The golden calf ( Heb. עגל הזהב ) is an idol that appears several times on the pages of the Old Testament as an object of worship of those who have departed from the God of Israel . In accordance with the agadic midrash , the taurus was revived thanks to the power of the Almighty, which was even in pieces of the tablet, through which Moses with the words ale shor (rise, bull) raised Joseph's ark from the waters of the Nile to be reburied in the Promised Land after conquering Israel with twelve tribes . That is why gold in the smelter was transformed into the symbol of Joseph the calf. [one]
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Aaron's golden calf
During the Exodus , when Moses was on Mount Sinai and the people who remained without him began to grumble, Aaron, to reassure the people, made a golden calf of gold ornaments collected from the Jews:
| When the people saw that Moses did not descend from the mountain for a long time, he gathered to Aaron and said to him: arise and make us a god who would walk before us, for with this man, with Moses, who brought us out of the land of Egypt, we don’t know what has become. And Aaron said to them: Take out the golden earrings that are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me. And all the people took gold earrings from their ears and brought them to Aaron. He took them out of their hands, and made a molten calf out of them, and cut it with a chisel. And they said: Behold your God, O Israel, which brought you out of the land of Egypt! ( Exodus 32: 1-4 ) |
Moses, descending on the orders of the Lord, fell into anger with Sinai, broke the Tablet of the Covenant , handed to him on the mountain by God, and destroyed the calf. Then Moses gathered the sons of Levi and said to them: “Thus saith the Lord God of Israel: lay each your sword on your thigh, go through the camp from gate to gate and back, and kill each your brother, each your friend, each neighbor” ( Ex 32:27 ) This was fulfilled and about three thousand people were killed that day.
Golden calves of Jeroboam I
The king of Israel, Jeroboam I , separated from the son of Solomon , King of Judah Rehoboam of Judah , and raised two golden calves in his kingdom: one in Beit El (Bethel), and the other in the north of the country in Dan . Formally, they symbolized the foot of the throne of Yahweh . The inhabitants of the kingdom worshiped these calves as gods; their cult was preserved throughout the kingdom's existence (some kings went on, accepted foreign cults, but even the most positively evaluated by the Bible rulers of the kingdom of Israel “did not recede” from the Bethel and Danish calves).
In culture
In the modern European culture, the “golden calf” is a symbol of profit, power, money , wealth, greed (while in the Bible gold is only the material from which the idol was made, and the worship of another “god”, that is, violation of the first and foremost ( you will have no other gods ), and the violation of the second commandment is the creation of an idol, but it is believed that Moloch was originally meant to be the “golden calf”, and this violates the commandment not to sacrifice your children to Moloch). The image was reflected in the aria of Mephistopheles from the opera by Charles Gounod “ Faust ” (in the Russian version - “On earth, the whole human race ...”), in the title of the novel Ilf and Petrov “The Golden Calf ”. The image of the golden calf was used in the film Dogma .
See also
- Surah Al-Baqarah (Surah Cow from the Qur'an)
- Apis and Mnevis
Links
- The Golden Calf // The Jewish Encyclopedia of Brockhaus and Efron . - SPb. 1908-1913.
Notes
- ↑ http://www.machanaim.org/tanach/_weekly/kitisa00.htm // Dr. Pinchas Polonsky , Comments on the Torah.