Biblical Beginnings

This chapter examines the main narrative of the Golden Calf found in Exodus 32, as well as other allusions to this episode from Israel’s history from what became the canonical Hebrew Bible. The account of the Calf in Exodus appears to have been shaped by polemical imperatives in the earliest stages of its development, and reflects complex questions surrounding sanctioned forms of divine worship, the status of different priestly groups, and the relationship of those groups to the Israelite monarchies and the cult forms they sponsored. The conception of the Calf in Exodus appears to reflect ancient ideas about the sanctioned means of worshipping the God of Israel, with an older form of Israelite cult practice—the use of bulls or calves to suggest the invisible divine presence—being critiqued here. However, rather than corroborating the Exodus narrative’s presentation of the affair, the version of the episode preserved in Deuteronomy reflects the profoundly different imperatives of a later age. While the Exodus narrative ultimately hearkens back to a time in Israel’s history in which the making of the Calf was perceived primarily as a lamentable cultic infraction, the reframing of the narrative in Deuteronomy embeds it in a larger discourse in which the making of the Calf appears as the pre-eminent example of idolatry, a distinctive ideological construction of the exilic and post-exilic periods that marked all forms of religious practice not sanctioned as “orthodox” as betrayals of the covenant and regression to the worship of false gods.