Video iReport from the Foot of Mt. Sinai - 2/8/2010 3:09pm
Worshipping the Golden Calf
At the time of Moses, Egypt was a highly advanced civilization, and its theology was as fully developed as Judaism or Christianity is today. Memphis, in the northern part of Egypt, was the political capital of Egypt, while Thebes to the south (modern-day Luxor) was the religious capital. Thebes was the home of magnificent temples dedicated to the Egyptian gods, along with more than 8,000 priests to serve them. One of the best examples of an Egyptian temple is the Temple of Karnak.
Emad Samir, our Logos colleague and an expert Egyptologist, teaching on the “Avenue of the Sphinxes” in front of Karnak Temple.
Notice the two huge pylons that serve as an entryway to the temple. All Egyptian temples consisted of five elements: 1) entryway pylons, 2) courtyard, 3) garden, 4) vestibule, and 5) holy of holies. The five elements are reflected in the design of Israel’s tabernacle: 1) the entryway, 2) the courtyard, 3) the altar/laver, 4) the holy place (with the menorah, altar of incense and table of showbread), and 5) the holy of holies (with the ark of the covenant). Only priests were permitted inside Karnak Temple, a practice adopted by the Israelites with the tabernacle, and later with the temple in Jerusalem.
Three images sit in the temple courtyard, one for each god of the Triad of Thebes, to whom the temple is dedicated:
1) Amon, the father god; 2) Mut, the mother god; and 3) Khonse, the son god.
Emad teaching inside the holy of holies. A golden image of Amon would have sat
on the stone platform in the foreground, as the ark of the covenant sat in the
holy of holies in the tabernacle.
The Temple of Karnak flourished during the period that the Israelites were in Egypt, and it represented the fully developed and sophisticated religion that the Israelites experienced during their centuries of slavery in Egypt. The Egyptian gods must have seemed very powerful to the Israelites, indeed. When God brings the Israelites out of Egypt in Exodus, he moves them to Mt. Sinai in the southern portion of the Sinai peninsula, a vast, barren, remote and dangerous land. Moses then climbs Mt. Sinai, the mountain of God, and he disappears into a huge display of smoke and fire. Then in Exodus 32: 1 we read: “When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain [over a month!] they gathered around Aaron and said, ‘Come, make us gods [literally “a god”] who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.’” Clearly, the Israelites view themselves as being in big trouble: they have left a devastated Egypt behind them; they are responsible for wiping out the entire Egyptian army in the Red Sea; they have lost Moses, their leader; they are in the middle of what Moses calls a “vast and dreadful wilderness” (Deuteronomy 1: 19); and God, who brought them out of Egypt, has apparently deserted them. They believe they are all going to die—two million men, women and children—in a barren and frightening place. The Israelites need a strong god to get them out of this mess! So they turn to one of the strongest gods in the Egyptian pantheon, a god they know intimately from their four hundred year stay in Egypt: Hathor. Hathor had been worshipped since the Old Kingdom, 2686-2181 B.C., long before Abraham, the Israelites or Moses arrived in Egypt. The daughter of Ra, the sun god, and the wife of Horus, Hathor appears in three forms: 1) as a woman, 2) as a cow, and 3) as a lion. As a woman she is often referred to as “the golden one;” “she of the beautiful hair;” or “the lady of drunkenness,” representing the joyful intoxication involved in her worship (hence, the drunken revelry Moses sees when he descends the mountain—Exodus 32: 17-19): the Greeks associated her with the goddess of love, Aphrodite. As a cow, she represents motherhood, and she is often presented as the divine mother of the ruling king. In a statue at her temple in Deir al-Bahri, Luxor, she is portrayed as a cow suckling Amonhotep II, who in our dating scheme is the Pharaoh of the Exodus. As a lion, Hathor is a warrior goddess, protecting her children. Most often, her iconography is a woman wearing the headdress of a sun disk and a cow’s horns.
Here we see Ptolomy IV presenting himself to Hathor (center) and her sister, Isis (left) at Philae Temple.
When the Israelites say, “Come, make us [a god] who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him,” Aaron crafts a golden calf for them, an image of Hathor. In desperation the Israelites call upon Hathor, daughter of the great sun-god, Ra, to rescue them. The golden calf is simply the iconography of Hathor, a symbolic representation of her motherhood and her role as nurturer and protector of her children. Watch the video iReport shot at the foot of Mt. Sinai—and see the golden calf!
Photography by Ana Vargas.
