1. And the people saw that Moses lagged in coming down from the mountain. These words bring us back to the concrete narrative situation at the end of chapter 24, before the long interruption of cultic law: Moses had disappeared into the numinous cloud on the mountaintop; the people, awestruck, waited at the foot of the mountain, glimpsing the flashes of fire from the cloud above. It is understandable that after forty days they should wonder whether Moses would ever return, and that they should be terrified at the idea of being stranded in the wilderness without the leader on whom they had been entirely dependent.

make us gods that will go before us. Here, and repeatedly in the Golden Calf episode, ʾelohim, which regularly refers to God (in the singular) is used in the plural: despite all the spectacular demonstrations of the LORD’s supreme power, the people have not liberated themselves from polytheistic notions. “Go before us” points to the urgently felt need for a guide through the wilderness, which should have been Moses or, more pointedly, the divine messenger God designated to lead Israel. The phrase is also a military idiom suggesting leadership in battle.

this man Moses. It is noteworthy that the most ordinary of terms, “man,” becomes a kind of epithet for Moses, perhaps intimating the distance of puzzlement or wonder with which others regard him. Just before the tenth plague, we were told that “[t]he man Moses, too, is very great in the land of Egypt” (11:3). Now “this man Moses” is an object of exasperation and perplexity for the Israelites. The connection with the passage at the beginning of chapter 11 is reinforced by Aaron’s request for the golden earrings, since the “borrowing” of gold and silver ornaments is mentioned in the same section of chapter 11.

4. fashioned it in a mold. The word represented as “mold,” ḥeret, usually means “stylus,” but incising would not normally have been part of the process of making a molten image. Some scholars relate both the verb and the noun to entirely different roots that yield the sense “wrapped it in a bag,” but that reading is quite strained. Perhaps a term associated with a different image-making process was then applied idiomatically to all kinds of metalwork image-making. In any case, Aaron is pointedly represented as fashioning the image, an idea that may have been reinforced by the use of the term ḥeret, in blatant contradiction to the comically lame excuse he will make to Moses, “I flung it into the fire, and out came this calf” (verse 24).

These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt. This is a provocative reversal of God’s proclamation at the beginning of the Decalogue and elsewhere that He is the LORD Who brought the people out of Egypt. The gods are plural while the calf is singular because ancient Near Eastern people were polytheists, not fetishists: the golden icon was conceived as the terrestrial throne or platform for the deity (singular or plural), having precisely the same function as the cherubim over the Ark. The Golden Calf is thus a kind of anti-Tabernacle or anti-Ark, meant for the same end of making the divine dwell among the people but doing it in a prohibited fashion. It should be noted that golden bulls or calves were often used as cultic seats for deities in the ancient Near East. Scholarship has duly registered an implicit polemic in this story against the northern kingdom of Israel, which set up golden calves at its sanctuaries in Bethel and Dan—evidently, not at all as images of pagan worship but as thrones for the God of Israel, in a competing iconography to the one used in Jerusalem.

5. a festival to the LORD. Aaron tries both to placate the people and yet to preserve a sense of loyalty to the LORD, YHWH. They have already twice said that they wanted him to make them “gods,” but, rather desperately, he clings to the notion that the Golden Calf should be seen as the LORD’s throne and that this celebration should be “a festival to the LORD.”

6. to play. The Hebrew letsaḥeq suggests revelry and in some contexts sexual play or license. The strong implication is a bacchanalian celebration (accompanied by food and drink) that involves shouting and song (verse 18) and dance (verse 19) and probably orgiastic activity as well.

7. your people that you brought up from Egypt. Like a disgruntled parent disavowing connection with a wayward child, God says to Moses that Israel is your people.

9. And the LORD said to Moses. The formula for introducing quoted speech is reiterated with no intervening response from Moses. According to this fixed convention of biblical narrative, this repetition of the formula after the lack of an answer points to Moses’s incapacity to respond, dumbfounded as he is by what God tells him.

10. leave Me be . . . and I will put an end to them. Either God, imagined in frankly human terms, is so thoroughly fed up with the refractory people that He really contemplates destroying them utterly and then starting from scratch with Moses, or these words are a kind of test of Moses, who firmly declines to be the progenitor of a new nation and shows himself a staunch advocate of Israel.

12. Why should the Egyptians say. Moses invokes what has been a leading motif of the Exodus story: God’s liberation of Israel from slavery and His triumph over Egypt established His “glory,” His unique status as supreme God of all the earth. To destroy Israel now would overturn all that has been achieved through the Exodus for God’s standing in the eyes of humankind at large.

13. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel Your servants. After the argument based on the preservation of God’s reputation, Moses invokes a contractual obligation: God has promised to the patriarchs a grand future for their descendants in the terms of the Covenant, and He surely cannot revoke that promise.

15. written on both their sides. Despite Christian and Jewish iconography, the stone tablets, as archaeology has discovered in remnants from the surrounding cultures, were thick enough to have inscriptions on both sides.

17. And Joshua heard the sound of the people as it shouted. Joshua, we should recall, was stationed partway up the mountain while Moses went on to the summit. Thus he hears the uproar of the Israelite revelry from a distance and is not close enough to see what is going on. Umberto Cassuto proposes that the single word for “as it shouted,” bereiʿoh, is a pun on beraʿah, “for evil,” which was used in verse 12.

A sound of war in the camp. Joshua is a military man and so jumps to the conclusion that the uproar means battle.

