Who is the LORD Jehovah?

Question

We read this incident in Ex 32:3-5

Then all the people took off their gold earrings and brought them to Aaron. He took the gold from their hands, and with an engraving tool he fashioned it into a molten calf. And they said, “These, O Israel, are your gods, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before the calf and proclaimed: “Tomorrow shall be a feast to the LORD [YHWH = Jehovah].”

My question is this: Does this use of the sacred tetragrammaton name of God suggest that the ancient Israelites used this name for anything other than the God of Israel?

If not, what does the above use suggest?

[I note that in this incident, the tetragrammaton appears to be applied to the bull-god of the Egyptians.]

Answer 1

God gave Moses His name to give to the Israelites prior to Him delivering them out of Egypt.

God also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel: Yahweh, the God of your ancestors—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob—has sent me to you.

Exodus 3:13- 13And Moses saith unto God, ‘Lo, I am coming unto the sons of Israel, and have said to them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you, and they have said to me, What [is] His name? what do I say unto them?’ 14And God saith unto Moses, ‘I AM THAT WHICH I AM;’ He saith also, ‘Thus dost thou say to the sons of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.’ 15And God saith again unto Moses, ‘Thus dost thou say unto the sons of Israel, Jehovah, God of your fathers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob, hath sent me unto you; this [is] My name — to the age, and this My memorial, to generation — generation.

People may of thought Moses was not returning to them or maybe had abandoned them and so turned to Aaron to build them gods to go before them.

Aaron was second in command so to speak. God would speak to Moses, and in turn he would speak to Arron his brother and then Aaron spoke to the people. The people also saw Aaron performing miracles which were relayed to him by Moses. Exodus 7:10-12, 7:19,8:5-6, 22:10

Their faith was now in Aaron to make them gods to go before them. False gods are what most people knew back then. Aaron under the pressure complies to their desires. For whatever his inner motivation was to yield to their request he did. Because of him creating a false god for them to believe in, 3000 people were killed immediately when Moses came back and issued a command for many to be killed. Yet Aaron remains alive with the honor of being high priest....Perhaps after this incident he became a merciful high priest..

And Aaron sees, and builds an altar before it, and Aaron calls, and says, “A festival to YHWH—tomorrow”;

Exodus 32:31 Moses returned to the LORD and said, “Oh, what a great sin these people have committed! They have made gods of gold for themselves

Nehemiah:16:19

But they and our fathers became arrogant and stiff-necked and did not obey Your commandments. They refused to listen and failed to remember the wonders You performed among them. They stiffened their necks and appointed a leader to return them to their bondage in Egypt.

But you are a forgiving God, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love. Therefore you did not desert them, even when they cast for themselves an image of a calf and said, 'This is your god, who brought you up out of Egypt', or when they committed awful blasphemies.

To answer OP's question; "Does this use of the sacred tetragrammaton name of God suggest that the ancient Israelites used this name for anything other than the One true God of Heaven?"

This incident with the golden calf and festival seems to be the only time it was falsely used. With 3000 lives immediately put to death after this happened probably kept them from doing something like that again.

Op asks; If not, what does the above use suggest?

Man is easily swayed to comply to the masses to make his name great. He can present a false God and lead many astray.

Answer 2

Let us consider the following grid of possibilities (By "the term" I refer to the tetragrammaton; I have tried to exclude possibilities where there appears to be no textual support whatsoever):

	The term originated in the time of Moses	The term pre-dates Moses
The term always meant the same thing	A	B
The term was originally generic and became more specific	C	D

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Option A

On this view, the Divine Name is something that was revealed to Moses, was unknown prior to that time, and was always understood as a specific reference to the God of Israel.

In this scenario, either the people were in full, sacrilegious rebellion against God -- their actions were the epitome of taking the name of the Lord in vain -- and their use of the Divine Name to refer to something other than their God was solemn mockery...OR...this started with a genuine, but severely misguided, effort to honor the Lord.

