Jordan B. Peterson

And Moses besought the Lord his God, and said, Lord, why doth thy wrath wax hot against thy people, when thou hast brought forth out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand?

Wherefore should the Egyptians speak and say, for mischief did he bring them out, to slay them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth?

Turn from thy fierce wrath, and repent of this evil against thy people.

So Moses is mediating for his people.

There's a warning here.

He's also the political mediator between Moses and the people, and he's played that role.

And now Moses is in fact gone, so the prophetic voice is gone.

It's not exactly surprising that Aaron attempts then to just express the will of the people, because in some way that is actually the role that he's been cast in, especially with Moses now gone.

Well, and there's also an implication in the text that's a very strong implication, which is that

If you dispense with that which is properly divine, you're going to worship something.

And especially, we could understand that if you understand that to worship is to celebrate and to pursue.

And if you worship, celebrate and pursue nothing, then you do nothing, right?

You have no forward movement.

And so, if you're going to move at all in life, you have to worship and celebrate something.

Obviously, if you destroy what's divine or turn your face away from what's divine, you're going to turn towards some sub-divinity.

It's still going to rule over you.

And so, then the issue becomes, given the necessity of that, that you have to have an ideal that you're pursuing, the only question becomes, what's the nature of the central ideal?

And of course, that's what the biblical corpus is trying to work out.

But you don't ever have this option where...

well, I choose to worship nothing.