And he received [them] at their hand
For the use they delivered them to him:
and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it
a molten
calf;
that is, after he had melted the gold, and cast it into a mould,
which gave it the figure of a calf, and with his tool wrought it
into a more agreeable form, he took off the roughness of it, and
polished it; or if it was in imitation of the Egyptian Apis or
Osiris, he might with his graving tool engrave such marks and
figures as were upon that; to cause the greater resemblance, so
Selden F25 thinks; (See Gill on
Jeremiah 46:20) or else the sense may be, that he drew
the figure of a calf with his tool, or made it in "a mould"
F26, into which he poured in the melted
gold,
and made it a molten calf;
the Targum of Jonathan gives another sense of the former clause,
"he bound it up in a napkin"; in a linen cloth or bag, i.e. the
gold of the ear rings, and then put it into the melting pot, and
so cast it into a mould, and made a calf of it. Jarchi takes
notice of this sense, and it is espoused by Bochart F1, who
produces two passages of Scripture for the confirmation of it, (
Judges 8:24 )
( 2 Kings
5:23 ) and illustrates it by ( Isaiah 46:6 ) . What
inclined Aaron to make it in the form of a calf, is not easy to
say; whether in imitation of the cherubim, one of the faces of
which was that of an ox, as Moncaeus thought; or whether in
imitation of the Osiris of the Egyptians, who was worshipped in a
living ox, and sometimes in the image of one, even a golden one.
Plutarch is express for it, and says F2, that the ox was an
image of Osiris, and that it was a golden one; and so says Philo
the Jew F3, the Israelites, emulous of Egyptian
figments, made a golden ox; or whether he did this to make them
ashamed of their idolatry, thinking they would never be guilty of
worshipping the form of an ox eating grass, or because an ox was
an emblem of power and majesty:
and they said, these be thy gods, O Israel, [which brought]
thee up
out of the land of Egypt;
they own they were, brought up out of that land by the divine
Being; and they could not be so stupid as to believe, that this
calf, which was only a mass of gold, figured and decorated, was
inanimate, had no life nor breath, and was just made, after their
coming out of Egypt, was what brought them from hence; but that
this was a representation of God, who had done this for them; yet
some Jewish writers are so foolish as to suppose, that through
art it had the breath of life in it, and came out of the mould a
living calf, Satan, or Samael, entering into it, and lowed in it
F4.