2 Aaron answered them, “Take off the gold earrings(D) that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me.” 3 So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. 4 He took what they handed him and made it into an idol(E) cast in the shape of a calf,(F) fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, “These are your gods,[b](G) Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.”(H)
5 When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, “Tomorrow there will be a festival(I) to the Lord.” 6 So the next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings.(J) Afterward they sat down to eat and drink(K) and got up to indulge in revelry.(L)
…
24 So I told them, ‘Whoever has any gold jewelry, take it off.’ Then they gave me the gold, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!”(AV)
25 Moses saw that the people were running wild and that Aaron had let them get out of control and so become a laughingstock(AW) to their enemies.26 So he stood at the entrance to the camp and said, “Whoever is for the Lord, come to me.” And all the Levites rallied to him.
27 Then he said to them, “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘Each man strap a sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.’”(AX) 28 The Levites did as Moses commanded, and that day about three thousand of the people died. 29 Then Moses said, “You have been set apart to the Lord today, for you were against your own sons and brothers, and he has blessed you this day.”
This came to mind when I had “Aaron was a prophet” called to mind.
He built a golden calf.
He led them into frolics.
The people who followed his lead were executed.
Aaron remained Moses’ second in command and went unpunished.
What do you take from this story?
Wheat & Tares 
Ask Ensign Peak Advisors. They know a thing or two about gold.
Blood is thicker than water. And gold more precious than blood.
Doesn’t the scripture say that the Lord made Aaron to be Moses’ prophet to the people, since Moses wasn’t a good speaker?
More evidence of polytheism in the OT. Early Israelites, like their neighbors, were polytheists who believed in a pantheon of gods each of whom governed over different aspects of nature. Animal worship in the form of art was common among the bronze-age cultures of that time. The hope was that by creating an image of a bull, devotees could summon the power of a god who had dominion over food production and animal husbandry and that their wealth and food surplus would abound as a result of making an idol and making sacrifices to it. Aaron was experimenting with idol worship in an attempt to summon the powers of a particular god in the pantheon (perhaps Yahweh or some other god). His younger brother Moses, ambitious and power-hungry, one-ups Aaron and performs an act of iconoclasm in order to assert his religious prowess, embarrass his brother, and usurp authority. He made his authority a question of you accept you live, you reject you die. He spares Aaron, because he still needs him to retain some religious legitimacy.
An attempt at an interpretation. Moses was a brutal tyrannical warlord. The passage in Numbers 31 where he slays the Middianites and tells his men to kill all the women and children, except for the young virgin girls who they were to “save for themselves,” attests to such.
What do I take from the story? About the same thing as I take from when Moses himself makes a gold snake for the people to bow down to. The Israelites were polytheistic, and made representations of their Gods out of gold in order to worship.
Later in copying the Bible, the priests tried to make the whole thing monotheistic, so they changed details of the story if needed. It is possible that Moses was less upset about the gold calf than he was about the partying, because he didn’t seem all that upset with Aaron and then himself makes an idol to (probably) Isis.
Stephen, if you take the story of Moses and the children of Israel to be largely a myth, then I say John W’s and Anna’s takes are the best way to accept the story. A shadow of a memory written down by people many hundreds of years removed from the events they claim to depict. It’s a polytheistic story with some but not all of the its edges sanded off to make the story fit a monotheist worldview.
However, if you want to try to accept the story as least somewhat accurate as written and that Latter-day Saint teachings about Jesus being the premortal god of Israel (who is referred to in the Tanakh as both Elohim and Yahweh) as also accurate (but ignore LDS teachings about the name “Elohim,” at least for the moment), then you can also point out that the word “elohim” has two uses in Hebrew. It can be translated as a plural word meaning “gods” (with the singular word being “el” or “god” – which is occasionally used to refer to the God of Israel but usually with a modifier of some sort like “El Shaddai”). It is also used to refer to the one God of Israel despite the word clearly being plural and the God of Israel clearly being a singular god. If you can accept all that, then maybe you can read the command from the people to Aaron in verse 1 (not included above) to arise and make them “gods” and Aaron’s response, “These are your gods,” as a story not about multiple gods but rather about making a physical manifestation of the God of Israel (Elohim). Or maybe the people really ARE calling for multiple gods, and Aaron is trying to do the least amount of harm by making only a single calf representing and saying, “See? Here’s elohim. Haha, get it?” As a modicum of support for this theory, I would point to the use of two calf statues in the northern kingdom centuries later as stand-ins for Yahweh to obviate the need to travel to the southern kingdom to worship at the temple. It’s not a great theory but it’s all I can think of (and I don’t claim to have invented it).