Jeff Benner points out that in the earliest known Hebrew script their pictographic term for "God" was:

The first picture...is an ox head representative of power because of his great strength. The second is a shepherd's staff and is representative of authority as well as a yoke. (The Ancient Hebrew Language and Alphabet pp. 40-41)

In a world where an ox was regularly symbolic of God, and among a people who had been misled by rampant idolatry in Egypt, making a calf might have been seen as a means of honoring God (if so, clearly they were mistaken).

I find it easier to believe Aaron was persuaded to participate by some such analogy than that he went along with willful, belligerent violation of the 2nd & 3rd commandments, but I acknowledge there's insufficient evidence to rule out either possibility--peer pressure is a powerful thing.

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Option B

On this view the people are using a term that has long been known to refer to Deity, but they were grossly in error (presumably as a result of bad examples in Egypt) in applying the term to a graven image, which is never what the term was meant to signify. In this case the Israelites have fundamentally misunderstood what Moses has taught them about God.

Could the Divine Name have been known before the time of Moses? The plainest reading of Exodus 6:3 would suggest it was not, but it doesn't preclude the use of an equivalent name (though perhaps not in Hebrew) being known to the patriarchs before Abraham. It is noteworthy that the tetragrammaton does appear in the book of Genesis, prior to the lifetime of Moses. This could be because:

• When Moses wrote Genesis he included the Divine Name because he himself knew it, even if the people he was writing about did not
• The patriarchs hade an equivalent term, and Moses translated it using the Divine Name
• Exodus 6:3 has been misunderstood, and Abraham et al did know the tetragrammaton root, even if they did not understand its significance to the extent Moses did

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Option C

On this view the tetragrammaton was revealed to Moses but, at least in common usage, was understood the way the word "god" (lower-case) is often used in contemporary English. A comparable example would be the Hebrew Elohim, which as a title properly refers to the God introduced in the very first verse of the Bible, but was also used more generically to refer sometimes to His representatives, and sometimes to false gods.

The children of Israel may have misunderstood what Moses was trying to teach them about God (what a shock!), and it was over time that they came to recognize that the Divine Name should be used as a specific reference to the God they worshipped and not to anything else.

Note that this option is difficult to reconcile with the revelations Moses received in Exodus 3 & 6, unless we conclude that later editors of the Torah wrote back into Moses' words the words they used to refer to Deity, even if that wasn't the way Moses did. To me this appears to be a stretch, especially because the Torah is saturated with usage of the tetragrammaton.

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Option D

On this view, the Divine Name was used in Hebrew, prior to Moses, as a generic term related to God or gods, and the idol was thus referred to with this name not as a means of adding insult to injury in mocking God, but because they saw the idol as a deity and that was a plausible means of referring to a deity. Over time, Israel came to apply the term specifically to the Lord and only the Lord (see Leviticus 24:16 as an example where this new, technical usage, would be taught & enforced).

In this case, the Israelites may not have been breaking the 3rd commandment, though they were certainly breaking the 2nd.

The possibility of the Divine Name--or something related to it--predating Moses, and the implications of Exodus 6:3, would be the same here as they were for option B.

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Conclusion

Under option A, the Israelites are not necessarily using the tetragrammaton to refer to the idol, but as a misguided attempt to honor & refer to the Lord.

Under option B, the term is being applied erroneously to the idol.

Under options C or D, the term wasn't originally unique to the God of Israel--it was a generic Hebrew word--that was later consecrated as the respectful term for the God of Israel. In these cases the term is being applied to the idol.

I find option A the most plausible, though I do not believe there is sufficient textual or historical evidence to entirely rule out competing possibilities. If option A is correct, Israel may never have used the tetragrammaton to refer to anyone or anything other than the God of Israel. On the other options presented, Israel did, as part of a violation of the 2nd commandment (and possibly the 3rd) exhibit the unusual behavior of using the tetragrammaton to refer to a false god.