Where did all the Gold and Jewels Come From?, page 1

Originally posted by siriuslyone

When the Jews made the golden calf, were they carrying or wearing enough gold to make an object that large?

Well, the Egyptian people (not Pharaoh and his nobles) were so happy to be free of the accursed hebrews that they gave them gold and silver to get them out of the land, seeing as how their presence in egypt had brought plagues of blood, frogs, gnats flies, lice, hail, boils, death of livestock, darkness, and the death of the first born.

So yeah, among a large enough group, there'd be enough gold to make a calf.

Now. If you would like to be really pestered by the Biblical text, try this one on for size. It's not the golden calf that is so problematic, it is what Moses did with it after punishing the survivors who had worshipped it:

Exodus 32:20

Then he [Moses, ed.] took the calf which they had made, burned it in the fire, and ground it to powder; and he scattered it on the water and made the children of Israel drink it.

So, look at what Moses did:

1. Burned it in fire. Gold, as a heavy metal, is not combustable in anything but a modern blast furnace. It melts at temperatures obtainable with bellows in a buried smelter that Egyptian-era technology would have known. But it doesn't actually combust until several thousand degrees. Not what you can produce with a campfire.

2. Ground it to powder. Gold is one of the most malleable metals, and doesn't fracture like iron or chrome does. It can be beaten out into sheets as thin as 10 molecules, like the film on the windows of the space shuttle, that filter out radiation. But because of its super-malleability, the one thing you cannot do is grind it to a powder. Only the iron pyrites (fools gold) can be treated this way, and so this has been about the oldest test for true gold - malleability, and lack of "pulverisability."

3. Scattered it "on the face of" the water. That is the literal rendering of the Hebrew here. On the surface of. But of course, gold doesn't float, since its specific gravity is about 19 times that of water. Gold sinks. Unless it's moses that's doing the scattering, apparently.

So, how do you explain this?

Scribal ignorance? Hardly. The scribes were the moneyed class of Israel, and were the most likely handlers of gold in that society. More than anyone besides goldsmiths, the king's courtiers and clerks would have known the qualities of gold, since they were in charge of the king's coffers. And First Chronicles says that these are the dudes that started writing down the Bible for solomon.

Maybe the "golden" calf was actually a wooden idol, covered with gold leaf? That would make sense; but then why not say so, when a whole chapter is given to describing how the later ark of the covenant, a wooden object, was carefully sheathed in gold, and how the plates were joined together. In the account at Sinai, Aaron tells the people to give him earrings, not gopher wood. And he describes a process of forging, and not overlay: "I threw their ear and nose-rings in the fire, and out popped this calf!"

Somewhere, there's some 'splainin' to do.

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