Moses Dissolves God's Vow at the Golden Calf

The people at the foot of Sinai stopped waiting. Moses had walked up into the cloud and the cloud had not given him back, so they said the sentence out loud that would cost them everything: this fellow Moses, we do not know what has become of him (Exodus 32:1). Nobody in the camp contradicted them. The man who had brought them out of Egypt became a man they could not account for, and because a people that has unseated its leader needs something standing in the gap, they carried their gold to Aaron until he melted it down and a calf came out of the fire.

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The Oath God Would Not Take Back

Moses climbed up to ask for a pardon and did not get an argument. He got a citation. God had sworn already, and the words were on the record: one who sacrifices to gods shall be destroyed (Exodus 22:19). An oath had gone out of that mouth, and what goes out of that mouth does not come back.

Which shut every door Moses knew how to open. Pleading works on a mood, but an oath is not a mood. It is a thing that stands until something lawful takes it down, and Israel was already standing inside it while the golden calf cooled at the bottom of the mountain.

So Moses stopped asking for mercy and started looking for a procedure.

The Law He Had Been Handed

He had one, because God had given it to him with the rest of the law. A man who takes a vow to the Lord shall not profane his word (Numbers 30:3). The man who swore cannot walk away from his own oath. A sage dissolves it for him, though only when the man comes in and asks for it. Moses had received those rules in order to teach them to other men, which meant he had also received the one instrument that could be turned around and pointed upward.

"Master of the universe," he said, "did You not give me the nullification of vows?" Then he pressed the part that made the rest possible. Any elder who issues rulings and wants those rulings kept has to keep them himself first. Since God had commanded Moses to dissolve the oaths of other men, it was only right that God bring His own oath to the same court.

A Man Sat and God Stood

Moses pulled his cloak around him and sat down, the way an elder sits when a case is brought to him. And the Holy One stood, the way a man stands when he has come to have a vow taken off him.

Later readers could not let that sit. Moses says "I sat on the mountain" (Deuteronomy 9:9), though nobody sits up there. The seraphim stand above Him (Isaiah 6:2). The living creatures stand until their wings slacken, and Moses himself stood every other time he went up. Rabbi Derusai said God built him a chair like the ones given to scholars who come before a king, which look like standing and are in fact sitting. Rav Huna bar Aha gave the blunter answer: Moses sat because he had come to dissolve his Maker's vow, and a sage hears that kind of case sitting down.

Then came the question. Rabbi Yohanan calls it the difficult matter, and it is difficult because a sage has only one thing to ask before he releases a man from an oath. "Do you regret it?" What the question means is that the man swore without understanding what he was swearing, and that had he understood it, the words would never have left him. Moses sat in a chair God had built for him and asked God whether He wanted the words back.

"I regret the evil that I said I would perform against My people."

"It is dissolved for You," Moses said. "It is dissolved for You. There is no vow here and there is no oath here."

The Levites Came Out of the Crowd

The oath was gone. The calf was not, and neither were the men who had made it, so God put the camp to a choice instead of a sentence: whoever has sinned against Me, him will I blot out of My book (Exodus 32:33). That was not an oath. There was nothing in it for Moses to dissolve.

The Levites came out of the crowd with swords and went through it, and they killed the men who had sinned. The ones who had stood in the open saying they did not know what had become of Moses were brought low, and the ones who came forward were lifted up. Psalm 75 sets its warning next to that arithmetic. Do not lift up your horns on high, do not speak with a stiff neck, since exaltation comes neither from the east nor from the west nor out of the wilderness. It comes from the direction nobody is watching.

The Hand on the Wall in Babylon

The oath was dissolved for Israel. It was never dissolved for anybody else.

Centuries later a Babylonian king had the Temple cups carried up out of the storerooms and filled with wine, and gods of gold and silver stood on the tables while the hall roared. Fingers wrote on the plaster. Belshazzar called in every wise man in the kingdom and not one of them could read the writing (Daniel 5). His first thought was rebellion, somebody inside his own house moving against him, because that is the only danger a king is trained to watch for. Then he understood that the writing had not come from inside the kingdom at all. God brings low, and He raises up (1 Samuel 2:7). His knees knocked together.

The second Psalm puts the anointed one's greatness on Zion, the mountain of God's sanctuary. Moses never reached it. He got a mountain in the desert, a chair built to look like standing, and one question.