The Golden Calf – Which Kind of Idolatry?

As I was doing my latest article at The Voice of One Crying Out in the Wilderness (The Second Commandment - Is it Different from the First?), it occurred to me that the account of the Israelites making a golden calf in Exodus 32 is a violation of the 2^nd commandment rather than the 1^st (see the introduction to that article for an explanation of the difference). Let’s carefully review exactly what happened in that story (you may want to read it yourself first in Exodus 32).

Moses went up on Mount Sinai, where God was giving him all kinds of really specific instructions for the Israelites, and everyone back at the camp started getting antsy. They went to Moses’ brother, Aaron, who was in charge, and asked him to make them a god to go before them because Moses was taking so long that they started to assume that he wasn’t coming back. So the people gave Aaron a bunch of gold, out of which he made the calf.

Now here is the question that we have to ask: what “god” did this calf represent? If it was any god other than the true God that had been working with the Israelites, then that is a violation of the 1^st commandment. If it were a physical representation of God, whom they had been following, then it would be a violation of the 2^nd commandment. Notice what Aaron said after he had made it:

Exodus 32:4-5

Then they said, “This is your god, O Israel, that brought you out of the land of Egypt!” So when Aaron saw it, he built an altar before it. And Aaron made a proclamation and said, “Tomorrow is a feast to the LORD.”

It should be clear from this verse that they are claiming that this golden calf is God, who brought them out of Egypt and led them to Sinai. Aaron even addressed it as “the LORD.” In this translation, the use of the word “LORD” in all capital letters indicates that the Hebrew word there is the tetragrammaton – “YHWH.” This is significant because YHWH is the specific name that God had revealed to Moses:

Exodus 3:13-14

Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘ The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is His name?’ Then what shall I tell them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”

The Hebrew word “YHWH” literally means “I AM WHO I AM,” and this same word is everywhere else translated as “LORD” in all capital letters. Therefore, when Aaron said that “Tomorrow is a feast to the LORD,” he was saying that it was a feast to YHWH, except he was indicating that the calf was YHWH. The Israelites no longer had Moses to represent God for them (he was up on the mountain for a few months), so they wanted something that they could look to as the representation of the God they had been following. In doing this, they broke the 2^nd commandment, which prohibits having images or statues of God.

In conclusion, whenever you are thinking about the topic of idolatry, you should always think to distinguish between 1^st commandment idolatry and 2^nd commandment idolatry. 1^st commandment idolatry is when you worship any being other than God, and 2^nd commandment idolatry is when you take a physical object or image and say that it represents God.