Exodus32chapter 32

Exodus 32:7-8

God calls them thy people, which thou broughtest out of the land of Egypt, handing them to Moses in the same words the people had used of Moses in verse 1. They have turned aside quickly out of the way, and the way was given at 20:4 and agreed to at 24:7. What God reports to Moses is what the narrator has already shown the reader in verses 4 through 6, told back in the same sentence the people shouted.

How quickly they have turned aside: The three acts the LORD names, making a molten calf, bowing down to it and sacrificing to it, each break a command already given. At 20:5 the LORD forbade bowing down to an image, and 22:20 set apart for destruction whoever sacrificed to other gods. Matthew Henry notes that the LORD saw what Moses could not.

Exodus 32:9-10

The word stiffnecked occurs here for the first time in Scripture, and it returns at 33:3, 33:5, 34:9 and Deuteronomy 9:6. Let me alone is an odd thing to say to a man who has said nothing, and Matthew Henry reads it as leaving the door open for the intercession that follows. The offer to make of Moses a great nation is the promise given to Abram at Genesis 12:2, and it is offered a second time after the spies at Numbers 14:12.

Now leave Me alone: Jerome read Leave Me alone as God showing that the prayers of His servant could hold back His hand. Adam Clarke sets the scene beside Abraham's pleading for Sodom at Genesis 18:23 to 33. Augustine notes that Moses refused and stayed with the sinners.

Exodus 32:11-12

Moses hands the people straight back, calling them thy people, which thou hast brought forth out of the land of Egypt, and reversing the pronoun of verse 7. He argues from what Egypt would say rather than from anything Israel has earned. Psalm 106:23 looks back on this moment and says Moses his chosen stood before him in the breach, to turn away his wrath.

Why should the Egyptians declare: Moses asks what the Egyptians would declare, and in verse 13 he calls on the LORD to remember Abraham, Isaac and Israel. He pleads the same way at Numbers 14:13 to 16, after the spies return. Matthew Henry puts the LORD’s glory before Israel in his heart.

Exodus 32:13-14

Moses' last argument is the oath God swore by his own self at Genesis 22:16, and he asks nothing on the ground of what the people deserve. The text then says the LORD repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people, while Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man that he should repent. Readers have long divided here, some taking the language as spoken after the manner of men, which is how Charles Spurgeon takes it in his sermon on the mediation of Moses, and others reading a real turn made in answer to prayer.

So the LORD relented: Augustine applies such language to human expectation and the order of natural causes, and he holds the decisions of God fixed. Moses had asked the LORD to turn from His fierce anger and relent in verse 12. Jonah 3:10 says the same of God and Nineveh.

Exodus 32:15-16

The tables are called the work of God and the writing the writing of God, and 31:18 says they were written with the finger of God. That phrase entered Scripture at 8:19 in the mouth of Egypt's magicians, who used it of the one plague they could not copy. Moses wrote at 24:4 and God writes here, and the first thing broken after the covenant is made is the covenant document itself.

the writing was the writing of God: The tablets and the writing were both the work of God, and in verse 19 Moses throws them down and shatters them at the base of the mountain. At 34:1 Moses chisels out the second pair himself, and God writes on them the words of the first. Adam Clarke looks to Jeremiah 31:33, the law on the heart.

Exodus 32:17-18

Joshua hears a camp under attack and Moses hears singing, and the two men are listening to the same sound. Singing entered Scripture at 15:1 with the song at the sea, which was sung after a deliverance and to the God who gave it. Moses corrects Joshua before either of them can see anything, because he already knows from verse 7 what he is walking down into.

Jamieson, Fausset and Brown place the camp on the plain of Er-Raheh, which cannot be seen from the top of Jebel Musa. Matthew Henry has Joshua waiting on the mountain through all forty days until Moses came down. Adam Clarke calls Joshua's reading the natural thought of a soldier.

Moses' anger waxed hot, which is the phrase the chapter used of God's anger at verse 10 and that Moses himself used at verse 11. He breaks the tables at the foot of the mountain where the people can see it, and Deuteronomy 9:17 says he brake them before your eyes. Whether the act is temper or a public declaration that the covenant is already broken has been read both ways, and the text records the act without giving a reason.

The calf is burnt, ground to powder, scattered on water and made a drink, so the thing they made ends up inside them. Deuteronomy 9:21 recounts the same act and adds that Moses cast the dust into the brook that descended out of the mount. Numbers 5:24 later puts a similar act into the law, where a woman suspected of unfaithfulness drinks water carrying dust from the floor of the tabernacle.

