“And the LORD said unto Moses, Go, get thee down; for thy people, which thou broughtest out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves / joined themselves with hyperdimensionals; They have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them: they have made them a molten calf, and have worshipped it, and have sacrificed thereunto, and said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which have brought thee up out of the land of Egypt…
Put some life into God’s verbatim report! He is outraged and spitting it out! You can best believe Moses was mirroring God’s response when he stormed down the mountain.
And Moses turned, and went down from the mount, And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing…Moses’ anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount.
Basically, Moses destroyed the covenant between these people and YHVH before they were completely wiped out under the terms of the covenant.
“And when Moses saw that the people were naked”
Given the invariably sexual aspects of pagan practices to invite, empower and express the gods through human bodies, those who had engaged in the pagan rituals were undoubtedly actually sprawled out naked and exhausted and hung over from the previous night’s revelry.
But mainly the term naked means unprotected from any source of danger, like the men at Shechem.
(for Aaron had made them naked unto their shame among their enemies:)
The enemies of those flipping sides to pagan gods were not the Egyptians who had been thoroughly defeated and weren’t following them, and not the Canaanites who were no-where in the vicinity of this desert. They were the Hebrews who stayed faithful to Fighter God.
This perspective is articulated by Moses’ first words when he saw the hot mess in the camp.
“Then Moses stood in the gate of the camp [so no-one could get out], and said, Who is on the LORD‘s side? let him come unto me.” (Exodus 32)
Only the Levites – Moses’ tribe – stood up for their leader, which is to say, stood on the LORD’s side. While the 11 other tribes and who knows how many millions of heathen taggers-on just stood by.
“And all the sons of Levi gathered themselves together unto him. And he said unto them, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour.”
There’s a reason for the Levite’s willingness to fight. Remember that incident at Shechem? You can be sure that murderous reputation dogged every last one of them, and this situation parallels that. Slaughter.
“two of the sons of Jacob, Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s brethren, took each man his sword, and came upon the city boldly, and slew all the males.” (Genesis 34:25)
And for this Israel cursed them.
“Simeon and Levi are brethren; instruments of cruelty are in their habitations…unto their assembly, mine honour, be not thou united: for in their anger they slew…Cursed be their anger, for it was fierce; and their wrath, for it was cruel: I will divide them in Jacob, and scatter them in Israel.” (Genesis 49:5-7)
This should encourage all of us who despair of ever eliminating our unsociable and disliked personality traits.
The reason the vast majority chose not to get involved is that the people who had switched allegiance were their relatives, friends, and neighbors. Being sociable was more important than being true to YHVH.
Why did brothers fight on opposite sides of the Civil War?
The American Civil War is the bloodiest conflict in which the United States has ever engaged. More than 600,000 American soldiers lost their lives in four years [source: Library of Congress] at a time when the total U.S. population was around 34,000,000 [source: U.S. Census]. This is proportional to about 5.2 million Americans dying in a four-year period beginning in 2008.
No one — no matter how prestigious — was exempt from the divisiveness of the Civil War…First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln had six close relatives who fought for the Confederacy. Three died in battle [source: NNDB]…
the oft-used term to describe the Civil War, the “Brothers’ War” [source: PBS]…
While the U.S. has suffered the strife of a civil war only once, other countries have seen their citizens engage in ongoing battles over religious and political divisions…
Many of these tensions have been ongoing for millennia...In A.D. 661, 29 years after the prophet Mohammed’s death, a dispute over whom was the rightful leader of Islam led to…Islam splitting into two opposing sects — Sunnis and Shiites…centuries of violence…
In 1990, long-held hatred between the African nation of Rwanda’s Tutsi and Hutu populations resulted in…the genocide of 800,000 Tutsis and the Hutus who sympathized with them [source: CIA]…
It takes deep conviction to choose ideology over family.
