Why did the Israelites make a golden calf? It’s a question that has puzzled readers of the biblical Book of Exodus for millennia.This essay gives a good, brief, overview of some of the main answers. It came out last year, but I missed it at the time.[...]
For more on the interpretation of the story as a criticism of the iconography of Jeroboam I's Yahwistic sanctuaries at Bethel and Dan, see here and, more generally, the links collected here. For golden calf and other metal bull artifacts, some of them quite ancient, see the links collected here.
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