In the thirty-second chapter of the Book of Exodus we have the following remarkable account of certain Israelitish proceedings in the time of Moses and Aaron:—“When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down out of the mount, the people gathered themselves together unto Aaron, and said unto him, up, make us gods, which shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him. And Aaron said unto them, break off the golden earrings, which are in the ears of your wives, of your sons, and of your daughters, and bring them unto me. And all the people brake off the golden earrings which were in their ears, and brought them unto Aaron; and he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf, and they said, ‘These be thy gods O Israel, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt.’ And when Aaron saw it, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation, and said, ‘To-morrow is a feast to the Lord.’ And they rose up early on the morrow, and offered burnt offerings, and brought offerings, and brought peace offerings; and the people sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play.”

There is no doubt this is a most remarkable, and, for the most part, inexplicable transaction. That it was an act of the grossest idolatry is clear, but the details of the affair are not so readily disposed of, and some amount of discussion has in consequence arisen, which has cast imputations upon the conduct of the ancient Jews not very favourably regarded by the moderns.The conduct of Aaron is certainly startling, to say the least of it, for when the people presented their outrageous demand, coupled with their insolent and contemptuous language about the man Moses, he makes no remonstrance, utters no rebuke, but apparently falls in at once with their proposal and prepares to carry it out. The question is, however, what was it that was really done? What was the character of the image or idol, he fashioned out of the golden ornaments which he requested them to take from the ears of their wives, their sons, and their daughters?

The suggestion that anything of a phallic nature is to be attributed to this transaction has been loudly ridiculed and indignantly spurned by some who have had little acquaintance with that species of worship, but it is by no means certain that the charge can be so easily disposed of. That phallic practises prevailed, more or less, amongst the Jews is certain, and however this matter of the golden image may be explained, it will be difficult to believe they were not somehow concerned in it.

It may be a new revelation to some to be told that in the opinion of some scholars the idol form set up by those foolish idolators was not that of a calf at all, but of a cone. The Hebrew word egel or ghegel has been usually taken to mean calf, but, say these gentlemen, erroneously so, its true signification being altogether different. It is pleaded that it was not at all likely that the Israelites should, so soon after their miraculous deliverance from the house of bondage, have so far forgotten what was due from them in grateful remembrance of that, as to have plunged into such gross and debased idolatry as the adoration of deity under the form of an animal. Also that it would have been inconsistent with their exclamation when they saw the image, “This is thy God, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt,” and with Aaron’s proclamation, after he had built an altar before the idol for the people to sacrifice burnt offerings on, “To-morrow is a feast to the Lord.” It is urged from these expressions that the only reasonable and legitimate inference is, that the golden idol was intended to be the similitude or symbol of the Eternal Himself, and not of any other God.

Certainly it is, as we have said, remarkable, and presents a problem not at all easy of solution. Dr. Beke contends that in any case, it is inconceivable that the figure of a calf should have been chosen to represent the invisible God—he concludes, therefore, that the word egel has been wrongly translated.

With regard to the etymology of the word, its root Àgal is declared to be doubtful, FÜrst taking it to mean to run, to hasten, to leap, and Gesenius suggesting that its primary signification in the Ethiopic, “egel denoting, like golem, something rolled or wrapped together, an unformed mass; and hence embryo, foetus, and also the young, as just born and still unshapen.”

It is inferred from this, supposing it to be correct, that the primary idea of this and kindred roots, is that of roundness, so that egel may readily mean any rounded figure, such as a globe, cylinder, or cone. “Adopting this,” says Dr. Beke,—“a cone, as the true meaning of the Hebrew word in the text, the sense of the transaction recorded will be, that Moses having delayed to come down from the Mount, the Israelites, fearing that he was lost, and looking on the Eternal as their true deliverer and leader, required Aaron to make for them Elohim—that is to say, a visible similitude or symbol of their God who had brought them up out of the land of Mitzraim. Aaron accordingly made for them a golden cone, as an image of the flame of fire seen by Moses in the burning bush, and of the fire in which the Eternal had descended upon Sinai, this being the only visible form in which the Almighty had been manifested. Of such a representation or symbol, a sensuous people like the Israelites might without inconsistency say, ‘This is thy God, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Mitzraim;’ at the same time that Aaron, after having built an altar before it, could make proclamation and say, ‘To-morrow is the feast to the Eternal,’ that is to say, to the invisible God, whose eidolon or visible image this egel was.”

