Jeremy Rosen
Making Sense of the Bible: Can its Ancient Text be Relevant Today? Exodus 32:5

Jeremy Rosen - Making Sense of the Bible: Can its Ancient Text be Relevant Today? - Exodus 32:5

- Good morning, everybody. For those of you who celebrate Thanksgiving, I wish you all a happy Thanksgiving! And for those of you who wake up every morning and give thanks for being alive, it’s another day. This part we’re going to do today- I’m sorry. First question is, “Who is the composer?” It was Gounod, G-O-U-N-O-D. Either a piece called “Judex” or “Mors et Vita,” which is, “Death and Life.” And thank you, Carla. Everybody’s fine in the family. So this is one of the most important episodes in the whole of the Torah. It is a cataclysm. We have just come off the single most important spiritual event that has the greatest, and has had historically the greatest, impact on Jewish life, namely the 10 Commandments, the revelation on Mount Sinai, and essentially the source of our culture, our history, and our tradition. Now as often happens, the moment of highest ecstasy or achievement is followed almost immediately by the most disastrous denouement, the disastrous catastrophe. And so after the 10 Commandments being the most important thing, and with a little gap for the tabernacle in between, and as we’ve mentioned before, did that come before or after them, comes this destruction and disaster of the golden calf, which is going to lead to 40 years of wandering in the desert. Indirectly, by the way, I should mention. Because it was the spies in the Book of Deuteronomy, no Numbers, that we’re going to come to, which was the final decision of 40 years in the wilderness.

But this now, the narrative of the golden calf, which we began last week but I’m just going to run over quickly, is played out in so many different layers that it’s very difficult to keep track of who’s saying what, why they’re saying it and what their motive is. So if we can go back for a minute just to the opening of chapter 32 where the people have seen that Moses isn’t around. He was supposed to come down at a particular moment and he’s stayed up the mountain, and that then leads the people to panic. If you remember, two people were left in charge. There was Aaron and there was Hur, or Hur, as it comes out in the English, and they were left in charge. They’d previously supported Moses during the battle against Amalek. And they come round the people and they come round and they say, “Look, Moses disappeared. We want a god who took us out of Egypt to go before us.” What did they think? If they’d relied on Moses up to now and if they’d experienced Moses on Mount Sinai, what were they actually thinking? And in verse two, Aaron has said to them, “Okay, look. I see you’re out of control here somehow or other, and you want something and I don’t know where Moses is and you want a symbol, I’m going to make you a symbol.” Now that’s interpretation already. He doesn’t say that. But what he really says simply is, “Break off the golden ornaments in the ears of your wives and your sons and your daughters and bring them to be.” And what happens is not just bringing the gold from their sons and daughters, but it says again, and notice this dear statement in verse three, it’s very important. And all the people, everybody, everybody broke off their ornaments of gold and brought them to Aaron. Then in verse four, Aaron takes the gold from them and it goes straight into saying he formed an image, formed an image into a kind of a mould.

Doesn’t say anything about melting it down. So we’ve jumped a stage. And then they make this golden calf, he makes the golden calf, and it all happens in a flash it seems, but it takes time to do this. It couldn’t have happened just flash like that. And then everybody says, “These are your gods, Israel, who took you out of the land of Egypt.” But as we’ve said before, does not mean, like Elohim, does not mean gods and yet here that seems to be what they’re saying. On the other hand, it could equally be, “This is God.” Which is strange because we’ve already heard that God has no image and they seem to have made this kind of image of God. And then what happens? And that’s where we ended off last week. And we come to verse five of chapter 32 of Exodus. Aaron then sees. It doesn’t say what he sees. Maybe he realises this is a problem. “How am I going to deal with this problem?” And he builds an altar, that must also have taken time. You don’t just sort of build an altar like that. And then Aaron calls, declares publicly, that, “Tomorrow we’re going to have a festival.” So you might ask, “Well, it took that time to build everything, make the preparation, and that’s perfectly normal.” The rabbis like to say, “The mere fact he said, ‘Tomorrow’ and not, ‘Today,’ is he’s delaying tactics. He’s trying to delay in the hope that Moses is going to come down.”

