But the Bible that we have is actually the sacred text of the Southerners who hadn't gotten along so great with the northerners. In the Southerners version of the story, the calf was clearly offensive to God. But imagine for a moment, the story told from the perspective of the northerners. At that period of time, the most normal thing would seem to be, well, you worship a God who's in charge of fertility and a God who's in charge of architecture and a God who's in charge of something else. So you have these multiple deities. From their perspective, you need all the help you can get. And worshiping a golden calf, that would be a fertility image. And fertility is what's going to be the most important thing, settled in a land that is not very fertile.
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