It is admitted by the advocates of this theory that there are certain things in the English version which appear adverse to it. For instance, it is said that all the people broke off the golden earrings which were in their ears, and brought them to Aaron; and he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf, from which it might be inferred, it is said, that the idol was first roughly moulded and cast by the founder, and then finished by the sculptor.

It is urged however, that it is generally admitted by scholars that the original does not warrant this rendering, the words “after he had,” which are not in the text, having been added for the purpose of making sense of the passage, which, if translated literally, would read, “He formed it with a graving tool, and made it a golden calf,” a statement, says Dr. Beke, which in spite of all the efforts made to explain it, is inconsistent with the rest of the narrative, which repeatedly says, in express terms, that the idol was a molten image.

In order to get rid of this difficulty, several learned commentators have interpreted the word hhereth (graving-tool) as meaning like hharith, a bag, pocket, or purse, causing the passage to read, “He received them at their hands, and put it (the gold) into a bag, and made it a golden calf.” Dr. Beke thinks this untenable on the ground that as Aaron must necessarily have collected the golden earrings together before casting them into the fire, it is hardly likely that express mention would be made of so trivial a circumstance as that of his putting them into a bag merely for the purpose of immediately taking them out again.The root hharath, according to Gesenius, has the meaning of to cut in, to engrave; and one of the significations of the kindred root pharatz is to cut to a point, to make pointed. “Hharithim, the plural of hhereth, is said to mean purses, bags for money, so called from their long and round shape, perhaps like an inverted cone; whence it is that Bochart and others acquired their notion that Aaron put the golden earrings of the Israelites into a bag.”[15]

Dr. Beke remarks:—“If the word hhereth signifies a bag, on account of its resemblance to an inverted cone, it may equally signify any other similarly-shaped receptacle or vessel, such as a conical fire-pot or crucible; and if the golden earrings were melted in such a vessel, the molten metal, when cool, would of course have acquired therefrom its long and round form, like an inverted cone, which is precisely the shape of the egel made by Aaron, on the assumption that this was intended to represent the flame of fire. Consequently, we may now read the passage in question literally, and without the slightest violence of construction, as follows: ‘And all the people brake off the golden earrings which were in their ears, and brought them unto Aaron. And he received them at their hands, and placed it (the gold) in a crucible, and made it a molten cone;’ this cone having taken the long and rounded form of the crucible in which it was melted and left to cool.”

An argument in favour of this reading is certainly supplied by Exodus xxxii. 24, where Aaron is represented as saying to Moses, when trying to excuse his action, “I said unto them, Whosoever hath any gold, let them break it off. So they gave it me: then I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf” [or cone?]. It is contended that “the whole tenour of the narrative goes to show that the operation of making the idol for the children of Israel to worship must have been a most simple, and, at the same time, a very expeditious one, such as the melting of the gold in a crucible would be, but which the moulding and casting of the figure of a calf, however roughly modelled and executed, could not possibly have been.”

This cone or phallic theory met with a by no means ready reception by Jewish scholars; it had not been broached many days before it was energetically attacked and its destruction sought both by ridicule and argument. It has been admitted, however, that philologically there is something in it, more even, says Dr. Benisch, than its advocate Dr. Beke has made out. The former goes so far as to state that its root, not only in Hebrew, but also in Chaldee and Arabic, primarily designates roundness; and secondarily, that which is the consequence of a round shape, facility of being rolled, speed, and conveyance; consequently, that it may therefore be safely concluded that it would be in Hebrew a very suitable designation for a cone. “Moreover, the same root in the same signification is also found in some of the Aryan languages. Compare the German ‘kugel’ (ball) and ‘kegel’ (cone).”