Then in verse six, a very important verse this, so everybody got up the following day. See? They managed to survive, get through that day all right. And they offered up sacrifices. That also must have been something that took time. And notice that again, you have two words here. Burnt offerings are normally sacrifices that go directly to God. There were two every day in the tabernacle and the temple and they were devoted entirely to God. Whereas the from the word shalom were sacrifices, part of which went to the Almighty, but the rest was eaten by people in a big kind of festival for the masses, like the Romans used to do, circuses and bread and food and fun. And that seems also to have taken quite a while to go through the whole process of bringing the animal forward, of slaughtering it, and then sort of stripping it and dividing up the meat and putting everything on the right place on the altar and sacrifice. That would’ve took time. But after it was over, what happens is everybody got up to eat and drink. So in other words, this was a celebration. They celebrated religious occasions by eating and drinking. So again, this is all taking time. They ate and they drink. And here’s the important line: Verse six. After it says, they got up in the morning, they offered up burnt offerings, and peace offerings. The people sat down to eat and drink. And they got up. Now the word has different meanings. After all, Isaac was called Yitzhak because his mother laughed at the thought of being able to give birth to him. So means to laugh. But also is used sexually. Joseph’s wife wanted: Sorry, Potiphar’s wife. Potiphar’s wife wanted to have sexual fun with Joseph.

And the word is used there. It’s used elsewhere throughout the Tanach, in the case of the young men who were fighting at the time of David and Abner and Joav. Also as something that is associated with corruption and idolatry. Because remember that idolatry always involved sexual immorality, either with or through the priests or through the masses coming to dedicate their bodies, and the either the product of their bodies or the sexuality of their bodies for religious worship. So clearly this is another way of emphasising the idolatry of this whole event. Idolatry both in terms of wanting God’s representative in a physical way, idolatry also in the sense that it represents immorality, lack of self-control. And as a result, a denial of everything that the 10 Commandments and Sinai had said. One of them is this direct link with God that we all have and it’s with a non-visual image. And secondly, there are rules and laws about how to behave that are associated with it. So this term is a bit of a giveaway as to what their motives were. Because as you’ll know from that famous book, “Moses and Monotheism” that Freud wrote in which he suggested that really Moses was a follower of Akhenaton, who the Egyptian Pharaoh who tried to change the religious system and was overthrown, and Moses then found a new career by adopting the Jewish people and taking them out of Egypt.

But when he started trying to impose laws on them, they killed him ‘cause they didn’t want all these restrictive laws limiting their freedom. So again, this is a balance between looseness, freedom to do as one pleases and on the other hand the constraints of a religious system. Verse seven, now God is speaking. God turns to Moses. God speaks to Moses and He says: “Go down.” Again, the have this lovely way of interpreting things and saying, “Going down means descending spiritually.” You’ve been on a high level spiritually, this is dragging the whole edifice down into the dust. But here obviously the logical meaning simply is, “Go down from being up on the mountain with me having fun, or, if you like, spiritual interaction. You’ve been thinking about your spiritual experience with me, God, for too long. You’ve really got to go down and take care of the people. This is a problem of people. So go down the mountain and your people.” And notice how it says, “Your people.” He should say, “My people. After all, they’re my people.” Well God made a deal with them, took them out of Egypt, but now is blaming Moses. Poor old Moses. He’s getting the rough end of the stick. Your people have become corrupt and the ones that you took out of Egypt. You know, shifting the blame. Everybody’s shifting the blame here. We’re going to see how they all shift the blame on somebody else. Verse eight. They’ve turned away quickly, almost immediately. From the way, the right path, that I have commanded them. They have made a: A molten image of a god, of a calf. Not only are they bowing down and worshipping it, but they are sacrificing and they are saying, “These are your gods, or this is your God, who took you out of the land of Egypt.” So at this stage, Moses knows clearly what’s going on. He’s been told by God what’s going on, to go down the mountain.

