The Masculine Cross

or an Animal?-The Prayer to Priapus-H

nd of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him. And Aaron said unto them, break off the golden earrings, which are in the ears of your wives, of your sons, and of your daughters, and bring them unto me. And all the people brake off the golden earrings which were in their ears, and brought them unto Aaron; and he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molte

sest idolatry is clear, but the details of the affair are not so readily disposed of, and some amount of discussion has in co

man Moses, he makes no remonstrance, utters no rebuke, but apparently falls in at once with their proposal and prepares to carry it out. The question is, however, what was it that was real

e acquaintance with that species of worship, but it is by no means certain that the charge can be so easily disposed of. That phallic practises prevailed, more or le

es should, so soon after their miraculous deliverance from the house of bondage, have so far forgotten what was due from them in grateful remembrance of that, as to have plunged into such gross and debased idolatry as the adoration of deity under the form of an animal. Also that it would have been inconsistent with their exclamation when they saw the image, "This is thy God, O Israel, which broug

Beke contends that in any case, it is inconceivable that the figure of a calf should have been chosen

en, to leap, and Gesenius suggesting that its primary signification in the Ethiopic, "egel denoting, like golem, something

ost, and looking on the Eternal as their true deliverer and leader, required Aaron to make for them Elohim-that is to say, a visible similitude or symbol of their God who had brought them up out of the land of Mitzraim. Aaron accordingly made for them a golden cone, as an image of the flame of fire seen by Moses in the burning bush, and of the fire in which the Eternal had descended upon Sinai, this being the only visible form in which the

le broke off the golden earrings which were in their ears, and brought them to Aaron; and he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he h

ded for the purpose of making sense of the passage, which, if translated literally, would read, "He formed it with a graving tool, and made it a golden calf," a statement, says Dr.

them at their hands, and put it (the gold) into a bag, and made it a golden calf." Dr. Beke thinks this untenable on the ground that as Aaron must necessarily have collected the golden earrings together before

o a point, to make pointed. "Hharithim, the plural of hhereth, is said to mean purses, bags for money, so called from their long and round shape, perhap

ave acquired therefrom its long and round form, like an inverted cone, which is precisely the shape of the egel made by Aaron, on the assumption that this was intended to represent the flame of fire. Consequently, we may now read the passage in question literally, and without the slightest violence of construction, as fo

it me: then I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf" [or cone?]. It is contended that "the whole tenour of the narrative goes to show that the operation of making the idol for the children of Israel to worship must have been a m

ore even, says Dr. Benisch, than its advocate Dr. Beke has made out. The former goes so far as to state that its root, not only in Hebrew, but also in Chaldee and Arabic, primarily designates roundness; and secondarily, that which is the consequence of a round shape, facility of being rolled, s

the living animal, and a reference to the Hebrew concordance shows that the term, inclusive of the feminine (heifer), occurs fifty-one times in the Bible, in twenty-nine cases of which the word indisputably means a living creature. Dr. Benisch therefore asks, "Is it admissible that one and the same writer (for instance, the Deuteronomist) should have used four times this word in the sense of heifer (xxii. 4 and 6; xxi. 3), and once in that of cone (ix. 16) without implying by some adjective, or some turn of language, that the word i

e unbroken chain of tradition for about two thousand years, it can only hold good on the assumption that the originators of the tradition were infallible. If not, an error, whether committed intentionally or unintentionally in the first instance, does not become a truth by dint of repetition; any more than truth can become error by being as persistently rejected. The Doctor contends that when the Jews became intimately connected with Egypt, and wit

against the allegation that he had imputed to the Israelites what he calls the obscene phallic worship. "Most expressly," he says, "did I say that the molten golden image made by Aaron at Mount Sinai was a plain conical figure, intended to represent the God who had delivered the people from their bondage in the land of Mitzraim, in the form in which alone He had been manifested to them and to t

tool, may mean also a mould. Again, it does not appear at all likely that the quantity of gold supplied by the ear-rings of the people would be sufficient to make a solid calf of the size. True, it may have been manufactured of some other material and covered with gold;

and the latter by Le Clerc-a dispute we can never settle owing to the remarkable ambiguity of the language, we may briefly notice the question, supposing it was a calf made by Aaron, what induced and determined the choice of such a figure? Nor must it be supposed that here we are upon undebatable ground; on the contrary, the same d

as to worship it, but only be put in mind by it of the Divine power, which was hereby represented,-an ox's head being anciently an emblem of st

rtation:-"Now therefore, fear the Lord, and serve him in sincerity and in truth; and put away the gods which your fathers served on the other side of the flood, and in Egypt, an

nd that it had two kinds of temples, the entrance to one being most pleasant, to the other frightful. Herodotus says of this idol:-"Apis or Epatus, is a calf from a cow which never produced but one, and this could only have

nd our judgment respecting the precise motive which determined Aaron to set up a calf as the object of Israelitish worship, and conclude that had he offered any other object of worship, whether some other animal, or any plant, or a star, or any other production of nature, the learned

ic form. The Paphian Venus, for instance, was represented by a conical stone: of which Tacitus thus speaks:-"The statue of the goddess bears no resemblance to the human form. It is round

is placed between two cypresses under the portico of the temple of Astarte, in a medal of ?lia Capitolina; but in this instance the cone is crowned. In another medal, struck by the elder Philip, Venus is represented bet

ed that all those hills which were consecrated to Jupiter should be represente

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