7. The Golden Calf
Take a walk with me as I toe the cliff of an idea which established Christianity would largely deem blasphemous and heretical. Because it’s Wednesday and why not?
I follow very few outlets and publications. I’m very choosy. Social media usage is way, way down for me, and I never watch the news. Most of my news comes to me in the form of suggested articles based on search history when I’m opening a new tab in Chrome on my iPhone. I also subscribe to Medium, which I highly recommend. What I do ingest is carefully chosen and vetted, to the best of my ability.
A while ago, I was hit with a few articles about “the origins of Yahweh.” Have any of you seen these? I’ll provide a few links:
https://www.thetorah.com/article/yhwh-the-kenite-god-of-metallurgy
https://medium.com/@awgonnerman/yahwehs-forge-8609b249a8f6
There are many more, but those are both quite good and thought provoking. To summarize, basically, it’s been theorized that the Abrahamic God, YAHWEH, was imagined with characteristics which very closely mirror Canaanite/Kenite pantheon deities possessing qualities of smelting, forging, fires, metallurgy, etc. There are so many references which seem evidentiary, though we can’t necessarily verify this beyond reasonable doubt.
One example, however, which is very hard to forget takes place in the iconic tale of Moses receiving “the law”—The Ten Commandments. In this story, after Israel has been liberated from slavery in Egypt and subsequently led into the desert, where they will regain their identity and eventually find the promised land (the metaphors here are STAGGERING), along the way they are tempted at many junctures to return to their captivity, believing at times they would prefer slavery to a desert devoid of the structure they had in Egypt. “Ignorance is bliss,” said Cypher to Agent Smith. They even ask for kings when God is telling them with visitations and through a mysterious “Ark of the Covenant” that He/She/It wishes to be their ruler, freeing them from institutional confines.
At one resting point, Mt Sinai, where Moses is compelled to ascend the mountain and hear from God, the Israelites get a party going in the valley below. It probably looked a lot like that weird orgy rave scene in the Matrix movie when the characters reached Zion. The story says, in so many words, that they were reveling in pagan, impure practices, to the point of fashioning an idol out of gold, the famous Golden Calf. They are rebuked for this, making Moses so angry that he throws down and breaks the stone tablets upon which God has just inscribed The Law for his/her people. Irony!
Now let’s pause for a moment. One thing about this story that I’ve always found puzzling, even as a kid, was the question, “How did a pagan practice like this make it into Israel in the first place?” Right? Where did they even get the idea? It seems possible they were losing hope in the God they’d been serving, eating heavenly crackers for their daily meals with feet aching from the miles upon miles of aimless wandering. Perhaps they were calling out to any god who would “listen to them”—which is another way of saying, ‘do what they wanted’—and thus borrowed from pagan practices they’d beheld in their exploits over history.
Another distinct possibility is, as strict as tribal markers and the call of racial purity seemed to be for Israel (to the point of CIRCUMCISION, which is… uh… pretty wild), there still might have been some integration from outside culture into the populace. That may have been where pagan ideas like this arose at this point in the story.
The last and (and I believe the most fascinating) possibility is they used a sacramental process reserved for their own deity—smelting and forging—to create an idol of a created thing, worshiping and pleading with that graven image instead of the God (the source!) who gave them this gift in the first place. What nerve they had, after being guided by a “pillar of fire” through the night as Exodus tells us!
We have a pretty unique opportunity here to expose a deeper dimension inside the universe’s messages to us via the Abrahamic religions. If the image of Yahweh imagined by Israel was indeed using (if only borrowing) forging, blacksmith-like images from Canaanite mythology, and projecting those images onto their deity—who they, like everyone else, claimed was “the one true God”— then one could easily see borne in this story a call from God for Israel to disavow its own cultural imagery as a flawed projection, and to remove practice and sacrament themselves from their pedestals, right there in the book of Exodus! Not only should they not worship or stake their dependence on the image of a created thing, but the sacrament itself of smelting and forging should not be idolized, either.
This makes a whole lot of sense when we consider how Israel elevated its rites and sacraments and purity laws to a lopsided level after receiving the law from Moses and settling as a nation. Jesus, who understood fulfillment of the law did not come through the law itself, or through any sacrament, constantly challenged and rebuked the resulting religious piety and even the practices themselves. Here in only the second book of the Old Testament, God is already mercifully shattering the boxes in which we try to contain Him/Her, and showing us that our salvation will not come from our own attachment to religiosity but from our willingness to follow a wild God into the unknown with faith and trust. It goes to show, friends, we can make an idol of God’s attributes so very easily. When we get too attached to form and tradition, we diminish our capacity to receive from the formless and the ever-new.
It’s also easy to forget that the bible is full of imperfect humans, reporting on their experiences with divine as best they could, from unique perspectives. The bible is full of folklore, with an undercurrent of traditions and beliefs which are not reflected in its pages and which, if exposed to a modern fundamental Christian, would seem odd or even occult. Within this story, we’re seeing evidence of polytheism even inside the very tribe of Israel, with an apparent movement on the part of God and the prophets over Israel’s history to communicate ONENESS. MONOTHEISM. A penultimate God, unifying all things. This, I and many others believe, has been the central message God has been trying to communicate to us all along; it’s less about “not that, but this”, and more about, “this and also that.” This is all; there is no such thing as “that.” (We still trackin’?)
Fast forward to the New Testament, where Paul said to the Athenians in Acts:
People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you. “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’
Paul also wrote, “For from him and through him and to him are all things.” Does that not sound like panentheism to you? God—the Universe, the Ocean of Consciousness—contains within it all qualities and all realities. The thought of containing this Ground of All Being to menial, humanocentristic motifs can be entertaining at times, and a God containing all qualities does manifest in its reality as ALL THINGS, but… too narrow a focus on each created thing bears within it potential for idolatry. It’s too concrete a way to think. If you do not understand the source of the thing and focus all of your attention on the thing itself—as itself, and nothing more—man, are you missing out!
Now, do you remember the Shema? The Hebrew call to prayer dating way, way back?
“Hear, O Israel, The Lord our God, the Lord is ONE.”
The message that I (and again, many of us) believe God has been saying across all religions is simply that all is ONE. The drama of the gold, the calf, the smelters, the pagans, the betrayals, the kings, and all of the wars and the bloodshed and the slavery… all of those are totally unnecessary in light of this realization. We’ve been hearing this message from God for ages through layers upon layers of ego, both individualistically and collectively. The fulfillment of this story arch—the fulfillment of the law—lies in effacing our egoic designs and allowing the real fundamental substrate of all being to dwell in our thoughts and behaviors, toward ourselves and toward one another, like walking tabernacles on our journeys from slavery to the desert and finally into enlightenment. Again, the metaphors are staggering!
When we look at anyone or anything in the universe as simply that thing and nothing more, we succumb to dualistic thinking and do indeed begin making idols out of all that has been created. Non-dualism can free us from those trappings.
God is the gold. God is the calf. God is the smelter, the prophet, the Christ. God is you and God is me. Look no further.
cheers.
—wjc