And at the same time, God goes on to say this in verse nine: God says to Moses: “You know these people, you know who they are, you know who the Israelites are. It’s a stiff-necked people. And now,” verse 10. “Leave me alone. Step back. Don’t try and argue with me. I’m going to express my anger by destroying them. And you alone, I will turn into my new nation. I’ll rebuild again with you.” Now, you might remember that last week I mentioned that there was an interpretation that said the people who initiated the golden calf were not the Jews but this this mixed multitude of political refugees and others who came out of Egypt who were not, if you like, feeling the same way about their Jewish identity as those who theoretically were expressing it religiously. But this seems to say that it’s the whole of the people that were involved. But we’re going to see as we go through this chapter, it’s not that simple. Now I just want to mention that Romaine has asked whether the ongoing paucity of human faith, the need for immediate concrete manifestations to allay their fears, is very human. And I think it is. And I think that probably is why in the end there is a reconciliation here. And is also used, as Shelly rightly points out, and I’m glad you mentioned this, I forgot to mention it with regard to Abimelech, the Philistine who looks out of the window when he sees that Isaac and Rebekah are using this word playing together or obviously intimate.

And they had already assumed that, Abimelech had assumed that, she was a sister, but from the way he sees Isaac and Rebekah interacting, clearly they were much more. And so that again reiterates the idea of and Susan has pointed out that the Sefaria translates to dance. And that’s interesting because I don’t know where necessarily in the Bible means actually to dance. But anyway, let’s go back to the text. Thank you for raising those questions. We go back to the text and it’s verse 11. Moses’s reaction to God saying, “I’m going to destroy them. I’m going to destroy them and I am going to make you my people.” The word is and Moses implored and begged. And this term and indeed this statement, with some others we are going to come to, is part of the reading from the Torah on a fast day. Because this appealing to God for forgiveness and to enable us to overcome our failings uses the word not to be confused with and to complete. Instead of: He appealed to the face of God. That’s another way of saying, “Directly to God,” not that God actually has a face. Why God? Are you so angry with your people? “Now it’s your people,” he’s saying, throwing it back at God. That you took out of Egypt. With all the wonderful things you took them out. You put all that effort in, you’re going to waste it? Now it’s amazing obviously. Obviously this is meant to be a message to us rather than a description of God. In other words, what this is trying to convey to us is that Moses is pleading with God that he doesn’t want to be turned himself into a nation. He is committed to the nation, not his own ambition. And to do this, he is appealing to God and wants us to listen to this. Because this is a message for us rather than describing the actuality of appealing to God and God changing His mind. In verse 12: Why should the Egyptians say?

Now he’s appealing to the world at large. What will people say? He took them out with evil intention. And this is mirroring something that Pharaoh said earlier on the Book of Exodus when he turns to Moses and says: “This is bad, what you’re doing. What you’re doing is going to come to a sticky end.” And so now he is throwing this back and he’s saying: “Egypt will say, 'We always warned you that if they go out of Egypt, it’s going to be bad for them. God is only going to kill you off in the mountains. And destroy you.’” And then turns to God and he says, “Shul, repent, come back.” Same root. Repent from your anger. Is to comfort, but it also means to change your mind. About the evil that you are planning to do to your people. “And don’t do it for me,” he says in verse 13. Remember Abraham, Isaak and Israel and Jacob. Remember them and remember your servants. You swore to them. You said: “Increase your seed. Like the stars of the heavens. And this land that you’re coming to.” But he says this, does he mean which? The land in Sinai where he is at the moment? That’s a question. But anyway. I will give them and they will inherit forever. So this is: Actually is repeating God’s commitment to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and Israel, Jacob. “So this is part,” says Moses, “of our tradition. We’ve got this long association which goes back to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Just because now they’re doing the wrong thing, why are you going to destroy them?” And that plea is so powerful that in verse 14, and God changes his mind. That the evil He was planning to do to destroy the Jewish people. Full stop. End of this little episode.

So this little episode about the interaction between God and Moses on Mount Sinai shows already that he knew what was going on down the mountain and also shows how we can appeal to God’s mercy, and things don’t always have to turn out for the worst. Verse 15. Now Moses, turns from God. And he goes down the mountain. With the two tablets of stone in his hands, carrying them. These are now a description of them. We didn’t have a description of them before. Are written through on both sides, carved right through. Now this is a little interesting thing. Now written on both sides. There are two ways of looking at this. One of them is that they were engraved, like any cuneiform engraving on one side and engraved on the other side. So: On both sides does not necessarily mean all the way through, but the rabbis did take it to mean all the way through. Now the problem with all the way through is if you have a letter like letter Samekh in Hebrew. Samekh, it’s like a circle. And if it is carved through right through on both sides, what about the piece in the middle? How does that stand up? The rabbis and the Talmud says that the Mem and the Samekh, the two letters that are all carved round, the middle bit stayed up, suspended in space. It was a miracle. From a rational point of view, that does not make any sense because the Samekh and the Mem are part of the Assyrian or the Babylonian script, which only was used during the Babylonian exile and which is now used today by us. But at the time of Moses, there wasn’t that Ktav Ashuri, the Assyrian script, there was a Canaanite script.

