Notes for Ex. 32

1) The Golden Calf episode has us skip the covenant code. and the elaborate preparations for the tabernacle. This is a classic demonstration of idolatry in a literal sense, the quick move to violate the hub of the right table, the first table of the 10 Commandments.

2) Since it is a a Golden Calf, we are led into a consideration of the cultural idolatry of materialism in this country explicitly. Notice that this fundamental worship violation of the golden Calf episode comes immediately after a covenant code and ceremony and all of the preparations for right worship. We do something similar. We worship rightly, and then go off to worship mammon. If you doubt this, watch heads nod off in church board meetings about worhsip issues, but the rapt attention as soon as discussion turns to money.

3) Janzen in Exodus226 likens this episode corporately to the Adam and Eve story of the first couple.

4) I have some sympathy for these newly freed slaves. they have started to see Moses as more than a mediator of the presence of god, but its very emblem and embodiment. Without Moses, in his long delay, what will become of them? Are they now on their own? Since this is a festival to the Lord, it is an additional aid toward quelling their fears but it is not an abandoning of god. Janzen 229 makes an point about this all being a result of anxiety over the future, in other words, a failure of trust.

5) Thanks to Hollywood all the way back to the silents, this episode has a sexual connotation, but it seems to be a perversion of the reaction to the passage through the sea, as the same words are used. Janzen 228-9 wonders if the bull is less a fertility symbol and more a war/prowess symbol.

6) Historically, it cannot be an accident that we find images of bulls throughout ancient israel.

7) acted perversely is a scary word because this is the same verb, to spoil, to corrupt, as was used before the destruction of the flood

8)stiff necked is a wonderful image ofr stubborn refusal. think of trying to feed a baby who does not want to be fed.

9) This is god angry. i love the part about being left alone, perhaps the best example of god having male elements within.Notice that god separates from the people. now they are hte people of Moses, like when a young couple calls the child when misbehaving your child.

10) Moses will not leave god alone. he will not take the possible bait of being a new Abraham, even a new Adam.he appeals to god’s sense of reputation but pleads with god to change the divine mind. See, the relational god responds to us. This is not a god of pure decree.

11) the word implore has a sense of trying to turn something sour into sweet, of turning a frown upside down. change your mind is jsut as well translated as relent or repent.

12) then, remember. The omniscient One is told to remember by a forgetful human. remember, bring to life. Remember, perhaps who you are.Remember your promises of old and now.The name on which we swear has sworn to Abraham about this emergent people in gen. 22.