And now for a wild ride to the Land of the Philistines courtesy of God’s Ark of the Covenant and two cows. It is here of all places that correspondence between the Golden Calf and the Red Heifer will became crystal clear.
Let us, however pause for a moment, and consider what the golden calf actually was. Did the Israelites actually think that the Golden Calf was God according to the story? Did the Northern Israelites who had two golden calves in the temples of Dan and Bethel believe that?
Some did most likely, but not the sophisticates. For the sophisticates the golden calf was the steed of the God – God sat there.
How do I know that, well the hero of Jewish Bible Criticism, Ibn Ezra claimed it, saying that the calf was ‘Something corporeal on which the glory [i.e. god] would rest’ but beyond that animals were often the steeds of deities in the ancient word.
This understanding offers also offers a plausible explanation as to why the Israelites together with Aaron weren’t entirely obliterated after this disqualifying sin. Instead, only a few thousand people died and they were made to drink ashy water, which is yucky but not lethal. Moses even convinced God to lead them once more. Aaron would have been the cherry on top of the burnt parfait had they actually considered the calf to be a god.
Where else did God sit according to Priestly literature?
He sat on the Cherubs above the Ark of the Covenant.
As it says in Exodus 25:22: “There I will meet with you, and I will impart to you—from above the cover, from between the two cherubim that are on top of the Ark of the Pact—all that I will command you concerning the Israelite people.”
This may have actually been the basic disagreement between Northern and Southern Israel – Did God sit on the ark or on a calf? In the North they liked bovines as divine steeds, whereas in the South they like cherubs.
So now as promised the wild ride in the book of Samuel, with the comparison to the combined calf-heifer story in brackets.
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