And in the Canaanite script, neither the Samekh nor the Mem have a hole in the middle. The only one that does have a hole in the middle is the iron, which is like an I. I as in iron. And you carve it and it looks as though it’s got a hole in the middle. So that’s a small little aside about how you can have a statement like this and it’s difficult to understand what it means, other than to say the tablets were written in stone. And not only were they written in stone, but in verse 16 it goes on to say this: These tablets were divine objects. They weren’t normal objects of the sort we have. And the writing was God’s writing. So it was neither one nor the other. It wasn’t a Canaanite script nor the Assyrian script, it was God’s script, writing. Engraved onto the stone. So we have a lot of ambiguity here about how it was written. Not what was written, that was the oral version that we had declared, but actually the mechanics of how it was written. So he’s coming down the mountain now with these two tablets of stone. And remember, according to the last version, only one of the three versions, Joshua was halfway up the mountain between the two of them, between the top with God, Moses was with God, and the people down below. And: Verse 17. He hears the sound of the people going wild, out of control. He hears something going on and he doesn’t know what it is. He just hears the sound. And Moses says: So he says to Moses: In 17. “It sounds as though there’s a war going on.” Verse 18. To which he answers, that’s Moses answered, “I don’t hear the sounds of people overcoming, triumphing, killing. I don’t hear the sounds of people being defeated, being beaten up.

I just hear some sounds.” And although it’s true that the English here says, “The sound of song,” but are not can mean answering, it can mean oppressing, it can mean different things. And it doesn’t sound necessarily, but I understand why the translation would want to say that because if they’re sitting down and they’re having an orgy, usually there’s music in an orgy. But anyway. And Moses gets closer to the camp. He saw the calf and dancing, people dancing around it. And Moses lost his temper, like God losing His temper up above so to speak. And he threw down the tablets of stone, and broke them at the foot of the mountain. I’m just taking a break here at the moment. Janet makes the saying, sorry, Romaine raises the question of whether Hashem is using Moses and Aaron as mediators. Well, that’s true. They were the mediators. They were sent from the burning bush, Moses and then Aaron, to mediate between Pharaoh and the Israelite people. And initially they were the mediators but mediators of the word not mediators in the sense that shall we say a guru is or indeed like a Hasidic rebbe is, a kind of a stage between God. That was never meant to be their role. Their role was merely as a teacher. And that’s why Moses is called Moses, our teacher, not Moses, our rabbi, or our mediator or anything else. “Strange,” says Janet, “to manufacture a god and then worship when you know you made it yourself.” But all idols are made that way.

And everything, even the idols we make today, are we make them. We know they’re not divine or in any way and we make them the most important things in our lives. Thank you Romaine for your comment. Elliot, thank you very much for all these different perspectives. Okay, I really appreciate that and thanks for your blessing. And let’s get back to the text and I’ll answer the rest of the questions later on if you don’t mind. So going back to the text, he smashes the stone at the bottom of the mountain. And in verse 20 now, on Exodus 32, he takes the calf which they have made and he burns it in fire. In other words, he dissolves it. And grinds the ashes or what’s left over the liquid. You know by now it’s not liquid anymore, it’s just metal, and he has ground it down. He mixes it with water or scatters it over water. And then look what he does. And he made the children of Israel drink it. What better example can you have of the futility of an idol if you’re consuming it, going in one end, and it goes right through your body and out at the end, either, you know, as excretion of some form. There’s no better way of showing how meaningless this was. This amazing example of meaninglessness, forcing them to drink the golden calf that Aaron had made. So that’s the procedure. Now verse 21. Moses says to Aaron, “What have these people done to you?” Now what have they done? We don’t know. And that’s why the rabbis say they killed Hur. Hur was the person who tried to intervene and stop them and they killed him. So what have they done to you has this other subtle meaning.

