This is always the excuse written after some catastrophe such as Joshua losing a battle, Philistines defeating Israel in battle, Moab defeating them, getting stomped by Assyria and getting skullfricked by Babylon. When the Iraelites won a battle, it was because God was on their side - a divine victory. Whenever they lost, it was because God defeated their free will and gave them into the hands of the enemy. Wars were not won by people, but by the gods. Pathetic excuses really, but those excuses were commonplace.

Let me give you an example. In 2 Kings 3, Elisha the prophet of Yahweh promised the kings of Israel, Judah, and Edom that they would defeat Moab. In the end, Moab sacrificed to their god Chemosh who won the battle for them by defeating the Israelite coalition. The same war victory was described by Mesha, the king of Moab, and Mesha gave all the credit to Chemosh for crushing the Israelites. He tells the story of why the Israelites had oppressed them for years - it was because they had abandoned Chemosh, but their recent victory was precisely due to them returning to Chemosh. It’s straight out of an Israelite fairy tale. It’s reasonable and even expected once you understand that Moab and Israel were cut from tbe same Canaanite cloth - they were both sects of Canaanites. They shared the same culture, the same language, and the same excuses for winning and losing battles. The Bible even admits this much when Abraham’s nephew, Lot, has an incestuous relationship with his daughter and produces the ancestor of the Moabites… they are the “inbred bastard cousins” of the Israelites.
Mesha Stele

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miracles

Never happened

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Moses

Didn’t exist

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freeing you from generations of slavery

As Moses never existed and the Israelites were never slaves in Egypt, the only one who ever freed the Israelites from slavery en masse was Cyrus (Persian emperor and king of Babylon). Cyrus was the Lord’s messiah, Isaiah 45.

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turning to worshipping a golden calf just because Moses has been gone a while

They weren’t worshipping the calf. They were worshipping Adonai - Yahweh - the “one true god”. They were using an idol to worship him, as they had done for hundreds of years especially with El Elyon, the patron deity of Israel before the priests began to assert that Yahweh and El were the same deity (hence why the scribes wrote Exodus 6:3 to resolve the two gods into one god). Using idols was the only way they knew to worship Yahweh. Funny thing is that Yahweh punished them for using an idol to worship him, but he had not yet given the commandment to them to not use idols in their worship - the very thing Moses was supposed to bring down to them on the stone tablets.

Try to understand. They were not worshipping a statue of a calf. They were using the calf as an image - as an idol - a representation of their god Yahweh. Just see for yourself in exodus 32.

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3So all the people took off the rings of gold that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron. 4And he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf. And they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” 5When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it. And Aaron made a proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to the LORD.”

Question: who brought them out of Egypt?
Answer: the LORD
Who does the calf represent?
Answer: the god who brought them out of Egypt
Question: when Aaron saw the golden calf, he proclaimed a feast day to which god?
Answer: the LORD

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It is said that the Jews are God's chosen people

Later scribes wrote about the Israelites as if Yahweh (the LORD) chose them. In fact, the earlier story is preserved in Deuteronomy 32:8-9, when Yahweh received the Israelites as a people from his father El Elyon (god most high) when El Elyon was dividing up the nations and assigning his sons (gods) to rule over those nations.

This post was edited on 4/6/24 at 8:24 pm