The Golden Calf

IT DIDN’T take long for Israel to rebel against God’s commands. They broke the first two commandments—no other gods and no idols—before Moses even came down from Mount Sinai.We discuss the Israelites’ desire for an idol to give locality to their “god,” and whether the golden calf was supposed to represent Yahweh, the storm-god Baal, the moon-god Sîn (they were at Sinai, after all), or the creator-god of the Amorites, El, whose main epithet was “Bull El.”And Sharon makes the astute observation that God’s promise to send His angel to push out the nations before Israel is a picture of what will happen when Christ returns.There is a bit of archaeology this week, too, as we point out that some of the people occupying Canaan whose names have been lost to history, like the Hivites, Perizzites, and Jebusites, have actually been identified by scholars in recent years (Mycenaean Greeks, Philistines, and Hurrians respectively).