You have brought upon them this great sin. You have been responsible for this. So he is quite rightly blaming Aaron for this. So now we’re going to hear Aaron’s point of view. And notice the words and the difference between what he’s going to say and what previously we read at the beginning of this chapter. And Aaron says, verse 22, “Don’t be angry with me. You know the people. They’re a terrible lot. They’ve always been complaining at Marah, ‘cause there wasn’t water, complaining in Egypt, complaining about you, complaining here. You know what they’re like. And they said to me, 'Make us a god or gods.’” But notice: That they will go in front of us. Which is why I think the use of God here in this narrative is not the plural word of Elohim. Because when Elohim, meaning gods, was first used in the Torah in Bereshit, it says: Bereshit bara Elohim. Bara is singular. If it would be gods, it would be: They made. So Elohim as a plural noun, usually when it’s referring to God, is single. But here they’ve used a plural word. They’ve talked, “Make for us gods that they will go,” otherwise what would be one God, it would be: He will go. Not: they will go. Because Moses, the man, and he was only a man after all, he took us out of Egypt. Didn’t God take us out of Egypt? Clearly they were already thinking. They couldn’t think of God as such. They thought of Moses doing all these things through magic or something. We don’t know what’s happened to him.

“Okay,” says Aaron. And so when they all gathered round and I saw how violent they were, and I saw what the problem was, I said to them, “Anybody got any gold around here?” So it’s not what he said before, “Whoever’s got gold, bring it to me.” He’s now trying to distance himself. “I didn’t ask them to bring me gold, didn’t answer. I just said, ‘Anybody got any gold?’ They broke off immediately and gave it to me! And me, what did I do?” It’s amazing when you see what he actually says here. What he says here very clearly is that, “I just threw the gold into the fire. I said simply, verse 24. "I threw this gold into the fire.” Nothing about shaping it or making it. “And this calf walked out! It appeared out of nowhere. I didn’t think of a golden calf. Where would I get an idea of a calf for? It just came!” I mean, you know, sort of, my father used to tell me a funny story that when he was headmaster of the school and he was sitting in his study and outside of the study he heard a boy walking up and down, walking past, whistling. And he got up and went to the door and called the boy over and said, “Were you whistling?” And he said the boy said, “No, Sir, I wasn’t whistling.” He said, “But I heard you whistling.” “No, Sir, I wasn’t whistling, I was just blowing through my mouth.” So that’s a bit like Aaron saying, you know, sort of, “I didn’t make it, it just came out by itself.” Verse 25. And Moses saw the people. They were wild. Because Aaron had enabled them to go wild. And here’s a word: Which has several different meanings. Is anybody who gets up against somebody.

To get up. means to destroy in some way. Or alternatively it means they threatened anybody who tried to stop them doing what they were doing. But it’s a difficult phrase. It doesn’t appear anywhere else in the Bible. It’s unique in that sense and it’s very difficult to know what it means. So anyway, he saw the people were out of control ‘cause thanks to what Aaron did, they were violent, crazy, drugged up to the eyeballs and out of control. Verse 26. Moses stands in the gates of the camp. Actually, we’ve never heard of the gates of the camp before. We’ve heard just over the gates of the tabernacle, and maybe that’s what it means. And he says: “Whoever believes in God, come to my side. Come and join me.” And the whole tribe of Levi gathered round Moses. It seems they were the only ones who are not participating in this riot of what’s going on. But it is an absolute rave riot that’s going on. And this is something that I always have difficulty. I always have difficulty with any violence, however necessary it may be. Verse 27. And he says to them, “I’m telling you this is what God wants. We’ve got to purge the camp of the ringleaders. Gather up, gird up your swords, tie them around your waist. And pass through. Go to and forth. Through all the gates or all the settlements of the camp. And be prepared to kill your brother, your neighbour, and your relatives. I want you to get rid of the ringleaders.” And the sons of Levi, Moses had asked. 3,000 people were killed. Now this is a huge camp. This is a camp, if you take what the Bible says, of 600,000 men, and forget the women and forget the children and forget the elderly and the so forth.

