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 (Skoryk) people, which he conceived as having a great potential but weakened by political division. The poem, based on the Moses of the Bible, sees Moses, after forty years leading the Children of Israel in the desert, under attack from a revolt by Dathan and Abiram . Moses leaves the camp to meditate; in his absence the Israelites worship the Golden Calf. In the desert Moses is tempted by an evil spirit, Azazel, and also by the ghost of his mother Jochebed, who seek to get him to renounce God (Jehovah). Jehovah creates a storm in which Moses is swept away.