Julio

Oh, oh! You're adding MORE imponderables to the story!
First of all, it wasn't the slaves' problem that Moses DELAYED his stay up there on the mount!
Secondly, they had no law at the time of the golden calf!
Thirdly, Jehovah made a SERIOUS error of judgement, by choosing the WRONG slaves!!
And just look at what you said: "God will re-establish the covenant but this time he will entrust the law to worthy people."
It is, in your PRIVATE interpretation, Jehovah's FAULT that he MESSED UP his original plan, and I agree.
A decent Jehovah would have sat down calmly and calculate the risks of the entire plan, whereby he would have NOT to kill THREE THOUSAND innocent slaves right away!!!
You see, forgive me for putting it like that, YOU and other exegetes are always EXCUSING Jehovah and blaming the slaves.
It is a terrible misdemeanour, my friend!
Of course the gory scene is allegorical, or crap like that, from an IDOL invented by Moses, but conservative exegetes arrive in the forum to throw sand into the eyes of discerning [liberal] commentators.
Bottom line: taking the fable as if it were literal, then Jehovah and Moses - a terribly cynical pair - are to blame for the KILLINGS that were brought in as if to bless the entire plan to liberate the slaves from the BEST country of that region at that time!

Julio

Excellent point!

Julio

Perfect deduction. It is a tale with loose ends, allowing fundamentalist scholars to twist it to pleasure!
It is a shame that we go to church to hear fragile brains exposing this so-called "Law" as divine and holy!
It started with the KILLING of three thousand innocent bystanders!
The 10 Cs should be entirely scrapped from our humanist Constitutions.
"Thou shalt NOT follow gods, and Jehovah!"

Julio

True. And his wife took the opportunity to exactly define Moses' character "A bloody man!"
Exodus 4:25.
Decades later, Moses would kill all Zipporah's family, in the Midianite campaign, Number 31.

Sheshbazzar

Except you are either forgetting or neglecting the information that Moses went up the Mountain in Ex 19:3,
came back down,
then went back up again in Ex 19:8,
went back 'down' again in 19:14,
went back up again in 19:20,
went back down again in 19:24-25,
before going up yet again in Ex 24:12
The path must have been getting pretty familiar by then.

Sheshbazzar

And to continue the tale,
After Moses comes down from the mountain, and breaks the tablets in Ex 32:19
He then needs to go back up the mountain in Ex 34:4
where he stays up there yet another 'forty days and forty nights' 34:28
then comes back down in 34:29

After at least FIVE separate trips 'up' that mountain, with more than -eighty days- being spent 'up' there, one would think that by this time 'The Law of YHWH'
had been given;
But nope, Moses ain't done yet with his 'giving of YHWH's laws', not by a long shot, no way, no how, as the 'law giving' continues, going on, and on, and on, for many chapters, adding on hundreds of the additional 'laws, statutes and ordinances' of 'YHWH' which are only finally completed and set before the people -forty years latter- in Deut 27 where they are required to affirm them.

And the 'rest of the story' is how many of the Hebrews rejected, refused, and chose to die rather than to submit to that tyranny being inflicted by Moses and his band of insanely murderous religious zealots.
'Hebrews' and 'Israelites' were not all 'Jewish', and did not all accept that 'Jewish' form of 'religion' and 'religious history' that the religion of 'Judaism' attempted to impose upon them, and to foist off upon the rest of humanity.

NoeL

Hehe, that was funny. But no, I didn't pinch it from Mel Brooks.

GakuseiDon

My mistake then!

ph2ter

The whole story about breaking the tablets is fictive and serves the affairs of later times (in supposed time of Moses the Jews actually didn't have a script yet).
The story is about political and religious struggles before and in the time of the exile. It advocates the Levite priesthood (The Levites did as Moses commanded, and that day about three thousand of the people died. 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.”) over the Aaronite (He said to Aaron, “What did these people do to you, that you led them into such great sin?”)

The story is also about abandoning the polytheism and the sacrifices of the firstborns.
The Jews said to Aaron: "they gathered around Aaron and said, “Come, make us gods who will go before us"", and Aaron "and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf", "Then they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.". Everyone can see that the gods (in plural) are in conflict with the only one calf. Semiopen rightly pointed to Kings 12:28. where "the king took counsel, and made two calves of gold". They are two because one represented Yhwh or El and the other was probably a cow and represented the goddess (Aserah, Astoreth), consort of Yhwh-El.
Later censorship is obvious. Originally polytheism was official among the Jews and in the time before the exile it started to be treated like idolatry.

The author does not attack only the polytheism, he also attack the practice of sacrificing the firstborns. The imagery of that kind is present throughout the whole chapter.
Let's look Exodus 32.19-20: "When Moses approached the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, his anger burned and he threw the tablets out of his hands, breaking them to pieces at the foot of the mountain. And he took the calf they had made and burned it in the fire; then he ground it to powder, scattered it on the water and made the Israelites drink it."
Moses has done to the calf what had been usually done with the firstborns - they were burned in the fire. The calf parallels the firstborn. What is interesting is that the sacrificing imagery of breaking into pieces is not applied only to the calf, but also to the tablets. The calf represented the young god which is figuratively sacrificed by burning in the fire. Sacrificed meat must to be eaten, and the calf is accordingly consumed by the whole community of Israel. It is known that colloidal gold is a suspension of intense red color (if particles of gold are less than 100 nm) so it appeared that the Israelites drank blood. Also at the end of chapter it is said: "And the Lord struck the people with a plague because of what they did with the calf Aaron had made.". Because of its yellow color, gold could be connected also with a plague, because this is the skin color when someone gets jaundice.

Breaking the tablets could also symbolize breaking of the old bad laws which proscribed the sacrifice of the firstborns. The prophet Ezekiel says something in line using the similar imagery :
"Also I swore to them in the wilderness that I would scatter them among the nations and disperse them among the lands, because they had not observed My ordinances, but had rejected My statutes and had profaned My sabbaths, and their eyes were on the idols of their fathers. I also gave them statutes that were not good and ordinances by which they could not live; and I pronounced them unclean because of their gifts, in that they caused all their firstborn to pass through the fire so that I might make them desolate, in order that they might know that I am the Lord."' Ezekiel 20.23-27

The old statutes that were not good are sacrificed and destroyed - the old tablets were broken and the old gods of polytheism together with the tablets.

Iskander

What I have posted is only an explanation to the question you have asked. The explanation I have posted is neither right or wrong, nor better or worse than any other.

The promises made to Abraham and others, however, have a deeper, spiritual meaning that remains intact. The “land” promised to Abraham is interpreted in a spiritual sense to mean the kingdom of heaven, that is to say, the new earth to be inhabited by the saints in eternal life. Paul understands the “progeny of Abraham” to mean all who share the faith of Abraham. The Davidic kingship becomes, in the New Testament, the glorious reign of the risen Christ, the son of David. And the New Testament authors see the gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church as the realization of the New Covenant.