sophiaserpentia | (no subject)

Richard Elliott Friedman in Who Wrote the Bible? on the golden calf story and what it signifies in the cultural conflicts between Judah and Israel. This book receives my highest possible recommendation to any lay reader who is interested in Biblical scholarship.

This analysis presupposes a cursory familiarity with the "Graf-Wellhausen Documentary Hypothesis".

The story of the golden calf is from the "E" text.

While Moses is getting the Ten Commandments on the mountain of God, Aaron makes a golden calf for the people. They say, "These are your gods, Israel, that brought you up from the land of Egypt." Aaron says, "A holiday to Yahweh tomorrow!" The people sacrifice and celebrate wildly. Meanwhile, God tells Moses what is happening below, and God says that he will destroy the people and start a new people descended from Moses. Moses pleads with God to be merciful, and God relents. Moses comes down from the mountain with his assistant Joshua. When he sees the calf and the condition of the people, he smashes the tablets in anger. Then the tribe of Levi gather around Moses and carry out a bloody purge among the people. Moses makes a plea to God to forgive the people's offense and not destroy them.

The story is all questions. Why did the person who wrote this story depict his people as rebellious at the very time of their liberation and their receiving the covenant? Why did he picture Aaron as leader of the heresy? Why does Aaron not suffer any punishment for it in the end? Why did the author picture a golden calf? ... pp. 70-71

To explain Friedman's analysis of this story we have to examine some of the historical background he established earlier in the book.

The best analysis of [the Biblical accounts of King Solomon's policies] is by an American biblical scholar, Baruch Halpern. ... He demonstrated that Solomon's domestic and foreign policies threatened the country's unity.

...For one thing, he had removed the northern community's chief priest, Abiathar. For another example, there were, of course, taxes to be paid by everyone... but, as Halpern pointed out, the record of Solomon's building projects shows that he spent the tax revenues disproportionately on military defenses in the south. ....

If all of this did not convince the populace that their king meant to exercise powerful centralized control from Jerusalem, Solomon established one more economic policy that could leave no doubt. He instituted the missim. The term missim in Hebrew refers to a sort of tax, not of money but of physical labor. Citizens owed a month of required work to the government each year. ...

We have two pieces of evidence of just how bitter [a pill] this was. The first is that the writers of the book of Exodus later described the Egyptian supervisors of the Israelite slaves not by the usual term "taskmasters," but rather as "officers of missim." ...

The second piece of evidence is an incident that took place shortly after Solomon died. [His son] Rehoboam went to Shechem, a major city in the north, for coronation. The northern leaders asked him if he intended to continue his father's policies. Rehoboam said that he did. The northern tribes seceded. ... [T]he first act of rebellion was their stoning one of Rehoboam's officials to death. The man they stoned was the chief of the missim.

And so Rehoboam ruled only in Judah (and Benjamin, which Judah dominated). The rest of Israel chose a man named Jeroboam as king.

...The Temple, the ark, and the chief priest of that religion were all located in Jerusalem. This meant that at least on holidays, and on various other occasions as well, masses of Jeroboam's population would cross the border into Judah, taking a sizable portion of the country's livestock and produce with them for sacrifices. ....

Jeroboam could not just make up a new religion to keep the people from going to Jerusalem. He could, however, establish for his new kingdom its own national version of the common religion.

And so the kingdom of Israel, like the kingdom of Judah, continued to worship Yahweh, but Jeroboam established new religious centers, new holidays, new priests, and new symbols of the religion. The new religious centers that were to substitute for Jerusalem were the cities of Dan and Beth-El. ...

Jeroboam's new national religious holiday was celebrated in the fall, one month after the major fall holiday of Judah. His new symbols of the religion, instead of the two golden cherubs in Jerusalem, were two molten golden calves. ... The calf, or young bull, was often associated with the god El, the chief god of the Canaanites, who was in fact referred to as "Bull El." We therefore have some reason to believe that Jeroboam's version of the religion somehow identified Yahweh with El. The idea that Yahweh and El were one would have the added value of further uniting the Israelite population with the still large Canaanite population in Jeroboam's kingdom. pp. 43-47

And now, to revisit the story of the golden calf:

...We have already seen considerable evidence that the author of J was from Judah and the author of E from Israel. We have also seen evidence that suggests that the Israelite author of E had a particular interest in matters that related to King Jeroboam and his policies. ... Further, E is a source which particularly emphasizes Moses as its hero, much more than J does. In this story, it is Moses' intercession with God that saves the people from destruction. E also especially develops Moses' personal role in the liberation from slavery, in a way that J does not. ...

Recall that the priests of Shiloh suffered the loss of their place in the priestly heirarchy under King Solomon. Their chief, Abiathar, was expelled from Jersualem. The other chief priest, Zadok, who was regarded as a descendant of Aaron, meanwhile remained in power. ... The Shiloh priests' hopes for the new kingdom, however, were frustrated when Jeroboam established the golden calf religious centers at Dan and Beth-El, and he did not appoint them as priests there. For this old family of priests, what should have been a time of liberation had been turned into a time of religious betrayal. The symbol of their exclusion in Israel was the golden calves. The symbol of their exclusion in Judah was Aaron. Someone from that family, the author of E, wrote a story that said that soon after the Israelites' liberation from slavery, they committed heresy. What was the heresy? They worshipped a golden calf! Who made the golden calf? Aaron!

The details of the story fall into place. Why does Aaron not suffer any punishment in the story? Because no matter how much antipathy the author may have felt toward Aaron's descendants, that author could not change the entire historical recollection of his people. They had a tradition that Aaron was an ancient high priest. ...

Why does Aaron say, "A holiday to Yahweh tomorrow" when he is presenting the calf as a rival to Yahweh? Because the calf is not in fact a rival god. The calf, or young bull, is only the throne platform or symbol of the deity, not a deity itself. ...

Why did the writer of E picture the Levites as acting in bloody zeal? He was a Levite. He wrote that Aaron had acted rebelliously while the other Levites alone acted loyally. Moses tells the Levites there that they have earned blessing by their actions. ...

Why did the writer picture Moses as smashing the tablets of the Ten Commandments? Possibly because this raised doubts about Judah's central religious shrine. The Temple in Judah housed the ark that was supposed to contain the two tablets of the Ten Commandments. According to the E story of the golden calf, Moses smashes the tablets. That means that according to the E source the ark down south in the Temple in Jerusalem either contains unauthentic tablets or no tablets at all. pp. 71-74.