Biblical Idolatry & The Role of Moses w/ Jordan B. Peterson

Summary

The Ben Shapiro Show — "Biblical Idolatry & The Role of Moses" w/ Jordan B. Peterson, et al.

Date: December 26, 2025
Main Guests: Jordan B. Peterson, Eric Metaxas, Jonathan Haidt, Dennis Prager, Greg Koukl, Jonathan Sacks, Hugh Hewitt, Ira Glass

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Episode Overview

This episode, drawn from the "Exodus Seminars" series, features an in-depth roundtable discussion on the biblical book of Exodus. Hosted by Ben Shapiro and joined by prominent thinkers—including Jordan Peterson, Jonathan Sacks, Dennis Prager, and others—the dialogue explores the significance of sacred space, the dangers and meaning of idolatry (focusing on the Golden Calf incident), and the role of Moses as mediator and archetypal leader. The conversation weaves together theology, linguistics, psychology, and cultural commentary, delving into how ritual, revelation, and the experience of the divine still resonate for contemporary listeners.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Sacred Space, Ritual, and the Presence of God

Timestamps: 02:12–06:23

• The group discusses Exodus 29:43-46, where God promises to dwell among the Israelites in the tabernacle.
• Eric Metaxas highlights God's elusive, yet tangible, presence: "The presence of God is the foundation of stable space... If the presence moves, so should the people." (03:46)
• Dennis Prager (paraphrased): The word 'glory' is rooted in 'weight'—God's presence is the ultimate weight in the universe.
• The existential contrast is drawn between a life anchored in the weighty presence of God versus the "unbearable lightness of being" without God (05:11).

Notable Quote:

"Our Western culture, when Nietzsche says when God dies, things become weightless, there's no gravity in our culture."
—Dennis Prager (05:12)

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2. The Personal vs. Abstract God

Timestamps: 06:55–12:11

• Contrast between the personal nature of the biblical God and the abstraction of Greek philosophy.
• Jordan B. Peterson: "To found a psyche and a community… you need an orientation to what's highest, that's unified. Why couldn't it be unified as a personality, given that we are personalities?" (07:58)
• The mobility and dynamism of God is discussed—God dwelling but also moving, challenging static representations.

Notable Quote:

"What God is isn't static enough to be encapsulated in anything that doesn't move... the container itself has to chase after the spirit that moves us forward into the adventure of our life."
—Jordan B. Peterson (09:45)

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3. The Golden Calf Incident: Idolatry & Human Weakness

Timestamps: 12:11–33:41

• The seminar shifts to the story of the Golden Calf (Exodus 32), examining the Israelites’ regression into idol worship immediately after a transcendent revelation.
• Greg Koukl: "The weakest form of faith is based on seeing miracles... It's the rituals of everyday life that allow true romance to bloom.” (18:34)
• Ira Glass draws a psychological and ritual distinction—epiphanies versus everyday habits: “You can't spend your days... distracted... and think, you know, what happened to the highest. You've got to start very intentionally and build habits.” (17:06)
• Ben Shapiro: "We worship, celebrate, and pursue something. If you destroy what's divine, you're going to worship something else. You don't ever have this option where, ‘Well, I choose to worship nothing.’” (60:35)

Notable Quote:

"Atheist scientists say, 'Just show me some proof.' The right response is you'd forget about the damn proof in about 15 seconds... You think you're way more amenable to proof than you are."
—Jordan B. Peterson (52:27)

• The political and psychological roles of Aaron and Moses are explored, as are the roots of populism, leadership, and the dangers of following popular opinion over principle.
• The symbolism of the golden calf (materialism, fertility, and the perversion of sacred gifts) is analyzed (65:02–70:05).

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4. Moses as Mediator and Archetype

Timestamps: 56:04–94:04

• Moses’ remarkable act of breaking the tablets is dissected: is it a justified dramatic embodiment of the people's betrayal, or an impulsive destruction?
• Greg Koukl: “Moses is the perennial outsider… and here he's saying, 'My whole life story is now bound up in the duty You gave me… If you destroy this people, you need to blot me [from Your book].'” (90:24)
• Moses' dialogue with God—contending for the people even at personal cost—is described as the height of sacrificial leadership and intercession.

Notable Quote:

"If you want to have the best relationship with someone, you love them and you fear them—but you don't fear what they're going to do to you, you fear what you could do to them." —Greg Koukl (36:09)

• Jonathan Haidt likens Moses’ vulnerability to archetypal reluctant heroes: “The person of the most value for a position is the one who doesn’t want to take it.” (117:54)

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5. The Aftermath: Repentance, Humility, and Renewal

Timestamps: 94:04–127:07

• Post-Golden Calf, the discussion examines the measures of atonement, social culling, and the stripping of ornaments as ritualized humility.
• The group explores analogical and literal readings of the massacre following the calf, pointing to the psychological and societal consequences of unchecked chaos and idolatry.
• The movement of the tabernacle outside the camp is seen as both a literal and symbolic distancing of God’s presence after sin.

Notable Quote:

“God is not dwelling in the midst of the people anymore. God says, you take the tent, set it up over there, far away... I'm no longer among you.”
—Greg Koukl (109:50)

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6. Moses’ Intimacy with God and the Limits of Human Knowledge

Timestamps: 123:03–130:11

• Moses requests to see God’s glory—pressing the limits of human-divine intimacy.
• Dennis Prager provocatively shifts focus from "God is love" to "God is goodness," challenging prevailing theologies (123:03).
• The answer God gives Moses—allowing him to see God's “back” but not His “face”—is parsed for its spiritual, psychological, and existential implications.

Notable Quotes:

"This is the most audacious prayer in the Bible. He’s praying to know everything of the Lord that a human being can know and not die."
—Dennis Prager (127:07)

"Reality is that to which you must adapt... To manifest a personality rooted in love is the best way to live."
—Jordan B. Peterson (38:49)

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Timestamps of Key Segments

• Sacred space & glory: 02:12–06:23
• Personality of God vs. abstraction: 06:55–12:11
• Daily ritual, the meaning of prayer & loss of transcendence: 17:06–23:34
• Golden Calf incident: 52:27–101:05
• Moses’ response, the breaking of the tablets: 76:00–79:20
• Massacre & aftermath: 98:13–101:55
• Idolatry’s modern parallels & the leader’s role: 60:35–71:38
• The mediated presence of God: 106:51–115:20
• Moses’ intimacy & knowledge of God: 123:03–130:11

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “God is the stability of the moving... It’s always double because God is hiding, but also revealing himself.”
  —Eric Metaxas (10:46)

• “You worship the thing you value most, and if it isn’t the highest, then you’re inevitably engaging in idolatry.”
  —Ben Shapiro (60:35)

• “The God of the Bible is the most moved mover... the God of the Bible loves in this deep way.”
  —Dennis Prager (31:07)

• “It’s not just you have the capacity to harm the world. You love them so much you fear harming them.”
  —Greg Koukl (36:09)

• “Everybody dies with something left still to do. The best you can do… is that you can see in the dim future.”
  —Greg Koukl (120:00)

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Thematic Takeaways

• Idolatry is not merely ancient; it’s a perennial temptation to misplace our deepest loyalty—be it to material wealth, to leaders of our own making, or to cultural fads—rather than to what is truly highest.
• Leadership’s burden is not popularity but principled mediation between the divine and the people, with Moses exemplifying the leader’s willingness to sacrifice his own standing for the community’s good.
• Divine intimacy and human limitation: Moses’ story is archetypal, threading reluctance and ultimate devotion; his yearning for God’s presence is met with both mercy and boundaries, echoing the human condition's perpetual seeking and the necessity of humility before the ultimate mystery.
• Modern parallels abound, particularly in the discussion about the worship of materialism, sexualization in culture, the loss of ritual and transcendence, and the risks of excessive compassion untethered from higher moral purpose.

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Conclusion

This episode offers a rich, multilayered exploration of Exodus and human nature, contrasting the struggles, follies, and hopes of the Israelites with enduring human tendencies. Through close reading and spirited, sometimes vulnerable interchange, the panel draws out the enduring relevance of sacred space, ritual, idolatry, and redemptive leadership. The episode ends on the note of Moses’ humble but audacious longing to draw closer to the divine—a quest as relevant today as ever.

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For a complete engagement with the material—both intellectually and spiritually—this seminar is essential listening for anyone interested in the intersection of ancient wisdom, modern psychology, and cultural critique.

Transcript

[Jonathan Haidt]

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[Ben Shapiro]

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[Greg Koukl]

They grow up so fast.

[Ben Shapiro]

One day they're taking their first steps and the next they don't fit into the tiny sneakers they took them in. You blink your eyes and their princess dress is two sizes too small and their dinosaur backpack isn't cool anymore. But don't cry because they're growing up.

[Greg Koukl]

Smile because you can profit off of it for real.

[Ben Shapiro]

There are a bunch of parents on.

[Greg Koukl]

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[Dennis Prager]

It's a fantastic series.