The chief objection lies in the fact that there are various passages in the Scriptures where the word occurs, whose contexts clearly show that the idea intended was that of a living creature, and that the unbroken usage of language, from the author of Genesis to that of Chronicles, shows that the term had never changed its signification, viz.: that of calf, bullock, or heifer. In Levit. ix. 2, 3, 8; 1 Sam. xxviii. 26; Ps. xxix. 6; Isa. xi. 6; Isa. xxvii. 10; Mic. vi. 6, for instance, there can be no mistake that the reference is to the living animal, and a reference to the Hebrew concordance shows that the term, inclusive of the feminine (heifer), occurs fifty-one times in the Bible, in twenty-nine cases of which the word indisputably means a living creature. Dr. Benisch therefore asks, “Is it admissible that one and the same writer (for instance, the Deuteronomist) should have used four times this word in the sense of heifer (xxii. 4 and 6; xxi. 3), and once in that of cone (ix. 16) without implying by some adjective, or some turn of language, that the word is a homonyme? Or that Hosea, in x. 11, should clearly employ it in the sense of heifer, and, in viii. 5, in that of cone? A glance at the concordance will show that, in every one of the more important books, the word in question occurs most clearly in the sense of calf, and never in a passage which should render a different translation inadmissible. On what ground, therefore, can it be maintained that, in the days of the author of the 106th Psalm, the supposed original meaning of cone had been forgotten, and that of calf substituted?”

The reply to the objection that one and the same word is not likely to have been used by the same or contemporaneous writers in two different senses, and that the word has a uniform traditional interpretation, is that in the Hebrew, as in the English, considerable ambiguity occurs, and that the same word sometimes has two meanings of the most distinct and irreconcilable character. As regards the second objection, says Dr. Beke, which is based on the unbroken chain of tradition for about two thousand years, it can only hold good on the assumption that the originators of the tradition were infallible. If not, an error, whether committed intentionally or unintentionally in the first instance, does not become a truth by dint of repetition; any more than truth can become error by being as persistently rejected. The Doctor contends that when the Jews became intimately connected with Egypt, and witnessed there the adoration of the sacred bull Apis, they fell into the error of regarding as a golden calf the egel, or conical representation of the flame of fire, which their forefathers, and after them the Ten Tribes, had worshipped as the similitude of the Eternal, but of which they themselves, as Jews, had lost the signification. If this was the case, it is only natural that the error should have been maintained traditionally until pointed out.

So stands the argument with regard to the theory of its being a golden cone, and not the figure of a calf that Aaron made out of the people’s ornaments, and the worship of which so naturally provoked the wrath of Moses. There is much to be said in its favour, though not enough, perhaps, to make it conclusive. The propounder of it expressed his regret that he was under the necessity of protesting against the allegation that he had imputed to the Israelites what he calls the obscene phallic worship. “Most expressly,” he says, “did I say that the molten golden image made by Aaron at Mount Sinai was a plain conical figure, intended to represent the God who had delivered the people from their bondage in the land of Mitzraim, in the form in which alone He had been manifested to them and to their inspired leader and legislator, namely that of the flame of fire.” This is perfectly true, but those who are intimately acquainted with the phallic faiths of the world will find it difficult to disassociate the conical form of idol from those representations of the human physical organ which have been found as objects of adoration in so many parts of both the eastern and western hemispheres.

Supposing the philological argument to possess any weight—and that it does has been admitted even by those who regret the cone theory,—there are other circumstances which certainly may be adduced in confirmation thereof. For instance, the word chÉret translated graving-tool, may mean also a mould. Again, it does not appear at all likely that the quantity of gold supplied by the ear-rings of the people would be sufficient to make a solid calf of the size. True, it may have been manufactured of some other material and covered with gold; but the easier solution of the difficulty certainly seems that which suggests that Aaron took these ornaments and melted them in a crucible of the ordinary form, afterwards turning out therefrom, when cold, the golden cone to which the people rendered idolatrous worship.

