The story of the “Golden Calf” episode, offers three different answers to the question: Who brought Israel out of Egypt. And they are attributed to different people and recounted to us by different people! This opens lots of interesting possibilities for interplay of points of view.
When there are “rough edges” like this in a text it is a critic’s job, any sort of critic worth their salt, to pick at them and hope to see more of how or why the text is constructed. That’s what I do here, encourage you to pick at the edges from a narrative, relational perspective, and to ask so what’s going on here when God ascribes it to Moses, the people to a fine new golden statue, and Moses says God dunnit?
The post on Free Old Testament audio was this one Exodus 32 – Who Brought the People out of Egypt?
Tim,
Great Audio. I think in my post I failed to draw in vs 1 because it wasn’t a part of the lectionary reading that day. So I missed out on the idea that the Lord was repeating the opinion of the people. Context, context, context. Unfortunately, I also just pointed this out and didn’t really discuss the meaning too much.
Yes, http://5minutebible.com/?s=context “A Text without Context is Dumb” 😉 Thank you for the comment without it I’d not noticed this interesting feature of that passage.