The God You Can Make

It took 40 days, no more. That is how long Moses stood up on the mountain, in the cloud, where the thunder lived and the fire, and below the people began to shuffle. This Moses (you can already hear the contempt in the word), this Moses, who led us out of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him. Six weeks without visible leadership, and the faith of an entire nation began to tip. God had done nothing wrong. He was silent, He was high, and He could not be seen. There is little that frightens a human being as much as a God who is silent; His thunder we endure better than His stillness. In that silence their hands began to itch for something they could touch.

So they went to Aaron, the brother of Moses, the man who should have kept watch. Make us gods, they said, who will go before us. They did not ask for a new leader. They asked for a god they could make, something tangible, something that walks alongside, something you can see when the mountain falls silent. Aaron, who should have refused, asked for their gold, melted it down and cast it into a calf, a young bull-calf, the image of strength and fertility known across half the ancient East. The people pointed at it and shouted: these are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.

The folly piles up into something that would be comic if it were not so bitter. A statue, a handful of earrings just yesterday, gets the credit for an exodus it never lived through. The gold God had let them carry out of Egypt, they melt down into the god who supposedly led them out of Egypt. The bitterest part lies in the name they give the feast: "a feast to YHWH." They did not want to lose the real God. They only wanted Him in a form they could see and steer, a god the right size, one that fits on a pedestal and does not fall silent for 40 days in a cloud.

Go down, God said to Moses up in the cloud, for your people has corrupted itself. Your people, He now says, and no longer Mine. Let Me alone; My wrath will burn against them and consume them, and I will make of you a great nation. It was an offer any ambitious man would seize with both hands. He could start over as the new Abraham, with a clean slate and a great line of descendants. Moses refused. He went and stood between God and the people and pleaded. He could not appeal to the goodness of the people, for there was none; he pleaded on two things that lay outside the people. The first was God's honor. Why should the Egyptians say that You led them out only to kill them in the mountains? The second was the oath. Remember Abraham, Isaac and Israel, to whom You swore by Your own self. And it is written that YHWH relented concerning the disaster He had said He would bring on His people. The intercessor held back the arm of God, and God let Himself be held back.

Whoever listens closely hears no cold calculation in that anger. Not even 40 days earlier, at the foot of the same mountain, the people had sealed the covenant with blood and a meal (Exod 24). The anger that "burns" (charah af, literally: the nostrils grow hot) is the heat of a wounded love. And a God who asks to be let go leaves the door ajar. Ancient Jewish interpretation heard in "let Me alone" an invitation to Moses to hold on to Him.

Moses comes down, the two stone tablets in his arms, written by the finger of God. Joshua hears the noise from the camp and thinks of war, but Moses hears it better: no one is shouting over a victory, and no one is wailing over a defeat. There is singing. When he comes around the rock and sees the calf and the dancing, his own anger blazes up, and he hurls the tablets to pieces against the mountain. The covenant, carved in stone, breaks at the foot of the mountain just as the people had already broken it from above. He takes the calf, burns it, grinds it to powder, scatters it on the water and makes the Israelites drink it. The god they had poured for themselves goes through their insides as grit. A god you can melt yourself, you can also grind to dust, and what you can grind to dust is no god.

What follows is bitter and bloody. The Levites move through the camp, and 3,000 people fall. The sin with the calf is betrayal, and betrayal has a price; the text does not soften it. Yet even on this day of shards and graves, the last word has not yet fallen. The next morning Moses tells the people that he is going up to YHWH; perhaps he can make atonement for their sin. He climbs the mountain again and makes an offer that takes the breath away: forgive their sin, and if not, then blot me out of the book You have written. The intercessor went so far as to offer to be erased himself, if only the people could remain.

The golden calf is the mirror in which we see ourselves most sharply. Baal and Ra stand little chance with us; the temptation is a god our own size. That god finds what we find, wants what suits us and asks just as much as we were already planning to give. His commands that do not fit us are called time-bound, and His silence we fill with our own voice. It is a pious way to lose God, and it feels like faith. But a god we pour ourselves cannot carry us when the ground gives way, for everything he has, he has from us. Up in the cloud, over the shattered pieces of this calf, the God who will not be poured into a mold is about to proclaim His own Name.

A note on the source text. The golden calf, following Exodus 32. "These are your gods, Israel": 32:4; cf. 1 Kings 12:28. The intercession and the "relenting" of YHWH: 32:11–14; Joshua and the singing in the camp: 32:17–18; the offer to be blotted out and the refusal: 32:32–33; "My angel will go before you": 32:34. The burning anger and "let Me alone": 32:10; the covenant sealing at the foot of the mountain: Exodus 24:3–11. In the Heart box: ransomed "not with silver or gold" and "be holy, for I am holy": 1 Peter 1:15–19; cf. Leviticus 11:44; "pursue holiness": Hebrews 12:14. The divine Name rendered as YHWH.