[Greg Koukl]

We went through every section of Exodus with it with a team of people I was on for a couple of episodes.

[Dennis Prager]

Here is one of those episodes.

[Greg Koukl]

I think it's a spectacular discussion.

[Dennis Prager]

Give it a listen.

[Ben Shapiro]

Hello everyone. Welcome to episode 13 of the Exodus Seminars. Yesterday we covered the delineation of the Commandments into the description of the details of sacred space, ritual, and worship. We're going to bring that to a close at the beginning of this episode and then move to the story of the Golden Calf. And so we'll close with Exodus 29:43 46, the pronouncement of the establishment of God within the tabernacle and the sacred space. So and there I will meet with the children of Israel, and the tabernacle shall be sanctified by my glory, and I will sanctify the tabernacle of the congregation and the altar. I will sanctify also both Aaron and his sons to minister to me in the priest's office. And I will dwell among the children of Israel and will be their God. And they shall know that I am the Lord their God that brought them forth out of the land of Egypt, that I may dwell among them. I am the Lord their God. And God there reiterates the idea that he's the Spirit that has moved the Israelites forth out of tyranny into the desert and henceforth into the promised land. And so, any concluding comments on this section dealing with sacred space, ritual and worship?

[Eric Metaxas]

I mean, I think it's important just to mention the notion of the glory, because it's not right. It's not just a space. There's a sense in which God's presence was there in the. In the tabernacle. And of course, it's described in different ways. Sometimes it's described as light, sometimes as darkness, sometimes as cloud. There are different ways in which it's described, but it really is the presence of God which is there. And then we'll see it. Like, when the presence is there, then the tabernacle stays. And when the presence goes up where the presence leaves, that's when the people will move their tents and will kind of change place. So it's a foundation of space is the best way to understand it. It's like the presence of God is the foundation of stable space. If the presence of God moves, then.

[Ben Shapiro]

The church should move too, and things should move. Yeah, right, right, right. Okay.

[Dennis Prager (alternate or guest)]

But as you know, the word glory is rooted in the word Wait. And the contrast, I think, is Milan Kundera, the Unbearable lightness of being. God's reality is the weightiest weight in the universe behind everything. So for me, this is one of the great highlights of the passage, the whole book. In other words, the Exodus is freedom from. And the law and the covenant, and then the tabernacle are freedom for a new way of life and so on. But what's the purpose? The purpose, the Lord says, is his presence. His glory will be with them at the heart of everything they do.

[Ben Shapiro]

I like the mental, and to me.

[Dennis Prager (alternate or guest)]

That means a lot today because our Western culture, the lightness of being, when Nietzsche says when God dies, things become weightless, there's no gravity in our culture. Now, this is a reminder.

[Ben Shapiro]

One of the things that I suggest to my lecture audiences, I also suggested to my clinical clients, is that when they will be called upon to deal with heavy things in their life, everyone understands what that metaphor means. And so that would be catastrophe and suffering, encounter with malevolence, things that hurt and move you deeply. That you need to have deep things on your side. And part of the promise of the eternal verities, let's say that a humanities education offered was the instantiation within you of those deep things that would enable you to confront deep catastrophes and prevail. And that would be your alliance with truth and with beauty and with justice and with mercy. And that if you don't have those things on your side, then your lightness of being in the presence of the storms of catastrophe will demolish you. No foundation, no house can withstand a storm.

[Dennis Prager (alternate or guest)]

I'll magnify that to a civilization size.

[Ben Shapiro]

Right, well, and your point is that God is presenting himself. And so this is the Spirit that brought the Israelites out of tyranny, the Spirit that calls forth the people out of tyranny. And also that balance between darkness in the day and light at night, that's allied into a vision of the same Spirit. That's what's the most fundamental. And Oz, you pointed out that the word glory itself is rooted in recognition of what's weighty. I didn't know that. I didn't know that, by the way.

[Greg Koukl (alternate or guest)]

But there's also stress here, isn't there, on the personal nature of the deity? I mean, the Greeks had their theology, and Xenophanes is critical of anthropomorphism, so says that if horses and oxen had gods, they'd have gods like horses and oxen. So thinking of the divine in a. In a quasi human form is criticized from the very earliest Greek philosophical tradition. And in indic theology you have this stress upon unchanging being, but here we have this insistence upon the personal nature of the first principle. And of course that's immensely challenging, and that's been battled over by philosophers and theologians over the centuries. But I think this is a distinctly Hebraic perspective.

[Ben Shapiro]

Well, it's interesting to think about that biologically in some sense. I mean, the manner in which we manifest our highest mode of adaptation is as a personality. So we bring a personality to the problem of existence. And you would think that that means that the personality is able to move forward into being because it's the being that a personality can encounter. Why wouldn't that be something like a relationship? Why wouldn't that flow logically out of the observations that we've already made, that in order to found a psyche and a community simultaneously, you need an orientation to what's highest, and you need an orientation that's horizontal, and that orientation has to be unifiable. And so why couldn't it be Unified as a personality in relationship, given that we are in fact personalities. So why isn't that just a marker that that has to be, that that's necessarily true in some sense?

[Hugh Hewitt]

Well, Greek theology develops beyond the anthropomorphism that Douglass describes, but it. And it becomes more transcendent. It becomes a little bit more abstract. You see it with. With Plato and the Republic and Aristotle and his physics and metaphysics. But what's interesting that it gets, as it were, it goes in the other direction. It gets almost too transcendent, sort of completely, you know, completely beyond the cosmos, completely beyond the universe. What we see here is this extraordinary fusion of the particular and the universal as we saw in the moral universe with the decalogue. And that's what's so distinctive about this case.

[Ben Shapiro]

The problem with the abstraction is that's the Deus Abscondus problem. That's the death of God problem, is that if God gets too abstract, then he floats off into space and you have no connection with them.

[Hugh Hewitt]

And this notion of God, the cosmic narcissist of Aristotle. That's right, yeah.

[Ben Shapiro]

This notion of God moving, this just jumped into my imagination is, well, God is contained within the ark of the covenant, let's say. But he moves. You might say, well, why would God move? And I think the answer to that is that. I was doing a seminar on Nietzsche today, and Nietzsche pointed out that he was talking about this notion of will to power. And will to power, he said very distinctly, wasn't stasis or homeostasis. It wasn't something static. It was something dynamic and mobile. And you might say, well, we move forward in our life. It's a journey like the Exodus journey, maybe. It's always a journey from tyranny into the desert to the promised land. And that would mean that the spirit that moves us is a mobile spirit. And that what God is isn't static enough to be encapsulated in anything that doesn't move. You can build the right container, but the container itself has to chase after the spirit that moves us forward into the adventure of our life.

[Eric Metaxas]

I think it's a relationship between the two that is, God is the stability of the moving. And so you see that, like, this is not here, but when you see this notion of the divine chariot, which appears later in the prophetic text, right? It's like the presence of God descends, and then that's what makes it possible for people to move. In this case, it's the opposite. Is when the glory goes away, then things fall apart in A normal way. It's like we undo everything we built and we're going to move it to a different place for it to receive. But in terms of the personal and the impersonal, I think it's important to see that what's going on is always double. It's always double because God is hiding. God is hiding behind all these veils, but he's also revealing himself. And so there's an aspect of God which is transpersonal, we could say. And there's an aspect of God which is definitely personal. In the orthodox tradition, we have, we talk about the sense of God being beyond all being and being beyond all name and all representation, but then also being that which holds everything together and makes the world exist. So those two move simultaneously. Of God hiding in the darkness. We saw that in the. When Moses is up on the mountains, like, God is hiding in this cloud of darkness because in some ways he can't be seen, right? Moses can't see his face, but that's the mystery. It's like, on the one hand, you can't see his face, but he is. He is the ultimate person, you could.

[Greg Koukl]

Say, I think that also this language, in order to understand what we're about to do with the Golden Calf, the sense of the romantic and tremendous yearning that God has to be among his people is so clear from this language, right? He specifically says, it's not just, I brought you out to the. Into the wilderness to serve me, which is the language of a king to his subject. It's I brought you out here to live with you, to dwell among you. And it's repeated twice in this section, right? I'm here to. I brought you out specifically so that I can dwell among you. He wants the closeness with us. He wants the romance with us. And that's why it's such a tremendous sin against him when the people end up essentially throwing him out.

[Dennis Prager]

Right?

[Greg Koukl]

I mean, what they're about to do with the Golden Calf, in the language that you'll see, God's response is, okay, well, I'm withdrawing from you. Okay? You've thrown me out. I'm now withdrawing. To understand the seriousness of what God's about to do to the Israelites, you have to understand how close he actually wants to be to them. He's laid out this whole format, this whole living arrangement with them.

