For the likeness of an ox that eateth grass.- Psa_106:19-20.
The Israelites had, no doubt, been deeply impressed both by their deliverance and by the extraordinary manifestation of Mount Sinai; but they were far from being ready to receive the pure and exalted teaching respecting God which Moses had delivered. Ancestral traditions, stretching back into the dim past-of Jehovah a tribal God, like the Elohim of other nations, worshipped under the form of an image, and in a free and joyful manner with sacrificial feasts and revels-soon reasserted themselves. The mighty personality of Moses was removed for the time; and fears for the future, as well, perhaps, as superstitious dread of the cloud-capped mountain looming above them, combined to raise the outcry to Aaron: “Up, make us gods (Elohim), which shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we know not what is become of him” (Exo_32:1). Aaron yielded to their clamour, and from their golden earrings (perhaps chosen because they were worn as amulets by women and children, and had religious associations) he fashioned a calf (possibly a winged bull, like the cherubim, or like the ox-idols of Egypt). It was welcomed with the shout, “These be thy gods (Elohim), O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt”; an altar was erected, and a solemn feast was proclaimed by Aaron in its honour, as if it were actually the God it represented: “To-morrow is a feast to the Lord.” The feast-day was celebrated with the usual burnt-offerings and peace-offerings, feasting, drinking, and riotous revellings;-but it was a day destined to be stamped deeply on the conscience and memory of Israel.
1. The revolt was universal: “The people gathered themselves together.” It was a national rebellion, a flood which swept away even some faithful, timid hearts. No voices ventured to protest. What were the elders, who shortly before “saw the God of Israel,” doing to be passive at such a crisis? Was there no one to bid the fickle multitude look up to the summit overhead, where the red flames glowed, or to remind them of the hosts of Egypt lying stark and dead on the shore?
We need not cast stones at these people; for we also have short memories for either the terrible or the gracious revelations of God in our own lives. But we may learn the lesson that God's lovers have to set themselves sometimes dead against the rush of popular feeling, and that there are times when silence or compliance is sin.
The host, where Dr. MacGregor was guest, indulged in some remarks of a jocular nature, which implied a scoffing at religion as something not worth consideration. The sting of his remark lay in the fact that, as our host, he implied our concurrence in his remarks, which were made apparently in all good nature and genial outspokenness. It was an awkward moment, and I remember feeling the perplexing distress of the situation. Dr. MacGregor, with a courage I shall never forget, reproved, and that effectually, the spirit in which the remarks were made, and his words produced an apologetic silence. In that there might have been nothing out of the way, but few men could have done it as he did. He made no scene, did not fortify himself with a fit of indignation, but solely by the firmness and moral force of the rebuke shamed the speaker into a sense of his mistake. There was no breach of friendship, or interruption of courtesy, only perhaps a minute's silence, and thereafter the evening passed pleasantly enough. I am sure no one rose from the table without having a deep sense of Dr. MacGregor's moral courage in a very trying and delicate occasion.1 [Note: Dr. MacGregor of St. Cuthberts, 527.]
2. Still sadder than their sense-bound wish is Aaron's compliance. He knew as well as we do what he should have said, but, like many another man in influential position, when beset by popular cries, he was frightened, and yielded when he should have “set his face like a flint.” His compliance has in essentials been often repeated, especially by priests and ministers of religion who have lent their superior abilities or opportunities to carry out the wishes of the ignorant populace, and debased religion or watered down its prohibitions to please and retain hold of them. The Church has incorporated much from heathenism. Roman Catholic missionaries have permitted “converts” to keep their old usages. Protestant teachers have acquiesced in, and been content to find the brains to carry out, compromises between sense and soul, God's commands and men's inclinations.
