Jordan B. Peterson

It is not the voice of them that shout for mastery.

It's not triumphant.

Neither is it the cries of those who are being victimized that say, but the noise of them that sing do I hear.

It's celebration.

And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf and the dancing.

And Moses' anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands and broke them beneath the mountain."

Why?

Why does he do that?

Why does he... Why does he... Is it... It's an image of what's already happening.

It has been broken.

Right.

So he's making no bones about it in what he's communicating.

Yeah, well, and to the degree that what's written on stone is the inscription of the deepest tradition, what he's dramatizing is the idea that this idolatrous celebration, orgy, you said, is destroying what's most foundational to culture.

He's dramatized.

That's being dramatized in the text.

It's what he's dramatizing by his actions.

Can we also see that, yes, he's a messenger from God, and I think there's clearly that verbal echo that sort of, you know, the way God feels is his anger and then Moses' anger.

But I wonder if there's a sense in which Moses is, as it were, identifying himself with the guilt of the people, that he's, as it were, completing the sin of the people by shattering the tablets.

It's, as it were, it's the kind of the catastrophe that they brought about has rendered the covenant... So you think he was wrong in smashing the tablets?

Well, I don't know.