God pointed out to Moses that He had blessed the Israelites with a couple craftsmen of considerable talent. He had given the Israelites all the skill they would need to create all the things God was telling Moses to have them make, all the furniture and incense and decorations and fancy robes needed for the ark and the tabernacle. God then reiterates the importance of the Sabbath.
The Sabbath, by the way, is super-important. Anyone who works or who fails to worship properly on the Sabbath is to be cut off from the people. It seems harsh, but I guess we’ve already seen plenty of examples of how quickly the people can be led astray when there’s a bad influence around.
In fact, we’re reminded of this again in the very next chapter when Moses comes down from the mountain with all that God said on two stone tablets.
I wonder about those tablets, incidentally. There’s a lot more than the ten commandments on there. My Bible is written in tiny, tiny print and the stuff that God told Moses on Mount Mariah fills seven and a half pages, over ten chapters of text. Single spaced. Can you write that small on stone tablets? Three and a half pages worth of text on each slab? A lot of those building specifications would have been tempting to include some diagrams too. Why stone anyway? They just came from Egypt, there must have been some papyrus in the camp.
Anyway, when Moses comes back down with his two vary densely worded stone tablets, he finds that Aaron, in the relatively short time he’s been in charge of the camp, has forged a golden calf and is leading the people in a big pagan orgy. Yes, this is the same Aaron who just acted as God’s mouthpiece in the court of Pharaoh himself. Aaron who helped hold up Moses’ arms because he believed God would grant them victory over the Amalekites as long as Moses’ staff was raised to the sky.
The people immediately assumed Moses was dead or lost or somehow gone the second he left their field of vision, so they told Aaron to make them some new Gods to lead them. Apparently they were tired of the one who parted the Red Sea and decimated two different armies for them.
Moses is furious and smashes the two tablets, which seems like kind of a big deal to me no matter how angry you are, but God doesn’t seem to have a problem with it. Aaron kind of mumbles some story about how the people are simple fools and he threw all their jewelry into the fire and out came this calf, and isn’t that a funny coincidence? *nervous chuckle*
Moses informed Aaron and the people that no, in fact it’s not a funny coincidence and furthermore, everybody who’s still loyal to God, come stand over here with me. All the Levites joined him at the entrance to the camp, which may have had more to do with Moses being a Levite himself than their actual loyalty to God, and then Moses told them to do a lap, from one end of the camp to the other, killing everyone. Sons, brothers, friends, everyone. About 3000 people in all.
It seems like that should mean that everyone who’s left must be Levites, but I know that later they split up all the land they get according to their tribes so there must still be a few of each tribe left alive. I guess everyone who escaped the slaughter was allowed to come back and still live in camp, or Moses must have just meant to kill everyone who was worshipping this calf.
God threatens to wipe out everyone and just take Moses to the promised land, but Moses talks Him down and convinces Him to take everyone. God relents, but adds that He will blot out everyone who sins against him. Then he sets a plague on the Israelites.
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