Having said all that, I will now wait for people who are much smarter and have a good grasp of Hebrew (or who at least interact with those who do) to tell me why this theory is incredibly wrong.
John W, wow. Somehow amidst all the other horrible stuff in the OT I never noticed Numbers 31. What a truly depraved and evil story. From what I understand, Moses probably wasn’t a real person. But even so, how do we as a church (and all the other Judeo-Christian sects out there) hold him up as any kind of hero? It’s hard to imagine anything more evil than what he’s ordering the Israelites to do in this chapter.
The sons were wearing gold earrings?
From the context, I cannot rule out that each person had only one piercing.
I deduce that the men got to keep their earrings.
Not A Cougar, I’ve heard the interpretation that -im in Elohim is an honorific plural, not an indication of multiple gods per se. It is certainly an explanation I can accept given the likelihood that the post-exilic Israelite monotheists who wrote down the OT sought to impose their monotheism on the polytheistic traditions of their ancestors. But Elohim isn’t the only indication of polytheistic belief of the Israelites in the OT. At the very least, the Israelite first commandment is “no other gods before me,” which suggests that they viewed Yahweh to be a patron god who insisted that the Israelites not turn to other gods. If anything it suggests that the early Israelites believed in the existence of other gods, but that they just weren’t to seek after them to improve the weather, have a good harvest/hunt, and increase their wealth and power and that Yahweh would punish those who sought after other gods. Much of the OT narrative portrays Yahweh as one of many gods, and who is in direct competition with those other gods, rather than an omniscient, omnipotent, transcendent, overarching, all-present God (with a capital G), which Jews and Christians think of today.
Kirkstall, Numbers 31 is not featured in Sunday School manuals suffice it to say. I don’t doubt that strong leaders and spiritual guides existed in pre-exilic Israelite culture and it is possible that a Moses-like figure, perhaps even with a similar name inspired the stories of Moses told in the OT. But the stories are fantastic fables that cannot be corroborated with outside evidence. Still, the question that Stephen poses in part is what moral lessons can be derived from the golden calf story. I’m honestly not sure on that one. I think ancient Israelite culture derived morals from the story that just don’t apply today. Ancient Israelites feared being corrupted by outside cultures. Today, cosmopolitanism, where we accept lots of different cultures and even celebrate and embrace diversity as a sort of ideal, morality is much different.
John W, I most definitely agree and don’t mean to suggest that there is any strong evidence to support the historicity of the Exodus or monotheistic pre-exhilic Israelites. The view that the Israelites (pre-Exhile anyway) were thoroughly polytheistic seems to be pretty unimpeachable based on the archaeological record as developed by Dever, Finkelstein, and others. My theory about “elohim” really doesn’t hold water as anything more than a teaching tool for readers of Hebrew (and it’s probably most helpful to those of them who are monotheistic worshippers of the God of Israel). And yet, I can’t help but try to find meaning where there probably isn’t any, historically speaking.
I view the Midianite story in Numbers 31 as fictitious, composed by the Jews during or after the Babylonian captivity. It is an extreme form of nationalistic propaganda for people trying to regain their lands from their neighbors. Count it as trash talk against the Midianites, not historical reality.
Old Man, the Midianite story is one of several triumph narratives that are contradicted by the facts.
Calling those stories trash talking isn’t a bad translation into modern narratives.
Discovering such narratives (we destroyed our enemies completely) as a literary form and the historical evidence that no genocide actually occurred is one of the contributions modern study has made to the understanding of the Bible.
It’s not clear to me that there is a lot to be gained by studying the OT.