18. triumph . . . defeat . . . crying out. In the triadic line of poetry that Moses uses to respond to Joshua, “triumph” (literally, “might”) and “defeat” (literally, “weakness”) are antithetically bracketed, and then the third member of the line, as often happens in poetic triads, introduces a new, unstable element. The common claim that the Hebrew for “crying out,” ʿanot, means “singing” is dubious because the sound has just been described as shouting (though it might include singing). The same term, ʿanot, occurs in 2 Samuel 22:36, where it probably means “battle cry.” Moses’s response to Joshua, then, is that he hears an indiscriminate uproar which has nothing to do with military matters.

19. he saw the calf and the dancing . . . and he flung the tablets . . . and smashed them. Moses, of course, has already been informed about all this, but, as the Hebrew proverb has it, “hearing is not the same as seeing.” His wrath flares—precisely what he implored God not to allow to occur with divine wrath—and he responds in a paroxysm of anger, flinging and smashing. There is also a good deal of evidence that in the ancient Near East smashing the tablets on which a binding agreement was written was a legal act of abrogating the agreement.

20. scattered it over the water and made the Israelites drink it. Numerous commentators have noted the (approximate) analogy to the ordeal by drinking to which the woman suspected of adultery is submitted (Numbers 5:11–31). Richard Elliott Friedman asks, what water?, and then interestingly proposes that this would have to have been the water that Moses miraculously provided for the people, which would be a compounding of irony.

24. I flung it into the fire. Aaron in his feeble attempt at an alibi uses the same verb for violent or spasmodic throwing that was employed for Moses’s casting down the tablets.

25. let loose, for Aaron had let them loose. The basic meaning of the Hebrew paruʿa is “to unbind,” as in the unbinding or letting loose of long hair. The sense here is of a loosing of all inhibitions in orgiastic frenzy. Friedman sees in “let them loose,” peraʿoh, a pun on “Pharaoh,” while Cassuto detects in the same word a pun on beraʿah, “in evil.”

as a shameful thing to their adversaries. The word translated as “shameful thing,” shimtsah, appears only here and so its meaning is uncertain, though it seems to indicate something strongly negative. “To their adversaries” might conceivably be a euphemism for “to themselves,” as the more common word for enemies is sometimes used as a euphemistic substitution in curses.

27. Put every man his sword on his thigh. Typically, the short sword would have been strapped in a scabbard to the left thigh for quick unsheathing by the right hand. In rallying round him men of the tribe of Levi, his own tribe, Moses does something analogous to what David will do in creating a power base within the people through a kind of family militia recruited from his clan in Bethlehem. We can no longer recover the historical roots of the biblical traditions about Levi, later the sacerdotal tribe, as an implacably violent group. In the massacre of the males of Shechem (Genesis 35), that violence was negative; here it is represented in a positive light, supposedly exerting a necessary astringent effect on the people that has been “let loose,” that has surrendered to the orgiastic release of a pagan cult.

each man kill his brother . . . his fellow . . . his kin. This chilling command enjoins the sword-wielding Levites to show no mercy to friend or kin, since the very nature of a pagan orgy engulfing the masses is that at least some of those most deeply involved will be people close to the executors of retribution. The figure of three thousand dead in the next verse indicates that this is not an indiscriminate massacre but an assault on the ringleaders—or perhaps, those guilty of the most egregious excesses—among the orgiasts.

29. Dedicate yourselves. This is the same idiom for priestly dedication, “fill your hands,” that in the context of the Tabernacle cult was rendered as “install.”

so blessing may be given to you. The Hebrew syntax is a little obscure, but the evident sense is that the Levites, through their homicidal zealotry, confirm their “dedication” as a priestly caste and thus as worthy recipients of God’s blessing.

31. I beg You. The Hebrew, a single word, is neither pronoun nor verb but is an ejaculation, ʾana, which is used to begin an entreaty. “Please” in English seems matter-of-fact and merely polite, not sufficiently imploring.

32. if You would bear their offense. The thought stipulated after this conditional clause is left incomplete, perhaps because Moses is uncertain what to say and is in any case concentrating on the negative conditional clause: “if not, wipe me out, pray, from Your book.”

Your book. Although most modern translators prefer to represent sefer as “scroll” or “record,” the word also sometimes means “book” in biblical Hebrew (its regular sense in postbiblical Hebrew), and various ancient Near Eastern peoples registered belief in a celestial book in which the fates of humankind were inscribed. (The codex format of the book had not yet been invented, but a text written on a scroll could nevertheless be conceptualized as a book.) This entire exchange between Moses and God looks suspiciously like a duplication, in part contradictory, of verses 9–13. There God offered to make Moses the beginning of a new people after the destruction of all the Israelites. Here Moses asks for death if God will not forgive Israel, and God replies that He will exact retribution only from the offenders.

34. My messenger shall go before you. It is not the gods that the people wanted Aaron to make for them that will go before them but, as stipulated earlier in the story, God’s messenger. That messenger, we should recall, is not only a guide but also an inexorable and rather menacing monitor of the people’s behavior.

on the day I make a reckoning. The exact reference is obscure. Three thousand of the offenders have already been killed by the Levites, and, momentarily, there will be a further “scourge” by God. For this archetypal sin of the Golden Calf, a free-floating prospect of further retribution would seem to hover over the people like a dark shadow.

35. for having made the calf that Aaron made. The repetition of the verb conveys the complicity of both the people and Aaron in the making of the calf.