The whole subject is surrounded with difficulty, and men of equal learning and ability have taken opposite sides in the discussion, supporting and refuting in turn. Passing over the dispute as to whether Aaron simply received the ear-rings in a bag or whether he graved them with an engraving tool,—the first warmly argued by Bochart, and the latter by Le Clerc—a dispute we can never settle owing to the remarkable ambiguity of the language, we may briefly notice the question, supposing it was a calf made by Aaron, what induced and determined the choice of such a figure? Nor must it be supposed that here we are upon undebatable ground; on the contrary, the same divergence of opinion prevails as with respect to the previous question. Fr. MoncÆus said that Aaron got his idea on the mountain, where he was once admitted with Moses; and on another occasion with Nadab and Abihu, and the seventy elders. This writer and others tell us that God appeared exalted on a cherub which had the form of an ox.

Patrick says that Aaron seems to him to have chosen an ox to be the symbol of the Divine presence, in hope that people would never be so sottish as to worship it, but only be put in mind by it of the Divine power, which was hereby represented,—an ox’s head being anciently an emblem of strength, and horns a common sign of kingly power. He contends that the design was simply to furnish a hieroglyphic of the energy and power of God.

The usual explanation is that Aaron chose a calf because that animal was worshipped in Egypt. That the Israelites were tainted with Egyptian idolatry is plain from Joshua’s exhortation:—“Now therefore, fear the Lord, and serve him in sincerity and in truth; and put away the gods which your fathers served on the other side of the flood, and in Egypt, and serve ye the Lord” (Josh, xxiv., 14). Also Ezekiel xx., 7 and 8:—“They did not every man cast away the abominations of their eyes, neither did they forsake the idols of Egypt.”

There is no deficiency of evidence respecting the worship of the ox in Egypt. Strabo says one was kept at Memphis, which was regarded as a divinity. Pliny repeats the story and says that the Egyptians called this ox Apis, and that it had two kinds of temples, the entrance to one being most pleasant, to the other frightful. Herodotus says of this idol:—“Apis or Epatus, is a calf from a cow which never produced but one, and this could only have been by a clap of thunder. The calf denominated Apis, has certain marks by which it may be known. It is all over black, excepting one square mark; on its back is the figure of an eagle, and on its tongue that of a beetle.”

It certainly seems tolerably clear that the worship of the calf came out of Egypt, but so much difficulty surrounds the question of whether the Egyptian worship preceded or followed that of Aaron’s calf, that we are inclined to endorse the opinion of a modern writer, and say we suspend our judgment respecting the precise motive which determined Aaron to set up a calf as the object of Israelitish worship, and conclude that had he offered any other object of worship, whether some other animal, or any plant, or a star, or any other production of nature, the learned would have asked, “Why this rather than some other?” Many would have been the divisions of opinion on the question; each one would have found in antiquity, and in the nature of the case, probabilities to support his own sentiment, and perhaps have exalted them into demonstrations.[16]

The mention of a cone in connection with the matter now under consideration, and as the form of Aaron’s idol, suggests other examples of the same figure which are said to have had a phallic form. The Paphian Venus, for instance, was represented by a conical stone: of which Tacitus thus speaks:—“The statue of the goddess bears no resemblance to the human form. It is round throughout, broad at one end, and gradually tapering to a narrow span at the other, like a goat; the reason of this is not ascertained. The cause is stated by Philostratus to be symbolic.”

Lajard (Recherches sur la Cult de Venus) says:—“In all Cyrian coins, from Augustus to Macrinus, may be seen in the place where we should anticipate to find a statue of the goddess, the form of a conical stone. The same is placed between two cypresses under the portico of the temple of Astarte, in a medal of Ælia Capitolina; but in this instance the cone is crowned. In another medal, struck by the elder Philip, Venus is represented between two Genii, each of whom stands upon a cone or pillar with a rounded top. There is reason to believe that at Paphos images of the conical stone were made and sold as largely as were effigies of Diana of the Ephesians.

“Medals and engraved stones demonstrate that the hieratic prescriptions required that all those hills which were consecrated to Jupiter should be represented in a conical form. At Sicony, Jupiter was adored under the form of a pyramid.”