Old Man, I fully agree that the Midianite story is fictitious and it could very well be trash-talk. But I also believe all stories of the Pentateuch to be almost entirely fictitious. Stories like the Midianite one or the golden calf and Moses ordering the killing of “brothers, friends, and neighbors” pose a quandary for believers, however. For why place so much stake in one particular story being historically true (such as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden or Noah’s flood or Moses crossing the Red Sea) and then claim fiction in the face of a morally inconvenient story? If killing Midianites is fictional, then why regard another story to be true and accurate?
Nephi offers an general explanation in 1Nephi 13. I think he makes it clear that the Old Testament has been reworked and manipulated until it has become a stumbling block to the believer and results in the believer to be cast into an “awful state of blindness” or “soundness” in the 1830 edition I agree Numbers 31 bears remarkable similarity to an avoiding of the Mountain Meadows massacre written 500 years after the event by someone trying to justify the event and who needs to show the local church leaders were inspired. The historical books of the OT are a hodgepodge of propaganda and false tales The fact we bother to read it is evidence the Correlation Committee is a tool of the adversary. Remember Joseph was reluctant to approach God because he saw him as a terrible moral monster. This is a very great problem for anyone raised on the stories of the terrifying God of the OT
Bellamy, interesting theory, but verse 28 of 1 Nephi 13 makes it very clear that the the Old Testament would “go forth from the Jews in purity unto the Gentiles, according to the truth which is in God.” It would only be after it got into the hands of the great and abominable church (I’ll leave it to others to try to decide who or what that church is) that the plain and precious parts of the “gospel of the Lamb” would be taken away. With the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, it has become pretty clear that the records in the possession of the Jewish people around the time of Jesus were very much what we have today. There doesn’t appear to be anything significant left out. My conclusion then is that either the “great and abominable church” was up and running much earlier in antiquity than Latter-day Saints typically supposed such that it was able to control the creation and dissemination of what we call the Old Testament with all of the “plain and precious truths” stripped out by the time of Jesus OR Nephi (or any possible alternative author of 1 Nephi 13) is simply wrong about the origins of our Old Testament. I lean towards the later, but I’m often wrong.
John W, fiction or not, the real question is what lesson is the story intended to tell.
I think we learn a lot from that and on reflection on the intent of the text and how we are to interact with it.
Stephen, there are much better lessons to be learned from a variety of other sources. To waste a whole year on the OT is frivolous. Studying the above serves no useful purpose. Church leaders need to quit wasting member’s time.
The CFM instructor material for June 19th contains the following: “While we don’t know all the reasons Saul was commanded to kill all of the Amalekites and their animals, there are lessons to learn from his response to that commandment. To help class members identify these lessons, you could write on the board To obey is better than … and invite class members to ponder this phrase as you review together events from 1 Samuel 15. What are some good things we do in our lives that we sometimes choose instead of obeying God? Why is obedience to God better than those other good things?”
For reference, in 1 Samuel 15:1-3, Samuel (the prophet) relays the commandment to Saul (military leader) to exterminate the Amalekites, including…”Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” So, newborn babies, who are without sin and are NOT accountable for the sins of their parents (see AoF #2) need to be stabbed and decapitated…AND, the “fact” that Israelite men showed “faith” and made the hard choice to “obey” is the setup for a class discussion about the virtues of unquestioning obedience…
Suffice to say, I as instructor will be changing the topic of the lesson to “Obedience and Righteousness are different things”.
It’s kind of funny that most people are commenting about the historicity of the story, when I don’t think that’s the point.
Anyone who has been in a corporate environment knows that “s@&$ rolls downhill.” It’s rare to see leaders take real accountability for their mistakes.
Or in modern LDS corporate speak, “it’s wrong to criticize the leaders, even if the leaders are wrong” or “you’ll be blessed for following them anyways even if they are wrong”. The members will be hung out to dry as leaders protect themselves.
This was an interesting observation in scripture and a great parallel to the modern corporate church. Thanks!
