Jordan B. Peterson

It's like, no, you'll worship your stomach or you'll turn into priapus or like something's gonna drag you along because otherwise you just sit there and do nothing.

You're stuck with,

With celebration.

The thing you value enough to work for, the thing you value enough to make sacrifices for, of any sort, that's your God.

And he's also trying to help God figure out if there's a way of correcting the egregious error that the Israelites have engaged in that doesn't involve that they just die, right?

Because if you commit an extreme error, one of the consequences of that can be not only that you do just die, but that you should just die.

I mean, it was a tradition.

In pagan societies, if you were a general and you conducted a battle and you lost, it was like time for you to die, right?

Because obviously you weren't the right person.

This was even the case with Japanese in the Second World War.

If the Japanese leaders lost a major battle, it was incumbent upon them to dispense with themselves.

And they couldn't believe, from what I've read, that...

American generals would get another chance, that there was this idea that you could be redeemed from your cataclysmic sin, right?

Your failure to miss the mark.

And here, Moses is intervening with God to suggest that even though the Israelites have done something egregious and instantaneously egregious, despite evidence that they shouldn't, that perhaps there is a way forward that's better than merely just...

having them die as a consequence of their mistake.

Okay, so why is it a golden calf that they turn into?

Let's talk about the particulars of the idolatry.

Is it relevant that it's the jewelry that was taken out of Egypt by the Israelites?

I really think so.