The Golden Calf, in other words, is the anti-Akedah. In case the parallels are still in doubt, Moses’ prayer makes the connection explicit. “Remember Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,” he entreats God.

Some of them accepted the golden calf as their god. Moses’s brother Aaron , who acted as their leader in Moses’s absence, was grieved and spoke up: “0 my people! You have been deceived.

The golden calf wasn’t meant to replace Moses; they could have picked another person for that. And it wasn’t meant as a replacement for God; they didn’t have to wait for a forty-day delay in ...

Then Moses burned the calf, “he ground it to powder, scattered it on the water and made the Israelites drink it” (Exodus 32:15-20). (Also, don’t mess with Moses.) Moses confronted brother Aaron.

Rabbi Yehudah Halevi suggests that in the sin of the golden calf, “The people did not intend to give up their allegiance to God” in violation of the first of the Ten Declarations. Rather, they ...

Sheppard said Aaron, Moses’ younger brother and the high priest, had the people remove their ear jewelry for him to melt and form into a golden calf. “Here are a people who had been chosen by ...

Moses, outraged by the sight of a golden calf erected by the Hebrews as a deity, smashed the stone tablets. He apparently felt that the Jews were undeserving of them, and that it would be ...

ONE OF THE most dramatic events in the Torah occurs in the portion Ki Tisa (Exodus 30:11-34:35) when God gives the Torah to Moses on Mount Sinai. Two other crucial events in this portion are when ...