golden calves

• symbolized Bedouin herders’ concept of Sinai volcano

96:1.12The Ca­naan­ites had long revered Yah­weh, and al­though many of the Ken­ites be­lieved more or less in El Elyon, the super­god of the Salem re­li­gion, a ma­jor­ity of the Ca­naan­ites held loosely to the wor­ship of the old tribal de­i­ties. They were hardly will­ing to aban­don their na­tional de­i­ties in fa­vor of an in­ter­na­tional, not to say an in­ter­plan­e­tary, God. They were not uni­ver­sal-de­ity minded, and there­fore these tribes con­tin­ued to wor­ship their tribal de­i­ties, in­clud­ing Yah­weh and the sil­ver and golden calves which sym­bol­ized the Bed­ouin herders’ con­cept of the spirit of the Sinai vol­cano.

• olden symbol of Yahweh plagued Moses

96:4.3Moses had en­deav­ored to teach these Bed­ou­ins the idea of El Elyon, but be­fore leav­ing Egypt, he had be­come con­vinced they would never fully com­pre­hend this doc­trine. There­fore he de­lib­er­ately de­ter­mined upon the com­pro­mise adop­tion of their tribal god of the desert as the one and only god of his fol­low­ers. Moses did not specif­i­cally teach that other peo­ples and na­tions might not have other gods, but he did res­o­lutely main­tain that Yah­weh was over and above all, es­pe­cially to the He­brews. But al­ways was he plagued by the awk­ward predica­ment of try­ing to pre­sent his new and higher idea of De­ity to these ig­no­rant slaves un­der the guise of the an­cient term Yah­weh, which had al­ways been sym­bol­ized by the golden calf of the Bed­ouin tribes.

• symbolized Bedouin herders’ concept of Sinai volcano

96:5.8While Moses pre­sented fleet­ing glimpses of a uni­ver­sal and benef­i­cent De­ity to the chil­dren of Is­rael, on the whole, their day-by-day con­cept of Yah­weh was that of a God but lit­tle bet­ter than the tribal gods of the sur­round­ing peo­ples. Their con­cept of God was prim­i­tive, crude, and an­thro­po­mor­phic; when Moses passed on, these Bed­ouin tribes quickly re­verted to the semibar­baric ideas of their olden gods of Ho­reb and the desert. The en­larged and more sub­lime vi­sion of God which Moses ev­ery now and then pre­sented to his lead­ers was soon lost to view, while most of the peo­ple turned to the wor­ship of their fe­tish golden calves, the Pales­tinian herds­man’s sym­bol of Yah­weh.