I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Exodus 30-32.

Today’s passage continues with instructions for making furnishings for the Tabernacle.  In the middle of this God gave the command for what was referred to as the Temple Tax in the Gospels.  The most important element of this tax was that it would apply equally to everyone, rich and poor.  Everyone had an equal share in the maintenance of the Tabernacle.  This tax was to be collected whenever the leaders felt it necessary to conduct a census of the fighting men of Israel.  The tax, and the count, only applied to those men who were over 20 years of age.  There are references to this elsewhere, but here is one of the places that a man was not eligible to be part of the Israelite Army until after his 20th birthday.

The story of the gold calf in today’s passage contains some elements which I never noticed before.  It seems to me that there are either missing details, or the order of events was different than the order in which they are written.    When Moses came down the mountain and saw the people reveling in worship of the idol, he smashed the stone tablets which God had given him.  Next it tells us that he burned the gold calf, ground it into powder, mixed the powder with water, and made the Israelites drink it.  Then it tells us that he stood at the entrance to the camp and called for those on the Lord’s side to join him.  It says that all of the Levites joined him and he told them to go through the camp from one end to the other killing everyone.

However, the passage tells us that only about 3,000 people died that day.  Now thinking about this from a perspective of how stories get told and of how things are likely to happen allows us to see how this discrepancy would occur.  The first point on that I want to make is to remind everyone that writing was laborious and writing materials expensive.  So, one did not simply discard what one had written and start over if you realized that you had left something out.  You added it on where you were at.  I am not quite sure what exactly happened here, but it seems likely that Moses smashed the tablets and called for those who were on the Lord’s side to join him before destroying the gold calf.   From there I am not quite sure.  Perhaps those who died were those who resisted Moses’ destruction of the gold calf, or perhaps it was those who refused to drink the concoction he made out of it.  My initial thought was the latter, but further thought makes me believe it was the first.