Aaron kept retelling the story. "They said to me, Make us gods that may go before us. For this Moses, the man who brought us up from Mizraim, is consumed in the mountain, by the flaming fire from before the Lord, and we know not what has been done to him in his end" (Exodus 32:23).
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, the Aramaic paraphrase attributed traditionally to Yonatan ben Uzziel, adds the detail the plain verse does not. The people believed Moses had been consumed. They had seen the esha melahava, the flaming fire at the peak of Sinai, and they assumed it had swallowed him. Six weeks had passed. Their leader was gone into a furnace of light and had not returned.
The Targum is making a quiet argument. The people were not casually idolatrous. They were bereaved. They believed their prophet was dead and that the mountain had taken him. And when grief collides with the human need for a visible god, something terrible happens in the gap.
Moses was not dead. He was with the Shekhinah. But the camp below could not see that far. They saw only the fire and the silence, and their hands reached for gold.
Takeaway: Faith is tested hardest in the space between the promise and its keeping. When your Moses seems to have vanished into the fire, that is the hour to wait, not to melt down the jewelry.