The Golden Calf

 The standard modern narrative--the one that I was taught, and the one that predominates in the history books--is that the Jews invented Monotheism. It's a nice simple progressive story, and made God kind of like the steam engine: a wonderful new discovery that advanced us from darkness into light. And from the modern perspective, the Jews were the Newcomen engine while the Christians discovered the separate condenser and made the world ready for our big celestial railroad.

The problem was, the more I looked into it, the less sense it made. All the ancient traditions-and just about any religious system that rose to the level of theory--believed in a unity behind the diversity. (For the purpose of the standard narrative, duality as in Ahriman/Ahuramazda is practically the same thing as unity.) And pure monotheism seemed to be hard to find, what with angels, saints, the Trinity, and the Mother Of God. (Oh, there's the latecomer, the carefully engineered Islam, but the thrust of our histories is scarcely to point to it as the ne plus ultra of religion, now, is it?)

So monotheism seems to be overrated, both in its exclusivity and its practice. So what's all the emphasis about?

The real invention of the Jews, sez I, was not the idea of one god--but the idea of Divine Law. The one thing the ancient gods, uniplicitous, duplicitous or multiplcitous, never tended to do was tell people how to live. They asked for devotion, sacrifice, adoration, ritual, glorification--but almost never the regulation of everyday life. To once again invoke my high  school American History teacher, David Durfee's powerful distinction, the gods were authoritative but not dictatorial. There were commands you must obey, but outside of that, they were pretty cool. It was entirely possible for any number of vastly scary gods to coexist with elaborate legal systems and minutely reasoned ethical theories. Reciprocally, the gods acted, not systematically, but in great sweeping acts of fate and doom, love and madness. 

What the Jews developed/got given was something different. The idea of a God that shaped everyday life, not just in terms of the appropriate rituals, but in dress, diet, sex, and trade, well that was something new. It wasn't altogether new: priests had, since at least the sinking of Atlantis and probably to the retreat of the Old Ones to sunken R'Lyeh, circumscribed their lives and restricted their diet, dress and behavior, as part of their consecration to their specific God. The idea of extending that practice to an entire people, turning the idea of a covenant from the few to the entire world, that changed the world.

It puts the whole Golden Calf story in better perspective. It's actually a telling story: Moses goes up on Mount Sinai to get guidance from their tribal God; In the meantime , though, is there anything wrong in asking the other gods for a little help? Aaron (Moses's older brother, let's remember) didn't object to the practice. Despite the Cecil B. DeMille version, which has the worship of the Calf as a riotous Hollywood belly-dancing striptease, with a pathetic, embarrassed Aaron waving a censer up and down, there's at least the implication that this was standard procedure--which indeed it was everywhere in the ancient world. The demand for exclusivity and the banning of idols was, after all, still up the slope with Charlton Heston and the incendiary shrubbery. C.B. could view the Golden Calf as a nasty betrayal, but (as with the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil) they were breaking a law that had not been given to them yet. (One of the numerous things that make the story of Adam and Eve less than trivial, is  that the first crime was committed by beings who didn't know what crime was. And their crime was to find out what crime was.) The imposition of justice was not justly imposed--how could it be?

I have heard and read a bunch of Christian hagiobatics trying to explain the weird and often reprehensible behavior of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who really have a hard time qualifying as moral heroes. They were devoted to their unnamed God, But Abraham was a dope, Isaac was an asshole and Jacob was a gonif. And a whole lot of Christians putting together Bible Stories For Children back and fill an awful lot. "Mommy, tell me the story of Hagar and Ishmael!" But there's one aspect that makes it all interesting: that the Law had not yet been established. Abraham bargained with God--and Jacob's bargain with God was 'do all these things for me, and you will be my God and I will worship you," which is structurally a pagan bargain. It's little different from Achilles--and Jacob is no more fair or honest. With the advent of the law, things change, the tone of the Bible changes, and there's a new model for a human community.

We are so drenched in the idea of divine law that fundamentalist Christians run around asserting that human morality is impossible without a belief in God. Those who oppose them quickly turn to Marcus Aurelius, Cato the Censor and the Stoics. Adherents to the pagan model would find such an assertion insane and completely irrational. And, I submit, so would Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.