Moses in rabbinic literature his power over the angels when the people made the golden calf.The Bible does not note Aaron's opinion of this request, merely that he complied, and gathered up the Israelites' golden earrings. He melted them and constructed the golden calf. The Hebrew word calf can also mean circle. This would explain that they made a RA symbol and not casted a calf (difficult manufacturing process with furnace, beeswax, clay, etc.). Aaron also built an altar before the calf / circle (RA), and the next day, the Israelites made offerings and celebrated. God, however, protected him (Exodus Rabba xli. 12). When
Golden calf J (Exodus 34), this gives some antiquity and there may be some original events serving as a basis to the stories. The Golden Calf story is only in the E version and a later editor added in an explanation that God made a second pair of tablets to give continuity to the J story. The actual Ten Commandments as given in Exodus 20 were also inserted by the redactor who combined the various sources. Archaeologists Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman say that while archaeology has found traces left by small bands of hunter-gatherers in the Sinai, there is no