[Ben Shapiro]

You can see this as well as an ennobling of human destiny. You know, in the nihilistic world, everything is gone in a billion years. And what the hell difference does it make what you do now, anyways. And here there's an insistence that despite our fragility and limitation, that there's something so valuable about proper, ordered, free striving among free men and women. Let's say that God himself takes an interest in that. And you can be cynical about that. But I don't think the cynicism helps much because it's very hard on you in your life if you're cynical. And I think instead you could be open to that as a possibility, that people have a real role to play in being, and that the signal of that rule is the fact that you can find yourself embedded in some movement forward, let's say, that's deeply meaningful and we know what deep means, and we have a sense that there are levels of meaning. And so is it absolutely impossible to posit that we might have a real place in the order of being and that what we do actually matters? I think that's actually more frightening concept than the notion that what we do doesn't matter.

[Greg Koukl]

I think if.

[Dennis Prager (alternate or guest)]

Oh, go ahead.

[Jonathan Haidt]

I think if you could see God clearly, you wouldn't need faith, right? So it's a precursor in a lot of ways to freedom. If you could see God, it would be so undeniable. Like, first you die, but then additionally, everything that he would say would have to be absolute. And that's a kind of authoritarianism. And so it's like the faith of the belief is what allows the freedom to keep falling and drinking wine and picnicking and making golden calves. And every time he's out of sight, there's a fall, and then there's a movement back again.

[Ben Shapiro]

So you're suggesting if there wasn't a veil, there'd be. Everything would be so understandable to us that we could just follow it like automatons, Right?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Then you're back to the pharaoh in a way.

[Dennis Prager]

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[Ira Glass]

Resolved. I think it's important also to keep in mind here that the distinction between, even though they're very closely related, revelation and ritual. And you can have, we all know this in our lives. You can have an epiphany, oh, you know I'm going to do this, or oh, I feel I'm called to live this kind of life or. But that's just one moment, right? And the question of mediation, of how, you know, the highest ends up in the lowest, has to do with ritual. It has to do with the rhythms of life we adopt in relation to. In order to orient ourselves in relation to those high things. To bring in Aristotle, who's been taking a bit of a hard time in this conversation, Aristotle, in the Ethics, he brilliantly says how you know, the virtues are established by repetition, right? You become strong by lifting heavy things, right? You become courageous by facing difficulty. And if you want to live in relation to the highest, you need every day to break that down into the, you might say the habits of holiness or the habits of orientation. You can't spend your days, as I have been tempted to do, you know, distracted on the Internet or scrolling this or being busy from one thing to the next and then think, you know, what happened to the highest. You've got to start very intentionally and build habits into your life, or you'll always be at the situation of, you know, on again, off again, oh, there's a.

[Greg Koukl]

Revelation. That's exactly right. It's gotta be daily. And again, I think that you see that again, you're about to see that in the narrative when you talk about the big question, which is you guys just received 5 minutes ago a revelation at on this mountain from Moses and God, and you are about to sin in the most egregious way possible within five minutes of seeing that. And the idea in Judaism has always been that the weakest form of faith is based on seeing miracles. And when you see a miracle, it's easy to rationalize that away. It's easy to think of any memory in your life and you say, can you recreate the feeling that you had at that moment in your life? And the answer is no. I mean, it's almost impossible to recreate a moment that happened when you fell in love with your wife for the first time. Can you recreate, like right now, the feeling that you had? And the answer is no, you can't do that on command, right? It feels a certain way in the moment. Then it doesn't feel that way 20 years later how it was exactly in that moment. It feels something different. It's the rituals of everyday life that make you fall in love with your wife every single day and continue that love going. And the same thing is true of God. It's not the revelation on Sinai that makes you think, okay, well, this is what God is. It's the living with God every day with him in your midst, that allows true romance to actually.

[Ben Shapiro]

Bloom. One of the things you do when with people in psychotherapy as a behaviorist, is you find those things they're afraid of or disgusted by and are avoiding, and then you help them implement a practice of voluntary confrontation, voluntary incremental confrontation. And the practice transforms them. It makes them into someone who's no longer intimidated and retreating in the face of either disgust or paralyzed in the face of disgust or of fear. And it is that practice. And I think we've lost that in our modern culture. Like people say, well, I wish I was more courageous, or I wish I was more trusting. Or they don't say this very often, but maybe they wish they were more humble, less prideful. And it's as if we think of that, something that's homogenous, that could just descend on you en masse, instead of something that you practice like you practice trust with people. If you're wise, you practice courageous trust. And humility is a practice. You have to get better and better at it if you can. It's not like that's an easy thing to do, but you don't get better at it without practicing it in a ritualistic.

[Ira Glass]

Manner. And that's what prayer is, is fundamentally asking what is highest to help you on that journey. And it involves fundamentally the humility to station yourself in relation to that which you need and asking it for its help. Day by his help, however, you.

[Greg Koukl (alternate or guest)]

Want to configure that ours is a culture without prayer. I remember as a student, a lecturer who was giving a lecture on the Stoics, and he said, the great difference between you and your ancestors, whether they were pagans or Christians, is they prayed. And he meant these rituals of prayer, prayers at mealtimes, prayers punctuating life. I mean, I think that is a very interesting observation about the modern world.

[Hugh Hewitt]

And why it might have lost.

[Ben Shapiro]

Transcendence. I was not seeking for it.

[Dennis Prager (alternate or guest)]

Was. Well, I think they just lost it because we got a secularized worldview. You know, we live, as Peter Burger says, in a world without windows. So traditionally, the unseen was not unreal. But in the modern world, the unseen is unreal. And the real world is politics, technology, and so.

[Ben Shapiro]

On. It's funny is people still believe in a secular manner that still has an implicit transcendence, that there's something they can communicate with that will guide them. Because people often in trouble will, let's say, they'll hope they do the right thing. But you think about what that means is that it means they know they're not doing the right thing at the moment. And then they're opening themselves up to the possibility that there is a right thing and that there's a source of information that would reveal the right thing. And then they generally, it's easy for them to attribute the discovery of the right thing then to themselves. They thought it up, but they act as if they're talking with something, speaking with something that's transcendent, that has the capacity to determine what constitutes what's right. And so, and I was thinking, too, Jonathan here, about the Jesus prayer. So maybe if you would just recite that for a second, there's something I could say about.

[Eric Metaxas]

It. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a.

[Ben Shapiro]

Sinner. Okay, so you say, well, why would people repeat that to themselves over and over? And I would say, well.

[Eric Metaxas]

People. Maybe people won't know that it's a prayer that's repeated mentally. And sometimes monks will actually do it all the time, even in their sleep. And then there's a breathing which comes with that breathing and a posture and attentive, attending to the heartbeat, which creates this kind of rhythm that fills the person's life with this.

[Ben Shapiro]

Prayer. Okay, So I think people don't pray in part because they don't know how or what it means. But this prayer, for example, as far as I can tell, means something like the probability that I'm taking aim properly, optimally, and hitting the target constantly is very, very low. And to sin means to miss the mark. And so knowing that, I want to keep in mind that that's the case, because the degree I keep in mind that that's the case is going to be precisely proportionate to the degree that I might open myself up to learn. So one thing you want to do, perhaps, is remind yourself constantly that one thing that could get in the way of your continued ad adaptation would be your unrecognized pride. And so that injunction there, that plea to note to admit to your sins, I don't see how that's any different than opening yourself up to the revelation of something that's transcendent, because you're only deeming yourself unworthy in relationship to at least an implicit ideal. Because otherwise, what are you unworthy in relationship to? And if there's nothing worthy beyond that that could correct you, then there's no consideration of what constitutes unworthy at all. And then you might also ask, well, if you're not unworthy, then why the hell are you suffering so stupidly? I mean, that's the only hope you've got in some sense that you're doing something wrong because you're blind in some way. You don't understand. And if you could just lower yourself enough. That's what Jung said about modern people and God is that modern people don't see God because they don't look low enough. Which I think is a.

[Hugh Hewitt]

Wonderful. So, Jordan, is what you're saying that kind of the sense of an inner psychological fragmentation, a sense that one somehow out of kilt, with the realm.

[Ben Shapiro]

Of value, out of harmony, brings with.

[Hugh Hewitt]

It the implication that there really is a moral universe, a world of value out there which is discovered, not.

[Ben Shapiro]

Constructed. Well, it's pretty rough on people if they have no notion of moral progress whatsoever. I mean, then what do you do if everything around you is miserable and you're suffering? It's like, well, there's no up. Well, there's clearly a down, because that's where you are. There's no up, there's no hope. And you rarely find anybody so nihilistic that they really believe that there isn't, even in principle, an up beyond the hell they're in now. People do fall into that trap from time to time. And I would say at that point they're seriously and maybe irreparably.

[Dennis Prager (alternate or guest)]

Suicidal. Well, Stephen was saying outside a wonderful little phrase. Reality is on our side. In other words, however crazy or wicked or perverse ideas are, people can't finally live with them and it'll bounce back on.

[Hugh Hewitt]

Them. That's Horace's great line. You can drive nature out with a pitchfork, but it's always gonna come back in through the back.

[Dennis Prager]

Door.

[Hugh Hewitt]

Horace?