Kevin, I’m glad you were able to find value in the story; however, I think it’s also disingenuous to pretend it was only ever meant to be a morality tale understood as inspired fiction (and I’m sure that people posting on a Mormon-themed blog are naturally going to be more concerned with historicity than those on other religion-oriented forums). The Exodus is THE story of Israel’s lasting foundation in the Holy Land. The details of the Exodus might in actuality be nothing more than myth, but I also don’t think it was ever meant to be just a very extended parable to help God’s chosen people understand their relationship to their chosen deity.
Not a cougar. Good argument but clearly faulty Note the extensive citation to both Zenos and Zenock in the Book of Mormon and the pseudepigrapha evidence for their existence but never mentioned in the OT Your reading of the “great and abominatible “ is too narrow The Jewish religious establishment in 600 bc in my opinion qualifies Note also Nephi says the brass plates were much more lengthy than the OT Clearly if you take Nephis word a lot is missing and any biblical scholar will tell you the historical narrative in the OT was mostly constructed in Babylon after 600 bc the Dead Sea scrolls do not shed any light on this because the oldest of them were composed at most about 200 ad long after the changes were made that would become a snare to the Gentiles and plunge them into an state of awful blindness
Roger I completely agree Terryl Givens suggests we remove the OT from our course of study. I am reminded of Nibley’s remark that the poverty of our manuals and handbooks “defies description “
Jade if I were you I would ask someone to explain the difference and similarities. between this story and the Mountsin Meadows Massacre. Both happened because people chose to obey rather than asking God directly You of course run the risk of being released the next day
From @Jade (thank you!): “The CFM instructor material for June 19th contains the following: “While we don’t know all the reasons Saul was commanded to kill all of the Amalekites and their animals, there are lessons to learn from his response to that commandment.”
Wow. This is horrifying. It is 2022. Anyone with thoughts of God telling them to kill others needs to reach out for psychiatric care asap, maybe go to their nearest emergency room to seek help,
Bellamy, I do not mean to be rude, but do you take 1 Nephi 13 seriously or not? I’m not saying it’s accurate, but you seem to insist the Book of Mormon accurately depicts the history of the creation of the Old Testament and the excising of critical information from it. Verse 26 lays out the chronology and the “great and abominable church” is only created after the book comes from the hands of the twelve apostles and then into the hands of the Gentiles. That description doesn’t match up terribly well with a “great and abominable church” of Jewish elites living sometime around or perhaps long before 600 BC shredding copies of the writings Zenos and Zenock to ensure no one finds out about Jesus and his far-in-the-future crucifixion.
One good reason to study the Old Testament is that it constantly portrayed prophets as fallible and subject to human weaknesses.
Thanks to Stephen Marsh, @Jade, @Bellamy, & @anon today
This account (and correlation’s approved guidance), along with the modern-day LDS acceptance of an interpretation that Abraham was being righteous for his willingness to slaughter his son, merits deeper scrutiny. I think that in these applications, the wrong questions are indeed being asked.
At its core, it gets at a doctrinal foundation of the nature of God.
If God wanted internal House of Israel cleansing done, there are lots of Acts of God an Omnipotent God has at hand. What kind of people are produced when they justify such brutal carnage?
It opens up questions of what sort of God I would be willing to adore, to worship, then unfailingly obey.
Further, there are modern examples that heavily impact a others’ lives, membership, employment, and ability to support themselves:
Can I fully love my lgbtq+ family member (or self)? Can I work with them, employ them?
How much does our endogamy actually matter to God?
Would I practice polygamy as my ancestors did?
If I were a SP that was pushed to excommunicate a person doing good (Sam Young, Natasha Helfer, various historians….), would I “obey”? I find the reports that D. Michael Quinn’s SP while he was head of a graduate program at BYU did not fall to the pressure to revoke his temple recommend (which would have resulted in him losing his employment) really very heartening.
P. S. Did you hear about the Christian assault rifle with Psalms 144 laser etched on it; “Blessed be the LORD my strength which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight: My goodness, and my fortress; my high tower, and my deliverer; my shield, and he in whom I trust; who subdueth my people under me.” Not sure if it includes the entirety of verse.