two golden calves . . . “Here
are your gods, Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt.” The
representation of Jeroboam’s act as idolatrous —underscored by the use of
“gods” in the plural—is tendentious. Calves or bulls were often conceived as a
mount or a throne of God, precisely like those winged leonine figures, the
cherubim. In all historical likelihood, Jeroboam’s intention was not to
displace the worship of YHWH but merely to create alternate cultic centers to
Jerusalem with an alternate temple iconography. But the narrator pointedly
represents all this in precisely the terms, with an explicit quotation, of
Aaron’s golden calf (Exodus 32). (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3
vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 2:486-87)
Notice that, while Alter holds to the “pedestal”
interpretation, he has to reject what the biblical authors themselves interpret
the calves to represent, i.e., deities themselves (in theriomorphic form).