[Dennis Prager (alternate or guest)]

Horace?

[Jonathan Sacks]

Yeah? I'd like to ask a question that I've been waiting. Ben said God wants to dwell among us. Correct. So I'm going to pose a question. It's not rhetorical. I don't have an answer. I'm very curious for any of your answers. Does God want number one? But number two, if he does, does he want for his sake as well as for our sake? If it's for his sake, are we. And these really are open questions. In other words, if God wants something, then if he doesn't receive it, he's presumably sad. You can't say God wants X, doesn't get X and has no reaction. The very notion that God has a desire implies God has emotions. Are we right to say that about God, or are we talking, as the rabbis would say, bilshon b' nai Adam in the language of human beings. But if we're talking only in the language of human beings, then it's make believe. I don't want to make believe you of God, so I don't know, does God want things for.

[Eric Metaxas]

Him? Why would it have to be make believe rather than something like.

[Greg Koukl]

Analogical?

[Eric Metaxas]

Correct. Because if we understand this, we've been talking about this idea of this kind of subsidiary structure and how things lay themselves out in patterns that move all the way down reality. So the language we use about God, it misses God because God is transcendent beyond all things. But it's not arbitrary. It's the right word at the right level. And so we could a good way to understand what this is, that if God doesn't dwell among us in some way, the world actually ceases to.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Exist. I agree, I agree. That's about.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Us.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Yeah. That we need God is a given. Does God need.

[Ben Shapiro]

Us? I have a Jewish line of thought on that question that you might find interesting. So there's an old. And I don't remember where it's derived from, unfortunately, but I know it's derived from. From Jewish thought. What does a being that's omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent lack? And the answer is limitation. And so that's allied with another thought, which is God and man are in a sense twins. God has all the advantages of that which is unlimited and infinite, and human beings have all the advantages of that which is finite and limited. And the union of the finite and the infinite is greater than merely the infinite. There's something more complete about it, and it seems to me to reflect something else, which is one thing we know about being is that being is uncomfortable with mere being. And you can tell that because being is aligned with becoming. Right. The world keeps unfolding. It has a telos of sorts, even if it's just an entropic telos, which. Which it isn't by all appearances. But even if it was just that, being itself transforms. And so you could say, metaphorically maybe, that there's a longing for becoming that's implicit in being. And then there's an adventure in limitation that isn't there in that which is unlimited. And maybe you have the best of both worlds. If you have limitation and lack of limitation, then you might say too, how do you deal with the catastrophe of limitation? And that goes back to Greg's point to some degree, which is, well, you ally yourself with a veiled form of what's unlimited, and that fortifies you. And that way you can bear the catastrophe of being without floating away because of your lightness, that you're still in relationship with the infinite, and that gives you the courage. And then if you're skeptical, you might say, well, are you in relationship with the infinite? It's like, I would say you're in a relationship of some sort with the infinite, because there it is, you're encountering it all the time. And then the question only is, well, is the relationship heartening and helpful, or is it destructive and does it engender nihilism and hopelessness? You're stuck with it. I mean, people know that when they look up at the night sky, you're faced with the infinite no matter.

[Jonathan Haidt]

What. And are you saying that the infinite requires the.

[Ben Shapiro]

Finite? Well, I mean. Well, one of the questions. Well, it seems that because the infinite gave rise to the finite.

[Dennis Prager (alternate or guest)]

Right. So, Dennis, I love Rabbi Heschel on this. You know, in the book the Prophets, he contrasts the Greek and Aristotle notion of God as the unmoved mover. And he says, no, the God of the Bible is the most moved mover who loves and has compassion and is jealous and so on, and puts a very different view. I mean, I studied under my youth, under a Hindu guru in Rishikesh, and, you know, the ultimate God of Hinduism is beyond all caring and feeling and so on. And I love the fact that the God of the Bible loves in this deep.

[Greg Koukl]

Way. So, I mean, it's both. I mean, you get to Deuteronomy, right? And God is described as, in the Hebrew, tsur tamim pa', alo, right? He's a stone. That doesn't change. That's how Moses describes him when we get to the end of Deuteronomy. And so that's always the question is, how can these two things coexist? And it seems to me that it's almost the way that we, you know, a layman would describe physical forces. Right. When you talk about, you know, gravity, the object wants to fall. Does the object want to fall, or is that just the way that the world works? And that raises sort of a broader question that I think we're gonna get to in terms of what the Bible is. Is the Bible descriptive or is it normative? Right. There's a sort of notion that the Bible, as a piece of revelation, is God giving orders to people about how things should be, about how to establish a way of the world. But there's a really basic Judaic concept, which is the world is actually the world is created by the blueprint that is the Bible, right? Which is that the world is actually built after. And so what we're reading here is actually descriptive rather than normative. It's not as though. As though we're trying to, you know, change that. The Bible changes the world as much as the Bible describes the world. And if you wish to live in accordance with the best possible reality that already exists in the world, you're going to live according to the precepts of the Bible. And so when we're talking about God wanting or God needing or any of the romantic language that's used, I mean, Shir Hashiram, right? The Song of Songs is completely. It's a love song. I mean, it's an actual erotic love song about the relationship between God and the Jewish people. And does that mean that God literally wants to, you know, make love to the Jews or the Jews literally want to make love to God? Not really, but it's the best analog that we can make. And the thing that elicits what God truly wants of us, right, which is that emotional response to him, that abiding passion that we should have for him, even if he doesn't have quite the same kind of thing. Right. There's always going to be. We're about to see. Right? We're only going to be able to see his.

[Ben Shapiro]

Back. We can't see his.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Face. God really does have wants. Then I will repeat something I heard many years ago from a rabbi who asked the audience, so who's the most tragic figure in the Bible? And everybody threw out a name, and he said, oh, I'll tell you who.

[Dennis Prager]

God.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Correct. And that has always obviously stuck with me. If God has feelings, I actually feel bad for him. I'm not being cute, I'm being literal. Because he looks upon the creature he had the most faith that he did good with, where the only day, the creation of man, that God said and he saw it was very good, not just good. And he. And it says God got sad unto his heart when he looked at the human being in Genesis. So I just want to throw that out. I feel bad for God, and I'm not. Again, I mean it.

[Ben Shapiro]

Literally. When push comes to shove, I think the secularists think the same thing. And I would say the reason I think that is because of the Nuremberg.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Judgment, secularist thing. The same thing, the same thing.

[Ben Shapiro]

About that in some sense that the spirit of the cosmos itself can be, what, ridden with sorrow because of the magnitude of a transgression. Because the Nuremberg Judgment was that some things are wrong, right? The crimes against the Jews, the Holocaust in some cosmic Sense that was wrong, right? An a priori axiomatic sense, independent of your culture, independent of your training, independent of your motivations, if you participated in that, that crime against humanity, that was wrong. And there's an implication there of a cosmic wrong, right? That something's.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Going. But is there cosmic.

[Ben Shapiro]

Sadness? Well, something has to respond, like, why else is it wrong, right? There's some implication there that the concept of wrong itself has something about unfortunate suffering as part and parcel of it. And, you know, people can dispense with that and say, well, that's all nonsense. It's like it's so easy for you to dispense with the Nuremberg Judgment, is it? Because that's not an easy thing to.

[Greg Koukl]

Do. It's also the best way to live. Meaning that if the Bible is describing the best way to live by, then the best way to live is to live as though you have the capacity to harm the world, right? As though you have that capacity to make God sad. And it also explains why, you know, in Judaism, I mentioned briefly in the last episode how Judaism says that you're supposed to both fear God and love God, right? In the Hebrew, it's ahavat shemaim and yerat shemaim. You're supposed to love God and fear God. And how do you do both of those things at the same time? And an answer that I heard one time that I thought was quite beautiful is the same way that you love and fear your parents, meaning that you love them so much that you fear harming them, you fear hurting them, right? When you love people, you know where all their vulnerabilities are, and that's deliberately where you don't prey on them, right? If you really don't love somebody, you know where the vulnerabilities are, and you prey on those vulnerabilities, and that's how you destroy relationships. But if you actually want to have the best relationship with someone, you. You love them and you fear them, but you don't fear what they're going to do to you. You fear what you could do to them. And I think that's how you find the unity of love and fear is in exactly this, recognizing that God is desperate to be with us. God is desperate to experience with us the joys of the world that he's created for.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Us. So the notion that God created the human being because he was lonely does not strike you as odd? I've heard that and I've never known how to react to it. God got lonely again, I think.

[Greg Koukl]

All these things maybe that's true, right? I mean, this is my.

[Ben Shapiro]

Monody. My monogamy is more absurd than any other explanation. Wait.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Wait. If it's all an analogy, then he didn't get lonely. Analogy is not the same as.

[Greg Koukl]

Reality because the Bible is constantly speaking in analogical. God doesn't have hands either.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Right? I don't have a problem with that. But then we can't have. I don't think we could have our cake and eat it if it's all analogy. It's not.

