01-15-2019, 02:12 PM
Thanks for that link, Baruch!
As a follow-up to my previous post... I received my Kindle download of Richard Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible? this morning, and immediately did a search on the word "calf." Friedman asks in the introduction to his book the same question you did, Baruch, regarding "why a calf"?
There's an entire section on the Golden Calf in Chapter 3: "Two Writers, Two Kingdoms." Richard Friedman brings up the Jeroboam connection that was mentioned in that blog entry you linked to, Baruch, but Friedman goes into much more depth than the blogger did. Apparently, there were politics mixed in with religion, which led the "E writer" (from Israel, as opposed to the "J writer" from Judah) to focus on a calf rather than any other particular animal or symbol.
Friedman's conclusions are pretty intriguing, regardless of whether other scholars agree with him. I remember when some of us were discussing his book, The Exodus, in the old forum. I think I'm more into Who Write the Bible? than I was into The Exodus.
As a follow-up to my previous post... I received my Kindle download of Richard Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible? this morning, and immediately did a search on the word "calf." Friedman asks in the introduction to his book the same question you did, Baruch, regarding "why a calf"?
Richard Friedman Wrote:What was happening in this writer's world that would make him tell a story in which his own people commit heresy only forty days after hearing God speak from the sky? Why did he picture a golden calf, and not a bronze sheep, a silver snake, or anything else? Why did he picture Aaron, traditionally the first high priest of Israel, as a leader of a heresy?
There's an entire section on the Golden Calf in Chapter 3: "Two Writers, Two Kingdoms." Richard Friedman brings up the Jeroboam connection that was mentioned in that blog entry you linked to, Baruch, but Friedman goes into much more depth than the blogger did. Apparently, there were politics mixed in with religion, which led the "E writer" (from Israel, as opposed to the "J writer" from Judah) to focus on a calf rather than any other particular animal or symbol.
Friedman's conclusions are pretty intriguing, regardless of whether other scholars agree with him. I remember when some of us were discussing his book, The Exodus, in the old forum. I think I'm more into Who Write the Bible? than I was into The Exodus.
!לחיים