Charles Ellicott Commentary Exodus 32:4

"And he received it at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, and made it a molten calf: and they said, These are thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt." — Exodus 32:4 (ASV)

And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool. —Rather, and he received it (i.e., the gold) at their hand, and bound it in a bag. So Gesenius, Rosenmüller, Fürst, Knobel, Kurtz, Maurer, Schröder, Cook, etc. “Fashioned it with a graving tool” is a possible rendering of the Hebrew words, but will not suit here, since the next clause tells us that the image was a molten one. If it had been intended to say that the image was first molten and then finished with a graving tool, the order of the two clauses would have been inverted. A similar phrase to the one used here has the sense of “bound in a bag” in 2 Kings 5:23.

After he had made it a molten calf. —This is a quite impossible rendering. The original gives “and,” not “after.” The action of this clause must be either simultaneous with that of the previous clause or subsequent to it. Translate, and made it into a molten calf.

A molten calf. —It has been usual to regard the selection of the “calf” form for the image as due to Egyptian influences. But the Egyptian calf-worship, or, rather, bull-worship, was not a worship of images, but of living animals. A sacred bull, called Apis, was worshipped at Memphis, and another, called Mnevis, at Heliopolis, both being regarded as actual incarnate deities. Had Egyptian ideas been in the ascendant, it would have been natural to select a living bull, which might have “gone before” the people literally. The “molten calf,” which had no very exact counterpart in Egypt, perhaps points back to an older idolatry, such as is glanced at in Joshua 24:14, where the Israelites are warned to put away the gods which their fathers served on the other side of the flood, i.e., of the Euphrates.

Certainly, the bull form was more distinctive of the Babylonian and Assyrian than of the Egyptian worship, and it may be suspected that the emigrants from Chaldea had clung through all their wanderings to the mystic symbolism which had been elaborated in that primeval land, and which they would contrast favourably with the coarse animal worship of Egypt. In Chaldea, the bull, generally winged and human-headed, represented the combination of wisdom, strength, and omnipresence, which characterizes divinity; and this combination might well have seemed to carnal minds no unapt symbol of Jehovah.

These be thy gods. —Rather, This is your god.