[Ben Shapiro]

Real. It's not analogy. I mean, it's a.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Problem. Okay, so it's not.

[Ben Shapiro]

Analogy. Maybe it can be analogy and be something deeper than that as well. I mean, here's one thing you might contemplate. So reality is that to which you must adapt. Let's make that generalization. It's a definitional generalization. And then you might ask, well, what's the best way to live? And then you might say, well, to manifest a personality rooted in love, that is the best way to live. And maybe that's some balance between justice and mercy, and that's the balance between the hands of God. And there's a metaphor that's a metaphorical in some way, the use of love and the use of mercy and justice. But then there's a stark reality underneath that too, is that, well, if you want to have great relationships with other people, that's not a bad starting place. And so you're likely going to thrive if that's actually the way you conduct yourself and that thriving is real and the universe of interactions you have with other people is real. And then you might say, well, if you extended that love to beyond the human, to the degree that you were capable of that, and you see echoes of that in these stories where even the cattle are allowed to rest on the Sabbath, you want to extend that personality of care even beyond the human. And that seems like a laudable thing to do. And there's nothing about that that isn't adaptation to the structure of reality itself. I mean, I think the idea that. That this isn't a personal relationship is only strange to us because we accept axiomatically the idea that the world is an object. And that's not.

[Dennis Prager]

Obvious. This episode is sponsored by Alliance Defending Freedom as an advocate for truth. You know that women shouldn't have to share locker rooms with men, women shouldn't have to compete against male athletes, and they shouldn't be punished for speaking the truth. But across America, that's exactly what's happening. Men are being allowed to compete in women's sports, robbing girls of scholarships, medals, titles and safety. Now, for the first time in history, the U.S. supreme Court has agreed to hear two cases, West Virginia versus BPJ and Little versus Hecox on January 13th that could decide the future of women's sports nationwide. This could be a watershed moment in the fight to protect biological reality and fairness. Alliance Defending Freedom needs your voice today. Visit joinadf.com ben or text BEN to 83-848 to add your name to their declaration. Inside with truth and fairness. That's joinadf.com Ben or text Ben to 83848 what starts in women's sports spreads to schools, medicine and parental rights. This is our moment to push back, stand with Alliance Defending freedom today. Again, that is joinadf.com BEN or text BEN to 83848 to start fighting today. Grand Canyon University Our sponsor is an affordable private Christian university based in beautiful Phoenix, Arizona University. It's one of the largest universities in America. Praised for its culture of community and impact, GCU integrates the free market system, a welcoming Christian worldview, and free and open discourse into 369 academic programs with over 300 online join a nationwide community of learners redefining online education through GCU's 100% online MBA degree program. Learn ethical entrepreneurship and scale your business to serve your community. In addition to federal grants and aid, GCU's online students received nearly $161 million in institutional scholarships in 2024. Find your purpose at Grand Canyon University Private Christian affordable. Visit gcu.edu myoffer to see the scholarships you might qualify for. Again, that's GCU edu/myoffer go check them out right now. Lots of universities out there who are taking you for a ride, giving you a degree that is worthless, and teaching you bad values. Not the case at Grand Canyon University. There it's the opposite. Private Christian Affordable. Visit gcu. Edu Myoffer and see the scholarships you might qualify.

[Ben Shapiro]

For. Here's another reason why it's not obvious is when you look at objects, we thought forever that you see the object and you add something normative or value laden to it. But all of the most modern cognitive neuroscience of perception shows that that's just wrong. You see the value. In fact, you might even see the value, the meaning, before you see the object. It might be a prerequisite of object perception itself. And so then that really begs the question is what makes you so sure that the value isn't baked into the structure of reality Itself, it could easily be, and it seems it depends on how you define reality. But if reality is that which you adapt to, and you adapt to reality by adopting a value laden schema, which you seem to have to do even to perceive, the only question then becomes, what's the proper value laden schema? And the biblical answer to that is something like a personal relationship with something like the highest personality. It's like, so you could think of that as metaphorical, but it's also real. It's like there isn't anything more real than that. And I also think that's true partly because real, one of the things that people accept as real is pain. And there's a subjective element to that. But there's nothing that people, you can't find anything that people act in relationship to that demonstrates their belief in reality more than how they act when they're in pain. It's like, say what you want and see how that works. When you're in pain, it doesn't work. You're going to act like it's real. And so then you might say, well, pain is the fundamental reality. But then you might say, well, maybe is there something that can help you cope with or mitigate pain or prevent it? And the answer is, well, yes, there's all sorts of things. Love helps with that. And I mean literally. And so then wouldn't you say those things that help you deal with pain are more real than pain? And then if it's your participation in this vertical morality and this horizontal morality, your ability to align yourself with the highest and join with other people as a consequence, that's an ennobling of your spirit. It helps you stave off pain and suffering. How is there anything more real than that? And you might say, I don't believe that. I say, well, wait till you're in pain and see what you have left if you don't have that. So it's not just, it's not just metaphor, right? Even though it might also be.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Metaphor. I just want to say I'm coming. I want you to know this is a sort of confession. For the first time in my life. I don't think it's just an analog. Listening to all of you and thinking it through for the. I mean, my life has been studying the Torah. I've always assumed God got sad to his heart. That verse was metaphorical to describe so that we understand how much humans screwed up everything. And right at this moment, I might change by tomorrow, but I don't tend to change that rapidly. I think he Got sad because it's hard to imagine that we could experience things he can't. He would have created a being that could do what he can't do then. And that's hard to.

[Dennis Prager (alternate or guest)]

Imagine. But to go back to your original question, one of your questions, Dennis, one big difference, surely, between the Christian scriptures and the Hebrew scriptures is that you have in the New Testament the idea the Father had love for the Son before the world. In other words, you have love within the members of the Godhead and the Trinity. So God didn't need to create to have someone to love. And that commonly comes up with the Muslim idea of Allah, who needs someone if he wants to love, but not in the Christian understanding. So there was love in the Godhead. And then the Lord made us in his image, and we're capable of love. Now, our Christian problem is we tend to say, you Jews are legalistic. And, you know, Rabbi Sacks and others point out to me, rightly, we love the Lord our God. Love is at the very heart of Deuteronomy 6. And so we have to take on much more of what's there about God's love than we have done and not talk as if love is New Testament and law is the Old. Dennis, which is absolutely.

[Eric Metaxas]

Wrong. Quick.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Question. You said that God can't. That man can't experience anything that God can't do also, right? That's what you're saying. But God can't sin, right? Can God.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Sin? Well, that's behavior. So the reason God is God is that he doesn't sin. Man does. It's not possible to be human and not sin. It is possible to be divine and not sin. But. So the question is not really, does God sin? Is, does God want to sin? I mean, to really, truly follow my own thinking to its logical conclusion, does he. Do we ever have a desire that God doesn't have? I have no answer to.

[Jonathan Haidt]

That. Well, we have temptation certainly when we get to the New.

[Eric Metaxas]

Testament. But the traditional Christian vision is that sin is just. Is a turning away of something which is completely true and natural. And so it's like all our capacities are actually in the image of God, but it's only when we. When we turn them to the wrong goal is when it's sin. And so in a sense, God. Can. I still use the word analogical. Sorry.

[Hugh Hewitt]

Dennis. So.

[Eric Metaxas]

Like, all our capacities are the image of God. And so God sees, God speaks, God loves all these, all these God wants, but he does it without turning away from the original reason for why those things even.

[Greg Koukl (alternate or guest)]

Exist. In us, is there also not the point that we've seen in our reading the stress upon the goodness of God? So there's an anti legalism there, that these are not just prescriptions from a sort of super celestial tyrant.

[Dennis Prager (alternate or guest)]

But.

[Greg Koukl (alternate or guest)]

The prescription are emerging out of the benevolence, out of the goodness of God in relationship. Yes. And one of the key themes in the medieval theological tradition in the west is the idea that goodness is expansive. So just as human sinfulness is curved in on itself, the model of God is that of the expanding, of the expansion of love. I mean, of the Latin tag, the bonum.

[Ben Shapiro]

Deficiency. If you imagine that you want to prepare your son to thrive in the world, well, what you do is you have. You try to establish a great relationship with him, right? I mean, every father knows that you want to establish a great relationship with your son. And it's not just because you want to have a great relationship with your son. It's because you assume that if you have a great relationship with your son, he's armed in the proper manner to thrive in the world. Well, if that's how we train our children to live in the world optimally, then why wouldn't we conceptualize that's a microcosm of the manner in which life has to be conducted? Fatherhood wouldn't work to guide a child into the world if that relationship spirit wasn't generalizable beyond the confines of the relationship. And so why isn't the proper metaphor then for us, as we move forward in our lives, the same metaphors that we're trying to establish a relationship with the central animating spirit of mankind? And I think that is the proper, a proper mode of conceptualizing God in that that's actually metaphorically reasonable, but also really the most practical thing that you can possibly do. Both. It's.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Both. And that also is contingent in the other direction. Which means that in that case God, like you're saying you want to establish that with your son. So then that applies to God with us. Which gets to your question of want. If we're going to view that as a microcosm, that's.

