And he took the calf which they had made, and burnt it
in
the fire
Melted it down into a mass of gold, whereby it lost its form, and
had no more the appearance of a calf:
and ground it to powder;
but how this was done is not easy to say, whether by beating the
mass of gold into thin plates, and then filing them small; for
this art has remained unknown; the chemists have boasted of it as
only possessed of it; but it seems Moses, learned in all the
learning of the Egyptians, had it: however, it is now certain by
various experiments, that gold, though a very thick and heavy
body, consists of parts which are separable from one another, and
to be divided into infinite subtler parts: the famous Dr. Halley
has shown that one grain of gold may be divided into 10,000
parts, and yet visible; and Dr. Keil has demonstrated that a
cubic thumb's breadth of gold is divisible into 47,619,047 parts,
which do not escape the sight: according to the computation of
the said Dr. Halley, leaf gold, with which silver threads are
gilded, is not thicker than the 124,500 part of a thumb's
breadth; so that a cube of the hundredth part of a thumb's
breadth of the said subtle parts may contain 243,000,000
F12:
and strawed it upon the water;
of the brook that descended out of the mount, ( Deuteronomy
9:21 ) now called the fountain of St. Catharine; which Dr.
Shaw F13 says, after it has supplied the
demands of the convent (now built on this mount) is received
without into a large basin, which running over, forms a little
rill: and another traveller F14 speaks of a fountain about
the middle of Mount Sinai, which, though small, was found in it
running water very wholesome and refreshing: but if this was a
brook of running water, it seems more likely that water was taken
out of it and put into a proper vessel or vessels, on which the
powder of the golden calf was strewed; or otherwise it would have
been carried away with the stream, and could not have been taken
up and given to the people to drink, as is next said; and this
shows that it must be reduced to a very small light powder
indeed, to float upon the top of the water and not sink to the
bottom, as mere filings of gold would necessarily do:
and made the children of Israel drink of it;
not the whole body of them, or every individual, but the more
principal persons, and such who had been the most active in
encouraging the making of the calf, and the worshipping of it:
this was done not only that they might entirely lose their gold
and have no manner of profit by it, but that the idol, which is
nothing in the world, might be brought to nothing indeed, and
that there might be no remains of it to be abused to
superstitious uses, as well as to show them their folly in
worshipping that which could not save itself; and by drinking it,
whereby it passed through them and became an excrement, to
express the utmost abhorrence and detestation of it; as also to
show that they deserved the curse of God to enter into them, as
oil into their bowels, as that water did, and be utterly
destroyed: the Jewish writers, as Jarchi and Aben Ezra, suppose
this water, with the powder of the golden calf in it, had the
same effect and was for the same use as the water of jealousy,
that it made the bellies of those that drank it to swell: and the
Targum of Jonathan observes, that whoever gave any golden vessel
towards the making of the calf, there was a sign appeared in his
countenance: and Aben Ezra suggests the same, but neither of them
say what it was: but an ancient Latin poet, quoted by Selden
F15, reports from the Hebrew writers,
that whoever were guilty of this idolatry, as soon as they drank
of the water their beards became yellow as gold, whereby the
Levites knew who were guilty, and slew them; but as this is quite
fabulous, so I have not met with it in any Jewish writer, only an
author of theirs, of great antiquity and credit with them, says
F16, that whoever kissed the calf with
his whole heart, his lips became golden.