There were a lot of people there. And we’ve said all the time that it’s ha'am, the people who are celebrating and the people who were encouraging Aaron. And you’re telling me now only 3,000 were the ringleaders? Well, yes. Yes indeed. Just think of the Russian Revolution. Think of how many people were actually involved in that revolution. They were a small group of people who managed to bring it all about. It wasn’t a revolution of the masses, it was a revolution of a very small number of people. It only takes a few people to turn a whole nation round or to corrupt a whole nation. Initially the Nazis were only a few sitting in a beer cellar and look what they were able to achieve. And then you have the whole issue of: Why do you have to kill people? And you know, I’m never happy about this. But we are dealing with an existential threat, a real existential threat, to the Jewish people that they were able, for a period of time, to worship idols, to go against God, to go against everything that Moses stood for, everything he’s been preaching and teaching them. They’re basically saying, “We don’t want it.” And therefore, there’s no room in a sense here now for persuasion. Persuasion is going to take time. These people are passionate in their idolatry and in their rejection of everything they were taught.

So in one sense it’s necessary to purge. But again, as I’ve said before, and this is my interpretation, I believe very strongly that the use of terms like killing are hyperbolic and they are a waste simply of differentiating major crimes for minor ones, major problems for minor problems, and a kind of an indication of where one’s priorities should be and what is an existential threat. And again, I can only repeat something I’ve made before, that the Torah with its command to get rid of the Canaanites and destroy everything when they go into the land of Israel, didn’t happen, and they coexisted for hundreds of years afterwards. So one should take this idea as emblematic rather than literal, but it may well have been literal. And if you bear in mind how many people were killed by the Inquisition, how many people are murdered all the time and destroyed around us all the time, you know, what we have witnessed as Jews this past month, violence is endemic! And sometimes violence can only be dealt with by counter violence. So that, it seems to me, to be a good point to stop today and start dealing with the questions that have been cropping up and that I haven’t dealt with up to now.

Q&A and Comments:

So let’s start with what Mira says. Thank you, Mira. You’re paying me a very nice compliment. I value it a lot. Alfred, “Perhaps the two-sided writing refers actually to Boustrophedon.” I have not come across that word before, so thank you for teaching me something. I know what cuneiform is and I know what it looks like, but I never knew it had this specific name of Boustrophedon. It sounds a bit like a Greek word, but I don’t know. So if you can let me know what the etymological origin of it, I’ll be grateful. But either way, when this is over, I’m going to go and look it up.

Q: Angela, “Why did he do that when he was away and what he was doing breaking the tablets?”

A: That’s a very good question. How dare he break the tablets of God? How dare he do that? The rabbis actually say in the Gemera that God said, “I’m very pleased that you broke it. Because they had broken their side of it, I want to show them that I am capable of breaking my side of it.” But it does seem to me that this, if I take it as I see it, this is Moses’ reaction of anger. Anger at what they’re doing. And sometimes when we are angry, we do things we shouldn’t do. And interestingly enough, rabbinic legend has it that when it came to building the tabernacle, and in the tabernacle, they had the ark. In the ark, there was both the 10 Commandments as were given a second time and the broken pieces of the first one. So they were not completely disregarded.

Stephen, “Drinking water with gold is a wonderful way to destroy the kidneys.” Well, not being a medical man myself, I wouldn’t know. I don’t know how much they had to drink. And I imagine you’d have to have a reasonable amount to destroy your kidneys, but there’s no evidence after that that large numbers died from kidney failure, so maybe they didn’t have too much. But nevertheless, it’s a very good point.

Q: “Besides lockdown, do you teach on any other platform?” Mita asks.

A: At the moment, the only other platform I teach is in New York at the JCC. I give lectures there. But otherwise, no. But if you want to see what I’ve said in the past, all of those previous lectures are all on the lockdown website so you can catch up on a lot of stuff there. And I’m always happy to answer questions if people email me. I devote a certain time every day to answering email questions.

Faith says, “Idols, things we make, can elevate to the level of consuming desire like celebrity, avariciousness, conspicuous consumption, and ignore the pursuit of what really matters. Kindness, charity and scholarship.” Absolutely true. I completely agree with that. That is… You know, I’ve always claimed, we make idols, we make our golden idols. Ambition is the most obvious one. And, you know, consumption, consumerism is another.

And Rita has commented and congratulated you on that point, and I do too.