[Ben Shapiro]

Fractal. That.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Seems. I gotta tell you, I'm very vulnerable at this moment, to be honest. I wrote an essay.

[Ben Shapiro]

I. Group.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Hug. That's funny. There are too many Englishmen here. So the. I wrote an essay years ago that the hardest law of the 613 in the Torah for me to fulfill is love God with all your heart. And I've literally, till an hour ago, I still felt That I don't know how you could be sensitive to all the suffering in the world and still love God. I believe in God. I follow God, I respect God, I honor God. But love God was a toughie. And I believe God knows it's tough. That's why we're commanded to do it. It doesn't come naturally. But now, because of this discussion, I think I can. Because I now think that God can experience pain and that makes him.

[Ben Shapiro]

Lovable. Well, if there was no suffering in the world, you know, there'd be nothing for us that was real to do. And it's possible that we have something real to do, like real right down to the core, you know, and that. That terrible, unjust suffering is terrible and unjust really, but that we really have the moral obligation to deal with it. It's not being lifted off our shoulders even by God. So. All right, so let's move here. Exodus 30:and 31 is a reiteration of the building of the sacred space, the ark, the ritual, the layout of the rules for sacrifice that happens a couple of times in Exodus, an indication of its importance and I suppose the necessity, when these are oral books, of transmitting the procedural rules. Right. It's an aid to memory, that reiteration. Now we come to Exodus 32, and as Ben pointed out earlier, the Israelites have just seen this complete miracle of volcanic descent of God in the most blatant possible manner. And. And it's barely manifested itself before they decide to do something egregious. And I would say we probably do that in our own life all the time, Ben, because there are miracles unfolding around us all the time that we're too blind to see. So we don't even see them when they're there. And even if we do see them, it doesn't instantiate the kind of wisdom that instantly makes us into saints. And so I think this is really reflective of what people are like. And atheists, scientists, they say, well, just show me some proof. And the right response to that is you'd forget about the damn proof in about 15 seconds. And so you think you're way more amenable to proof than you are. Okay, so let's go into the golden calf.

[Greg Koukl]

Here. You should probably read the last verse of 31 before you get to 32 because it's two.

[Dennis Prager]

Tablets. Please.

[Greg Koukl]

Do. No. Right. So when he had finished speaking to Moses on Mount Sinai, he gave him the two tablets of the covenant, stone tablets inscribed by the finger of God. So you need that as a plot point. For. For what's about to.

[Ben Shapiro]

Happen. Right, right. So we've got the tablets. Great. Inscribed by.

[Eric Metaxas]

God. It's.

[Ben Shapiro]

Important. Inscribed by the finger of God on stone. Right. So that you don't forget them. And when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down out of the mount, well, he's up there communing with God. So you'd think they could have a little. And they know it. So you'd think they'd have a little patience with that. The people gathered themselves together unto Aaron, he's the political mediator, and said unto him, up. Make us some gods which shall go before us. For as this Moses, the man that brought us out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what has become of him. And Aaron said unto them, break off the golden earrings. It really is a pretty comical story, isn't it? It's so preposterous. It's so pathetic. And Aaron said unto them, break off the golden earrings which are in the ears of your wives, of your sons and your daughters, and bring them unto me. It shows that the political without Moses, without the divine prophet, is instantly at the whim of the idiot populists. It's something like that. The faithless idiot populists. And all the people brake off the golden earrings which were in their ears and brought them unto Aaron. And he received them at their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool after he had made it a molten calf. And they said, these be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt. And when Aaron saw it. And he's just built it, right? Just made it. And when Aaron saw it, in love with his own creation, he built an altar before it. And Aaron made proclamation and said, tomorrow is a feast to the Lord. And they rose up early on.

[Jonathan Sacks]

The morrow and offered, it's a feast for God. It's not a. In Aaron's defense, it's not a feast of the.

[Eric Metaxas]

Calf. Yeah, because it's the name of.

[Hugh Hewitt]

God. It's a delaying.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Tactic. Yes, there were a lot of delaying tactics. Get your wives to give all their earrings over is perceived by the rabbis, right? As a delaying.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Tactic. It's not an easy.

[Greg Koukl]

Conversation. Hey.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Honey. Honey, I'll take that earring for a calf. What are you.

[Ben Shapiro]

Nuts? Yeah. Okay, okay. So when Aaron saw it, he built an altar before it. And Aaron made proclamation and said, tomorrow is a feast to the Lord. And they rose up early on the morrow and offered burnt offerings and brought peace offerings. And the people sat down to eat and to drink and rose up to play. And the Lord said unto Moses, go, get thee down for thy people which thou broughtest out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Themselves. Thy people, thy people. It's no longer his.

[Ben Shapiro]

People. Right, right.

[Greg Koukl]

Exactly. You'll see the word play here. It's extraordinary because you see right here God says to Moses, your people. And then Moses for the next chapter and a half, essentially keeps saying, your people, your people, your people. The truth is that the very first time that Moses actually identifies the Israelites as his people is in the section that we'll get to in a little while, which it shows the romance between Moses and God and Moses and the Israelites. It's amazing. I mean, the grammar actually changes. He's constantly saying, they're your people, they're your problem, they're your people. And then when God, as we'll get to, you know, offers him the ability to essentially be supplanted, get rid of them, and he says, no. And then he says, and I want you to reunite with them. I want you to. Don't veil yourself. Don't run away from us. Come back. He says, come back to us. Right? Suddenly he's identified with the people. It's a really romantic moment. It's really.

[Ben Shapiro]

Amazing. And the Lord said unto Moses, go get thee down for thy people which thou brought us to the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves. They have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them. They have made them a molten calf and have worshipped it and have sacrificed thereunto and said, these be thy gods, O Israel, which have brought thee up out of the land and of Egypt. And the Lord said unto Moses, I have seen this people and behold, it is a stiff necked people, stubborn like the Pharaoh. Now therefore, let me alone, that my wrath may wax hot against them and that I may consume them, and I will make of thee a great nation. And Moses besought the Lord his God and said, lord, why doth thy wrath wax hot against thy people when thou hast brought forth out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? Wherefore should the Egyptians speak and say, for mischief did he bring them out to slay them in the mountains and to consume them from the face of the earth? Turn from thy fierce wrath and repent of this evil against thy people. So Moses is mediating.

[Jonathan Haidt]

For. And I love that Moses is also like, won't that be.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Embarrassing?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Right? So amazing, right? So he's reasoning in this.

[Ben Shapiro]

Way.

[Hugh Hewitt]

That's. You see, what would the Egyptians.

[Ben Shapiro]

Say What would the Egyptians say? Right. There's a warning here. I mean, it's.

[Jonathan Sacks]

That just as God said, I won't forgive anybody who does wrong in my name, he is saying to God, don't do wrong in your.

[Dennis Prager (alternate or guest)]

Name. Yeah. And your.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Promises. I want to express I have so much empathy for Aaron because I think Aaron in so many ways is like a storyteller. He's constantly mediating and he builds. You know, he's an artist, so he builds this golden calf. And it's constantly like, you can't get enamored in what you build or create as an artist in a certain way is one of the templates that it seems to be talking about, because he's constantly moderating between these two. And it's sort of like he's quick to fall in love with that which he's.

[Ben Shapiro]

Created. His job.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Is. And to view it as separate from its allegiance to what, to how it should be properly.

[Ben Shapiro]

Aligned. He's also the political mediator between Moses and the people. And he's played that role. And now Moses is in fact, gone. So the prophetic voice is gone. It's not exactly surprising that Aaron attempts then to just express the will of the people, because that in some way, that is actually the role that he's been cast in, especially with Moses.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Now gone, expresses it and makes it this beautiful thing.

[Greg Koukl]

Also. And then this is also why when Aaron dies later in the Bible, the people mourn him more than they mourn Moses. The language of mourning for Aaron is very extreme because the people are very close to him, because essentially he's a populist. But he can't be the leader. Right? He can't be Moses because Moses has to have a distance from the people. The leader has to have enough distance from the people to understand that his dictate doesn't come from the people, it comes from something higher. And the minute that he goes missing, the people immediately start creating idols out of and then worshiping the thing that they themselves created, which, by the way, is the nature of democratic politics. And we should mention at this point that that's exactly when you look for moral value in your political leaders, you're looking in exactly the wrong place. They're people created by your hands who you then turn your worship upon. You elected them and you made them. And then you say, why are these idols not serving my purposes properly? It's like, well, because you created them. That's why they're not serving your purposes.

