Golden calf God of Israel was associated with or pictured as a calf/bull deity through the process of religious assimilation and syncretism. Among the Egyptians' and Hebrews' neighbors in the ancient Near East and in the Aegean, the aurochs, the wild bull, was widely worshipped, often as the Lunar Bull and as the creature of El. When Moses went up into Biblical Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments (), he left the Israelites for forty days and forty nights. The Israelites feared that he would not return and demanded that Aaron make them "gods" to go before them (). Aaron gathered
The Teacher Who Was Not To Be had been admitted to the Norwegian Society of Composers. Thommessen, born in 1946, is known as an atonal modernist composer and a representative of the generation of composers who became active in the 1970s, whereas Paus, born in 1979, is a noted representative of a reorientation toward tradition, tonality and melody, who once described himself as a "cultural conservative non-modernist." The monologue is emblematic of the generation gap among older Norwegian atonal modernist composers and the younger generation of composers, who are more open to other, including traditional, musical styles. Thommessen had previously been Paus' teacher at the Norwegian Academy