Robert said, “Tomorrow in America, they officially have gratitude. May all of us, whether near or far, count our many blessings, that includes your wisdom.” Oh, you’re so sweet. I just want to say, Robert, every morning, the first thing I say when I wake up in the morning is to thank God. I thank you for my health, for being alive, for the blessings that I have. And of course there have been tragedies and disasters and mistakes in my life, but the answer is to focus on the positive. And you know, I do that without the history of having killed the poor Indians who enabled me to survive in order to have Thanksgiving. But nevertheless, we won’t have a turkey, we’ll have something vegetarian instead.

Romaine, “No mention of how affected Aaron was by the behaviour of the people. He’s pragmatic.” You’re making an excellent point, Romaine. Because one of the results that come out of this whole denouement of the golden calf is that Aaron is characterised as the person who is conciliatory. And in we have this famous statement: Be like Aaron. Love peace. Pursue peace. Love humanity. So the rabbis in define Aaron as being somebody who wants to help people, be kind to people. The trouble is that sometimes you can be too soft. Like inequality, if it’s taken too far one way or another, it can lose the ideal. Just as strictness is necessary, there can be too strict. So this idea of him being the pragmatist, I think is absolutely right. And the text seems to support that.

Richard Colquer, quoting, “Whoever the Lord for me is like the Maccabees.” Yes indeed. That’s exactly what they said. They repeated the Torah, which again shows at the time of the Maccabees that was well known, the Torah was well known, and people knew the text inside out. Or some of them did at any rate.

Q: Shelly says, “Is there a connection between the Levites killing 3,000 and Simeon killing the men of Shechem after the rape of Dinah?”

A: That’s an excellent question. The trouble was that the brothers killing the men of Shechem was against the will of their father, was considered to be a bad thing. Whereas this is considered to be a good thing. So, you know, in one sense they were both reactions to a bad act to start off with. I mean, after all the rape of Dinah was a bad act. But nevertheless, in the case of Simeon and Levi, they were considered to be wrong. And why Jacob, when he on his deathbed, in fact doesn’t actually curse them, but he says, “I need to separate them.” And one became religious fanatics, if you like, and Simeon became, if you like, the political fanatics. So it’s an interesting point. Karla, thank you.

Lindy, “Nietzsche said, ‘War is the natural state of man.’” Indeed he did. Yes. And… What’s his name? The German military historian. I have these senior moments. I know very well who he was and I’m just having a moment. I’m sorry. I’ll get there in the end. Thank you for your insight, Israel. Thank you very much.

Sarah Meron says, “It is Greek.” Ah, thank you Sarah. Bless you. “It’s writing from left to right on alternate lines. I would think unlikely in cuneiform.” How interesting. Wow! More research to do.

And Alfred says, “Boustrophedon is Greek. It’s a technical term for writing alternate directions, alternate lines arrive from the turning straight form the furrows in the field. But as Sarah’s pointed out, that’s not how cuneiform works.” But nevertheless, thank you both. You’ve made my day. Thank you Rita.

Q: “Reference to Abraham and Co. strange. Didn’t that come later?”

A: Well, no, I mean the promise to the land of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob happens in Genesis. That already happens when, at the time of Abraham, and reiterated to the fathers.

And Philip, ah, here’s a medical man, says, “Gold is only dangerous if given by injection, not orally.” Thank you for that.

Q: And Joshua says, “Bismarck?”

A: No, Bismarck was a politician. It was Christ, Cruz, da, da, da, da, da. Clausewitz! Clausewitz! Clausewitz is the German who wrote this very important book on war that the German militarism of the late 19th and 20th century is based on. Clausewitz. Bismarck was the unifier, the politician. And at one stage he fired Moltke. Moltke, his general, ‘cause he thought he wasn’t doing a good job. Phew! I’m glad. You see that’s what happens. At the moment I lose it and then I get it back again.

Q: Lorna, “Is Exodus claiming that God wrote using Hebrew alphabet?”

A: That’s an excellent question. It doesn’t say so. It doesn’t tell us what alphabet it was written in. We assume it was written in Hebrew, but we don’t know. And there’s no evidence of the script that we have now then, so it’s an open question. And on that open question, we will leave it for today. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody. Happy days. And please God, I will see you next week.