At the end of a note to Mr. Drummond on Tithes that evening, I expressed myself plainly about the House-tax and the shopkeepers, avowing my dread that Lord Althorp might yield to the clamour. Mr. Drummond called next day with the promised tithe document; and he told me that he had handed my note to Lord Althorp, who had said, “Tell her that I may be altogether of her mind; but that if she was here, in my place, with hundreds of shopkeepers yelling about the doors, she would yield, as I must do.” “Never,” was my message back, “so long as the House-tax is admitted to be the best on the list.” And I fairly told him that the Whig government was perilling the public safety by yielding everything to clamour, and nothing without it.2 [Note: Harriet Martineau's Autobiography, i. 263.]
3. There is nothing improbable in the story that the Israelites in the desert fell into this sin. The prohibition of metal images as symbols of deity was one of the fundamental principles of Moses' teaching, while the temptation to symbolize their deity under the form of a young bull-for such is the meaning of “calf” here-was one that might have presented itself very easily to the Israelites even in the desert, not because of their knowledge of the Egyptian animal-worship (which was of a very different type), but simply because of the widespread use of the bull as a symbol of deity throughout the Semitic world.
Two or three centuries later, bull images again emerge in the history of Israel. Among the measures taken by Jeroboam 1 for the consolidation of his new kingdom was one which was primarily designed to secure its independence of the rival kingdom of the South in the all-important matter of public worship. With this end in view, perhaps also with the subsidiary purpose of reconciling the priesthood of the local sanctuaries to the new order of things, Jeroboam set up two golden “calves,” one at Bethel and the other at Dan, the two most important sanctuaries, geographically and historically, in his realm.
It is now admitted on all hands that the bulls are to be recognized as symbols of Jehovah. He, and He alone, was worshipped, both in the wilderness and at Bethel and Dan, under the symbol of the golden bull. For the source of this symbolism we must look not to Egypt, as did the scholars of former days, but to the primitive religious conceptions of the Semitic stock to which the Hebrews belonged. Evidence, both literary and monumental, has accumulated in recent years, showing that among their Semitic kin the bull was associated with various deities as the symbol of vital energy and strength. Jeroboam, therefore, may be regarded as having merely given official sanction to a symbolism with which the Hebrews had been familiar, if not from time immemorial, at least since their association with the Canaanites.
From the time of Philo onwards it has commonly been supposed that the symbolism was derived from Egypt, where the bull Apis was revered in the temple at Heliopolis as the incarnation of Osiris, and the bull Mnevis in the temple of Ptah at Memphis, as the incarnation of the sun-god. There are, however, objections to this view. (1) The Egyptians worshipped only the living animals, not images of them; (2) it is unlikely that an image reflecting an Egyptian deity would have been chosen as the symbol of the national God, Jehovah, or have been represented as the deity who had delivered Israel from Egypt; (3) it is equally unlikely that Jeroboam should have sought to secure his throne by inviting his people to adopt the symbolism of a foreign cult. For these reasons most recent writers (including Dillmann) prefer to seek the origin of the bull-symbolism in the native beliefs either of the Israelites themselves, or of the Semitic nations allied to them.1 [Note: S. R. Driver, The Book of Exodus, 348.]
4. The great lesson of the incident is thus the danger of a false worship of the true God. In the present case this was through an inappropriate use of symbolism. Symbolism has its uses. The inability to realize the unseen and abstract justifies it. Men must depend on the tangible and illustrative. Speech is symbolic, the sign of thought. Poetry, music, art are symbolic. They suggest more than they actually express. When the tendency of symbolism is to suggest something beyond and above itself, it is legitimate and wholesome. But the dangers of symbolism are obvious.
The spirit of prayer like that of imagination is awakened in different persons by different objects. Some need such traditional symbols as the Madonna and the Crucifix to inspire it, others again find such symbols, from the very fact of their long familiarizing usage, void of appeal. Their virtue has gone out of them. Unfortunately it is in the nature of symbols either to wear out, or to become mere idols. A change of symbols is one of those needs of humanity that the Christian Church has not recognized.2 [Note: Richard Le Gallienne, The Religion of a Literary Man, 79.]
(1) There is danger in the direction of elaboration.-The more difficult and spiritual the thing to be symbolized, the more elaborate the symbolism is apt to become. Instead of being an open window to the sky, it becomes a veil whose elaborate design attracts and holds the eye to itself. This is the danger of ceremonialism in worship.