[Ben Shapiro]

Properly. Well, there's also an implication in the text That's a very strong implication, which is that if you dispense with that which is properly divine, you're going to worship something. And especially. And we could understand that if you understand that to worship is to celebrate and to pursue. And if you worship, celebrate and pursue nothing, then you do nothing, right? You have no forward movement. And so if you're going to move at all in life, you have to worship and celebrate something. Obviously, if you destroy what's divine or turn your face away from what's divine, you're going to turn towards some sub divinity still going to rule over you. And so then the issue becomes, given the necessity of that, that you have to have an ideal that you're pursuing. The only question becomes, what's the nature of the central ideal? And of course, that's what the biblical corpus is trying to work out. But you don't ever have this option where, well, I choose to worship nothing. It's like, no, you'll worship your stomach or you'll turn into Priapus, or like something's going to drag you along because otherwise you just sit there and do nothing. You're stuck with celebration. The thing you value enough to work for, the thing you value enough to make sacrifices for of any sort, that's your.

[Hugh Hewitt]

God. Human beings are wired for.

[Eric Metaxas]

Worship. And indeed, so what I find very impressive is that the mountain now appears again as this microcosm. And so you have the animal at the bottom, you have licentiousness, desire, all these things that are at the bottom. And then Moses goes up. And it's as if also kind of expressing the problem of disconnecting, let's say, the high and the low. And that's kind of what's happening. Moses is going up. And so because Moses goes up, it's as if things below fall apart. And there's a need for Moses to be that mediator. And that's what he's doing even now, as God is saying, I'm just going to destroy these people. He's acting as a representative of the people towards God, and then he's going to go back down and act as a representative towards the people. Right? So he really is the mediator between the two.

[Ben Shapiro]

Principles. And he's also trying to help God figure out if there's a way of correcting the egregious error that the Israelites have engaged in that doesn't involve that they just die. Right? Because if you commit an extreme error, one of the consequences of that can be not only that you do just die, but that you should just die. I mean, it was a tradition in pagan societies. If you were a general and you conducted a battle and you lost, it was like time for you to die, right? Because obviously you weren't the right person. There wasn't this. This was even the case with Japanese in the Second World War. Like, if the Japanese leaders lost a major battle, it was incumbent upon them to dispense with themselves. And they couldn't believe, from what I've read, that American generals would get another chance, that there was this idea that you could be redeemed from your. From your cataclysmic sin, Right? Your failure to miss the mark. And here Moses is intervening with God to suggest that even though the Israelites have done something egregious and instantaneously egregious, despite evidence that they shouldn't, that perhaps there is a way forward that's better than merely just having them die as a consequence of their.

[Eric Metaxas]

Destruction. I love Ben's point that in some ways God is using this as an opportunity to fight, forced Moses to identify with the people. I mean, it's such a beautiful image. And this story, by the way, this pattern, if people who are watching want to know that this pattern repeats itself in scripture many, many times. And if you want to understand some of the stories of Jesus, for example, it's this pattern. So Jesus goes up the mountain, the disciples go on the waters, and now the waters become unstable, and now they're afraid. So Jesus has to come back down and connect top and the bottom. Jesus goes up on the mountain to pray. The disciples fall asleep at the bottom of the mountain. So there's just all these iterations of how if you dis. When the mediator goes up, let's.

[Ben Shapiro]

Say, and disappears, it.

[Eric Metaxas]

Disappears. Then things at the bottom fall.

[Ben Shapiro]

Apart. If the point fall into unconscious.

[Eric Metaxas]

Chaos. That's right. If the purpose of something moves up, sometimes that's a problem. It's like people can't.

[Ben Shapiro]

Cohere. Okay, so why is it a golden calf that they turn into? Let's talk about the of purpose. Turn to the particulars of the idolatry. So go.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Ahead. I have a question for Jonathan first, which is in Exodus 11, they when the Lord's speaking to Moses, he says, let every man borrow of his neighbor and every woman of her neighbor. Jewels of silver and jewels of gold, right? It's a collection of all the things that are of earthly materialistic value. And we see this echoed here, but this is.

[Eric Metaxas]

It. So you can see it. It's like there's which is that on the one hand, to make the tabernacle, God tells Moses that he's going to gather this stuff up, the same stuff, precious, precious to make the tabernacle. But now this stuff that came from Egypt is gathered to make the idol. And so it actually talks about the potentiality as exactly that, as a kind of neutral thing, like let's say money. Money is not moral or immoral. It's neutral, it's possibility. So you can take money and you can use it to kill someone. You can take money, you can use it to help an orphan, or.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Put the jewels in the breastplate like we talked.

[Eric Metaxas]

About. You can create it in a way that elevates it. So it really does help you understand. And I think it's on purpose that it's like it's ornaments, because ornaments are non functional things. They're not part of the.

[Ben Shapiro]

Productive. Is it relevant that it's the jewelry that was taken out of Egypt by the.

[Eric Metaxas]

Israelites? I really think.

[Ben Shapiro]

So. So it's that they're recreating an idol out of the stuff that was taken from.

[Eric Metaxas]

Egypt? I think so. But it also has to do with the problem we mentioned that Ben brought about the other day, which is that they're worshiping that which they should sacrifice, right? And so it's a beautiful image. It's like this is what they should sacrifice up to God. And they're worshiping it so you can apply it to your life, right? Everybody will have images of it coming into their mind right away. It's like, this is what I should be giving to God, this energy, this my money or whatever. And now I'm worshiping it on its.

[Greg Koukl]

Own. Well, that's why you see Aaron try to recast it, right? He's saying this is a vector for worship. Guys, this is not supposed to be like the thing that you actually worship. This is just a way for you, right? This is a way for you to try to elevate. It's also important to know the reason that it's a calf is because it's obviously an Egyptian symbol, right? The last time that you've seen cows in the narrative goes back to the dream that Pharaoh has with Joseph, right? Where he has the dream of the seven fat cows and the seven skinny cows and all of this. The wealth of Egypt is supposed to be signified by the cow. I mean, that's one of the animals that crops up in the biblical text a fair.

[Ben Shapiro]

Bit. So is the golden calf, is it literally a worship of something like material wealth.

[Greg Koukl]

Yes. I mean, it's a.

[Ben Shapiro]

Worship. The storehouse of the.

[Hugh Hewitt]

Tree. It's also a fertility.

[Greg Koukl]

God. Yeah, that's.

[Greg Koukl (alternate or guest)]

Right. It's a Canaanite.

[Greg Koukl]

Fertility. Yeah. I mean, it's clear that one of the things that's really fascinating about the Bible's take on idolatry generally is that it actually is not a take on what idolatry actually is. Kind of fascinating. This is a point made by Yechezkel Kaufman, who's a scholar of sort of paganistic cult versus monotheistic biblical Judaism. Is that the way that paganism actually works is that you have a bunch of gods that have actual backstories. They actually exist up there in the ether. And so one of these sort of modern biblical critiques is that Judaism just posits, or the Bible posits a God in contrast to these other gods, and he's actually just fighting it out with these other gods. And that's obviously not clear from the text of the Bible. The Bible describes idolatry as pure.

[Ben Shapiro]

Fetishism.

[Greg Koukl]

Right. It's purely. There's an object and you worship the object, which is actually not really how idolaters worship. Right. Idolaters presumably worship this as a symbol of a set of gods that don't actually exist, but the Bible says they don't exist. So much so that we're just going to say, straight up, you're worshiping this golden object. Right. Which is why I think that modern people read this like people used to worship golden objects. And the answer is no, people did not used to worship golden objects. They used to use that as a way of signifying something else that monotheism says does not exist. What we're watching over the course of Exodus is actually, it's kind of fascinating because Judaism tends to say that Abraham is the first sort of person who's spreading monotheism. Broadly speaking, that's actually not evident in biblical text. The first person who's actually enjoined to destroy polytheism is Moses. Right. That's the transformative moment. And so all of Exodus is written in opposition to paganistic culture. And so when they make the idol and then the Bible basically says, you're worshiping like an actual metal object. Right. That has no other meaning. And that's why Aaron's attempting to recast that as sort of an intermediary and intercessionary thing for God. And God and Moses say, no, it's really meaningful. And it also means that Aaron ends up being punished for this later on because the commandment is this very bizarre commandment that we get to much later in the Bible, which called the para duma, the red calf, the red heifer. Right. The idea is that there are certain forms of impurity that cannot be alleviated by certain sacrifices. You have to find a red cow that is pure and purely red and then you burn it, and then you take the ashes of that and then you. And then you put it on the people. And this purifies them. It's obviously meant to be a punishment for what Aaron is doing right now. In attempting to not just say no to the people. He should just say no. He should just say, wait for my brother. He's up there. But he doesn't have the. And by the way he tries to excuse himself, like five minutes from now when we get to it, he's gonna say that what actually happened with the calf is not what happened with the calf. He's gonna say he threw all the metal in the fire and magically it just sort of emerged as a.

[Ben Shapiro]

Giant. Is it reasonable to consider him a careless.