“And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses…Consecrate / set apart yourselves today to the LORD.” (Exodus 32)
“I will therefore put you in remembrance, though ye once knew this, how that the Lord, having saved the people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed them that believed not.” (Jude, verse 5)
“and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.” (Exodus 32)
Out of an estimate of a total of 9 million people. Compared to the American Civil War, that’s a very small percentage. And as a preventive measure to maintain unity under Levite authority for roughly 1.3 thousand years from Moses to Christianity, compared to the number of deaths in the roughly equivalent 1.3 thousand years of Muslim internecine warfare from Mohammed unto now, a very small price to pay indeed.
The zealous Levites – as Hebrews in the land of Canaan – had proven themselves fearless in the face of overwhelming odds before. No surprise that they did so again – as Hebrews at Mount Sinai. So no surprise that the LORD chose / anointed them as the representatives of Fighter God, and turned Jacob’s curse into a blessing.
“The priests the Levites, and all the tribe of Levi, shall have no part nor inheritance with Israel: [but instead] they shall eat the offerings of the LORD made by fire, and his inheritance.” (Deuteronomy 18)
“And the LORD said unto Moses, Hew thee two tables of stone like unto the first: and I will write upon these tables the words that were in the first tables, which thou brakest.” (Exodus 34:1)
By literally breaking the tokens of the covenant that the people had figuratively broken, Moses reset the covenant making process. But he didn’t toss out the Ten Commandments with the stone fragments. That’s because the Ten Commandments are the indispensable basis for any stable, conflict-free society.
As those 10 utterances were memorialized and universalized, they provided a code of conduct that honored family, protected life, secured property, defined boundaries, enhanced trust and thereby secured the foundation for cohesive and productive social interaction. The Ten Commandments launched into human history the hypothesis that a society could be peacefully ordered under a rule of generally applicable laws rather than the forceful whim of autocrats.
Then, as Melchizedek, Moses himself initiated the terms of a new covenant / new testament with God. He starts by acknowledging God’s right-ness in carrying out a select purge of those who had corrupted themselves with false gods. He thereby saves the entire nation who was guilty of something. Maybe they didn’t take part in the corruption as did Aaron – Aaron! – but they didn’t stop it either. Moses’ limited response to the people’s sin gave the people the opportunity to rethink, repent, reform, and demonstrate their loyalty to God, as did Aaron and his clan.
But God is no pushover. This time he demanded more from both Moses.
“And [the first time] the LORD said unto Moses,
- Come up to me into the mount…
- and I will give thee tables of stone. (Exodus 24:12)
[The second time] the LORD said unto me,
- Hew thee two tables of stone like unto the first,
- and come up unto me into the mount,” (Deuteronomy 10:1)
The very first thing God addresses is an expansion on the first commandment, a prophylactic measure to prevent harm.
And he / the LORD said, Behold, I make a covenant…Observe thou that which I command thee this day…lest thou make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land whither thou goest…ye shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves…For thou shalt worship no other god: for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God:” (Exodus 34)
The second time around, Moses didn’t wait for God to unleash his wrath on recalcitrant sinners. He wrote a stiff sentence into the covenant.
“And Moses charged the people…saying, These shall stand upon mount Gerizim to bless the people, when ye are come over Jordan…And these shall stand upon mount Ebal to curse…And the Levites shall speak, and say unto all the men of Israel with a loud voice, Cursed be the man that maketh any graven or molten image, an abomination unto the Lord, the work of the hands of the craftsman… And all the people shall answer and say, Amen. Cursed be…Cursed be…Cursed be…Cursed be he that confirmeth not all the words of this law to do them. And all the people shall say, Amen.
The LORD will not spare him, but then the anger of the LORD and his jealousy shall smoke against that man, and all the curses that are written in this book hall lie upon him, and the LORD shall blot out his name from under heaven.” (Deuteronomy 29)
Many sincerely devout Jews were mistaken in thinking that the law of Moses was the means of salvation. Tragically, many devout Christians also misunderstand the system of law that Moses established.
Kingdom Come 