(2) In the direction of materialization.-Instead of assisting the mind to rise through the material to the spiritual, it panders to the weakness of the mind by conforming the spiritual to the material. Instead of kindling the imagination, it quenches it. This is the danger of idolatry. The history of Israel, with its calf-worship, shows the effects of the latter tendency. The history of Judah, with its imageless worship, but elaborate ceremonial, shows the evils of the former tendency. The meaning of the prophetic movement is found in its opposition to both tendencies. In the Roman Catholic form of Christianity the same dangers are manifested in a crass and obvious form. Rome, like ancient Israel, expresses its instincts in material symbols of ceremonial and image-worship, and often with just as fatal consequences. But is not Protestantism exposed to parallel or analogous dangers, though in a more refined and more subtle form? Protestantism expresses its instincts in intellectual symbols-as the creeds have often been called-as signs of Christian faith. These also have their place and uses. They seek to clarify our ideas of God. But most of our creeds have been born in sectarian controversy. They often superficially clarify only because they limit the idea of God. The God of these creeds, while in form the God of the whole earth, is in essence an intellectual idol; for in them definition becomes limitation, and limitation is of the essence of idolatry. The present demand for simplification in theology and creedal statement is in line with the prophetic movement in its desire to pass beyond both the material form and the purely intellectual formula to a more spiritual religion.
Idol is Eidolon, a thing seen, a symbol. It is not God, but a Symbol of God; and perhaps one may question whether any the most benighted mortal ever took it for more than a Symbol. I fancy, he did not think that the poor image his own hands had made was God; but that God was emblemed by it, that God was in it some way or other. And now in this sense, one may ask, Is not all worship whatsoever a worship by Symbols, by eidola, or things seen? Whether seen, rendered visible as an image or picture to the bodily eye; or visible only to the inward eye, to the imagination, to the intellect: this makes a superficial, but no substantial difference. It is still a Thing Seen, significant of Godhead; an Idol. The most rigorous Puritan has his Confession of Faith, and intellectual Representation of Divine things, and worships thereby; thereby is worship first made possible for him. All creeds, liturgies, religious forms, conceptions that fitly invest religious feelings, are in this sense eidola, things seen. All worship whatsoever must proceed by symbols, by Idols:-we may say, all Idolatry is comparative, and the worst Idolatry is only more idolatrous.
Where, then, lies the evil of it? Some fatal evil must lie in it, or earnest prophetic men would not on all hands so reprobate it. Why is Idolatry so hateful to Prophets?… But here enters the fatal circumstance of Idolatry, that, in the era of the Prophets, no man's mind is any longer honestly filled with his Idol or Symbol. Before the Prophet can arise who, seeing through it, knows it to be mere wood, many men must have begun dimly to doubt that it was little more. Condemnable Idolatry is insincere Idolatry. Doubt has eaten-out the heart of it: a human soul is seen clinging spasmodically to an Ark of the Covenant, which it half-feels now to have become a Phantasm. This is one of the balefulest sights. Souls are no longer filled with their Fetish; but only pretend to be filled, and would fain make themselves feel that they are filled. “You do not believe,” said Coleridge; “you only believe that you believe.” It is the final scene in all kinds of Worship and Symbolism; the sure symptom that death is now nigh. It is equivalent to what we call Formulism, and Worship of Formulas, in these days of ours.… It is the property of every Hero, in every time, in every place and situation, that he come back to reality; that he stand upon things, and not shows of things. According as he loves, and venerates, articulately or with deep speechless thought, the awful realities of things, so will the hollow shows of things, however regular, decorous, accredited by Koreishes or Conclaves, be intolerable and detestable to him. Protestantism too is the work of a Prophet: the prophet-work of that sixteenth century. The first stroke of honest demolition to an ancient thing grown false and idolatrous; preparatory afar off to a new thing, which shall be true, and authentically divine!1 [Note: Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero-Worship.]