Exodus 32:21-22

Moses puts the question to Aaron as a matter of what the people did to him, which offers Aaron the position of a man acted upon. Aaron takes it, saying the people are set on mischief, and Adam Clarke reads the reply as an excuse rather than an account. Deuteronomy 9:20 supplies what this chapter leaves out, that the LORD was angry with Aaron enough to destroy him and that Moses prayed for Aaron also.

the people are intent on evil: Aaron answers Moses by blaming the people, as Adam and Eve each passed the blame at Genesis 3:12 and 13, Matthew Henry notes. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown find in Aaron more dread of the anger of Moses than of the LORD. He was the elder brother, by 7:7.

Exodus 32:23-24

Aaron repeats the people's demand from verse 1 almost word for word, and then his account of the making parts from the narrator's. Verse 4 says he received the gold, fashioned it with a graving tool and made a molten calf, while Aaron says he threw the gold in and the calf came out. The text sets both accounts down and says nothing whatever about the difference, and Adam Clarke calls the second a subterfuge.

Aaron tells Moses that he threw the gold in the fire, and out came this calf. Verse 4 says he fashioned it with an engraving tool. Matthew Henry reads the answer by Proverbs 28:13, where hidden sin does not prosper.

Exodus 32:25-26

The word rendered naked carries the sense of loosed or broken away, and Adam Clarke points to the same verb at 2 Chronicles 28:19 for Judah made naked under Ahaz. Moses stands in the gate and asks who is on the LORD's side, which requires every man in a camp of thousands to walk somewhere and be counted. The sons of Levi gather to him, and Genesis 49:5 through 7 had cursed the sword of Levi and scattered the tribe in Israel.

Adam Clarke reads the call as a summons to everyone free of the idolatry, and takes the Levites as having no part in it. Matthew Henry says the case admits no neutral ground. Moses and Aaron were themselves of Levi, by the line of 6:16 to 20.

Exodus 32:27-28

The order is to kill inside the camp and inside families, brother, companion and neighbour, and three thousand fall that day. Deuteronomy 33:9 blesses Levi in the language of exactly this scene, that he said unto his father and to his mother, I have not seen him, and the blessing goes on to give Levi the law and the incense. Adam Clarke holds that the three thousand were the chief transgressors rather than a number taken at random, since the nation as a whole had been spared through Moses' prayer.

about three thousand of the people fell dead: Caesarius of Arles set these few deaths against the six hundred thousand who were saved, the count of men given at 12:37. Acts 2:41 counts about three thousand added at Pentecost.

Consecrate yourselves renders a Hebrew phrase that reads fill your hands, and it is the phrase used of the ordination of the priests at 28:41 and 29:9. What Genesis 49:7 scattered becomes at Deuteronomy 33:10 the tribe that teaches Jacob God's judgments, and the turn is dated to this day. Levi's standing in Israel rests on the one day the tribe drew a sword inside the camp.

Exodus 32:30-31

Moses goes back up with no promise that anything will come of it, saying peradventure I shall make an atonement for your sin. The word atonement had entered Scripture at 29:33 with the consecration of the priests, seventeen chapters after the passover, so in Exodus it arrives with the priesthood rather than with the lamb. He states the case to God as this people have sinned a great sin, and he softens nothing before he asks.

They have made gods of gold for themselves: Gods of gold is the very thing 20:23 had forbidden, gods of silver or gold made alongside the LORD. John Gill notes that the people had called the single calf Elohim, gods. Adam Clarke notes that Moses now knows the whole sin.

Exodus 32:32-33

Moses offers to be blotted out of God's book in place of the people, and the Hebrew sentence breaks off before the alternative is finished, which the King James prints with a dash. Paul says something of the same shape at Romans 9:3, wishing himself accursed from Christ for his brethren, and the two may be set beside each other without claiming that Paul is quoting. The answer refuses the exchange, that whosoever hath sinned against me, him will I blot out of my book, which is the rule Ezekiel 18:4 later states as law.

I will blot out of My book: Adam Clarke takes the book as the register of the tribes and families that Moses had ordered on the mountain, and blotting out as losing a place in the promised land. Revelation 3:5 uses the same image for the book of life.

Exodus 32:34-35

God sends an angel before them, which is what verse 1 had demanded when the people asked for gods to go before us, and Moses refuses the substitute at 33:12 through 16 and asks for the presence itself. The visitation is deferred rather than cancelled, since in the day when I visit I will visit their sin upon them. The chapter's last words put the calf on Aaron, because they made the calf, which Aaron made, and Aaron is still the man who wears the ephod in chapter 39.

the LORD sent a plague on the people: The plague fell on the people for the calf that Aaron had made, after Moses had pleaded for their sin in verses 31 and 32. Verse 34 had said the LORD would punish their sin. Adam Clarke cites a Jewish saying that every later affliction of Israel carries some dust of the golden calf.