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
Moses (Michelangelo) two horns on its head. The depiction of a horned Moses stems from the description of Moses' face as "" ("horned") in the Latin Vulgate translation of the passage found at Exodus chapter 34, specifically verses 29, 30 and 35, in which Moses returns to the people after receiving the commandments for the second time. The Douay-Rheims Bible translates the Vulgate as, "And when Moses came down from the Mount Sinai, he held the two tables of the testimony, and he knew not that his face was horned from the conversation of the Lord." This was Jerome's effort to faithfully