Misquoting Moses with Joel Baden

Moses ascends the mountain to commune with God. With their leader gone, the people of Israel awaiting his return in the desert panic, so his brother does what anyone would in that situation. He fashions a golden idol shaped like a calf out of everyone's molten jewelry. They throw a party complete with food, drink, and dancing, and when Moses returns, he's pretty miffed that he wasn't invited - and at the whole calf thing. You already know what happens next. It's not good. Broken tablets, divine wrath, and a sudden outbreak of plague. Aaron gets off remarkably easy. And the story quickly moves on. But perhaps you, as a reader, didn't. There are just so many details about this story that don't make sense. Why did Aaron make a calf in the first place? What did the Israelites exactly do wrong that angered Moses and their deity so? And why does Aaron say "THESE are your GODS, O Israel" when he only makes one calf, and Israel only worships one God? Today on Misquoting Moses, we're unpacking the polemical battleground that is the golden calf incident. 

Generation after generation, begat after begat, lists of names stretching on for what feels like endless chapters. I'm not talking about the The Silmarillion or even The Iliad. If you have ever tried to read the Bible straight through from cover to cover, chances are your eyes glazed over right around Genesis 4-5. And 11. And 25. And 36. And Exodus 1. And many, many more times. Every time, you quietly skipped ahead to the good stuff. Ever read Chronicles? Like all the way through? No you haven't. I get it. Genealogies don't really preach, and they're not particularly great reading either. Until you finally give them a chance… and find a guy who lives to be 969 years old, another guy who doesn't die and instead seemingly ascends straight to heaven, the names of cities disguised as people, family drama that begins in the womb, and the age-old verbal assault of accusing your neighbors of being the product of incest. Get ready to scratch those genealogies off your DNF list.

You've seen the multi-season television drama where every single episode follows the exact same formula. The main characters abandon their core values, face a massive crisis, get invaded by a foreign power, cry out for mercy, and get rescued by a heroic judge or king, only to repeat the whole cycle over again. No, sorry, I'm thinking of the books of Joshua through Kings! But this repetitive loop isn't lazy writing. It's a carefully crafted ideological framework built by a desperate group of thinkers trying to make sense of national catastrophe. Today, we're diving into the Deuteronomistic History to uncover the editorial engine driving the historical books of the Bible, and why its authors rewrote Israel's history to save their future. 

Abraham prayed to El Shaddai. Moses encountered a burning bush revealing the personal name YHWH. Solomon built a temple for a national God who allegedly lived in a cloud of thick darkness. If you line up every description of God in the early books of the Hebrew Bible, you don't get a single, consistent character. The God of the patriarchs looks and acts like a local Canaanite mountain deity, while the God of the Exodus is a fiery desert warrior who leads armies into battle. Today, we're tracking the dramatic evolution of Israel's God from a localized tribal storm deity sharing a crowded pantheon into the universal, singular creator of the universe.

The Bible offers two different accounts of how the ancient Israelites took possession of the Promised Land. In the last part of Numbers and in the book of Joshua, the Israelites sweep the land in a lightning military campaign, completely destroying all the Canaanites, then apportioning the land among the Israelite tribes. But in the book of Judges, the allotment of land comes first, and it is only afterward that they attempt to take possession of it - each tribe its own land, in a much slower and less systematic process than what we just witnessed in Joshua. Also according to Judges, some of the most significant cities, including Jerusalem remained under Canaanite control. But scholars don't think that either of these stories actually happened. So, why would Israel tell these stories about their own origins? And what can we actually know about the origins of the society who would later produce the most influential set of texts in the world? Today, we're asking all those questions.