[Greg Koukl]

Populist? I think that it's not that he's. It's not that he's careless. I think that he's, to a certain extent, like every leader, he has to make the choice between whether he is going to be subject to the whims of the people at all or not. And what the Bible says over and over and over is that leaders who subject themselves to the whims of the people do not deserve the title of the great leader. They can be helpful, they can be the person who is an aid, but they can't be the great leader. And the reason the kingship is removed from Saul, for example, is specifically because he says, I'm going to listen to the people. I'm not going to listen to God. And so the Bible is a very anti populist document. It really is. I mean, it says that there is a right and there is a wrong. And if you take into account what the people think about this thing, you're doing it totally.

[Ben Shapiro]

Wrong. Well, we spent a lot of time before you arrived on the scene talking about the structure of Mount Sinai with the vertical axis, which was the extension of an ethos that unites people collectively with the vertical axis. Sorry, I think I said horizontal axis properly. With the vertical axis, which unites individuals and the people with God. And that the proper form of moral endeavor is the union of those two things. It's the union with God that simultaneously provides unity to the people. And the problem with the leader that you describe would be that only one of those axes of moral necessity would be being attended to at one time. And maybe that's better than. That's better than being a pure psychopath. At least you're in dialogue with other people. But all the people could wander off a cliff together.

[Greg Koukl]

Right? I think, logically speaking, there's one other point in the text that I think is important for what we're going to get to, and that is Moses. Argument to God here is really fascinating, right? He makes the people, they're not going to look on you kindly if you do this argument, which is sort of an argument. What he's not doing is he's not making an offense to the people. They're confused, they're scared. I'm not there, I should have gone down. Or he's not doing that. He doesn't make any excuse for the people at all. He says, like, for your own sake, you shouldn't do this. And then his real argument is the original covenant. He says, you made two covenants, right? There's the original blood covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and then there's the COVANT we made 5 minutes ago at Sinai. So they've abrogated that covenant, right? They wrecked that covenant, which is why he's about to destroy the tablets in one second. And then that is going to have to be remade. That covenant does not abrogate the original covenant. The original covenant still exists even though they've abrogated. That's a covenant that cannot be abrogated by.

[Eric Metaxas]

Anybody. I just want to point one last thing before we continue. Is that just in terms of understanding the idea of the golden calf, or that the image of the calf or the bull or whatever is that later when we come to the temple, there will be big bulls in the temple, but they're not the object of worship. They're supports for something else. And so it's not like making a bull is evil in itself. It's making a bull and worshiping it, which is a problem, because like I said later in the story, then you will find those used in the temple.

[Ben Shapiro]

Itself. So, and this pertains to what you just brought up, Ben, Moses is talking to God and he says, remember Abraham, Isaac and Israel, thy servants, to whom thou swore by thine own self and saidst unto them, I will multiply your seed as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have spoken of will I give unto your seed, and they shall inherit forever. And the Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people. So thank God for Moses, if you're an Israelite. And Moses turned and went down from the mount, and the two tables of the testimony were in his hand. The tables were written on both their sides, on the one side and on the other were they written. And the tables were the work of God. And the writing was the writing of God graven upon the tables. And when Joshua heard the noise of the people as they shouted, he said unto Moses, there is a noise of war in the camp. And he said, it is not the voice of them that shout for mastery, neither is it the voice of them that cry for being overcome, but the noise of them that sing, Do I hear? And it came to pass as soon as he came nigh unto the camp that he saw the calf and the dancing. This is a frenzy of sorts, eh? And is that a frenzy of descent, like untrammeledness to the natural.

[Jonathan Sacks]

World? I think of it as an.

[Ben Shapiro]

Origin. Right, so that's that descent into the chaos merging.

[Greg Koukl (alternate or guest)]

Downward. And that fits in with the fertility element, with the bull representing power, but also.

[Ben Shapiro]

Fertility. Fertility, right. So that's fertility that's so interesting in relationship to our culture, because what that essentially means, it's the rise of the dominance to the highest place of sexuality itself. Of course, that's exactly what's happening in our culture, because that's even become the hallmark of personal identity and also the object of worship that borders on the mandatory.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Right. So interesting. Before we get here, God both forgets and.

[Ben Shapiro]

Repents. It is not the voice of them that shout for mastery. It's not triumphant. Neither is it the cries of those who are being victimized, let's say, but the noise of them that sing, do I hear? It's celebration. And it came to pass as soon as he came nigh upon unto the camp that he saw the calf and the dancing and Moses, anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands and broke them beneath the mountain. Why? Why does he do that? Why does he. Why does he. Is it. Is.

[Eric Metaxas]

It. It's an image of what's already happening. This is what's happening. It's like the order that comes from dramatized. Heaven is broken. And so it's like all of it, the image all comes together at the bottom. It says, that's why. I think it also says it's like underneath, almost underneath the mountain, at the bottom of the mountain, things are broken and shattered and fragmented and not together. And so that's what he.

[Ben Shapiro]

Does. So it's to drive the point.

[Eric Metaxas]

Home. Well, I don't know. I mean, it's just to show this is what, like you said, the covenant's been.

[Greg Koukl]

Broken. That's.

[Eric Metaxas]

Right. It has been.

[Greg Koukl]

Broken. Right, it's.

[Ben Shapiro]

Broken. Right. So he's making no bones about it in what he's.

[Greg Koukl]

Communicating. I mean, he's a pure messenger of.

[Dennis Prager]

God.

[Greg Koukl]

Right. I mean, he's literally doing exactly what God just. It says the. God's anger waxed. Moses anger waxes. The covenant is broken. Moses takes the tablets that are written, inscribed by the finger of God, the most precious object ever created, and smashes them at the base of the mountain. He says, like, what I'm doing is a physical representation of what God has already just done with the.

[Ben Shapiro]

Covenant. Yeah, well, and to the degree that what's written on stone is the inscription of the deepest tradition, what he's dramatizing is the idea that this idolatrous celebration orgy, you said, is destroying what's most foundational to culture. He's dramatized. That's being dramatized in the text. It's what he's dramatizing by his.

[Hugh Hewitt]

Actions. Can we also see that. Yes, he's a messenger from God. And I think there's clearly that verbal echo that sort of the way God feels is his anger and then Moses anger. But I wonder if there's a sense in which Moses is, as it were, identifying himself with the guilt of the people, that he's, as it were, completing the sin of the people by shattering the tablets. It's as it were. It's the kind of. The catastrophe that they brought about has rendered the.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Covenant. So you think he was wrong in smashing the tablets, it was.

[Hugh Hewitt]

Sinful? Well, I don't know. I think maybe it's a moment in which the kind of the collectively guilty action is completed and he identifies himself with the act of his.

[Ira Glass]

People. I don't.

[Ben Shapiro]

Know. Well, you could also conceivably read it as I'd like. In some way, a kind of over response is that he's so appalled by the goings on that now he impulsively destroys something that's of great value, that he's been entrusted. Well, I don't know. I mean, I'm curious. Well, I don't know. I mean, it doesn't seem that dashing the tablet of tradition to bits is necessarily the right response to the emergence of licentiousness. Although I would say that is what conservatives are doing now in the.

[Greg Koukl]

Main. Although I do think that the idea.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Here. The.

[Ben Shapiro]

Covenant. Absolutely, yes, exactly. Dashing the tablets into pieces in frustration. And.

[Greg Koukl]

Bitterness. I mean, I think that the idea that he didn't do the wrong thing is justified by the next several, several chapters of him repeating everything with regard to the tabernacle, which makes no sense unless it's a second covenant, right? If the covenant hasn't been broken, if Moses just did the wrong thing, if the covenant still maintains, you don't have to repeat the entire explanation of everything that you have to do. Again, the reason God says that again, he said, because you broke it. So now we're.

[Ben Shapiro]

Rebuilding. That could be Moses own redemption too, taking.

[Greg Koukl]

Place. I mean, I don't know what's about to happen. I mean, I consider this, along with some passages of Deuteronomy, the most moving section of all of the Hebrew Bible. But this whole segment where you get to God talking to Moses and Moses seeking his presence and the reconstitution of what the relationship between God and man in the nation means is so unbelievable that in order to reconstruct that everything has been raised, the people raised it with this orgiastic response. And now it has to be rebuilt literally piece by piece. I mean, he literally takes verse by verse and rebuilds the entire.

[Ben Shapiro]

Superstructure. It is also a fractal representation of the redemptive narrative. Right? Because one version of the redemptive narrative, the archetypal redemptive narrative, is tyranny, desert, promised land. But another is tradition, chaos, the re. Establishment of tradition. And so that's being played out here too, because it's obviously it is also the case that what the Israelites do is equivalent to dashing the tablets to.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Bits. That's why I think it's. I like his response. I always did. He's basically saying, you're unworthy of the greatest thing God ever gave.

[Hugh Hewitt]

Humanity. You've broken the first two commandments.

[Ben Shapiro]

And so the rest are.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Broken. You're only going to say it without an.

[Ben Shapiro]

Action. Make sure you break all of.

[Eric Metaxas]

It. There are some versions in scripture of God asking even someone to ritually represent the breakdown. Like when God tells the prophet to marry a prostitute, God telling him to do it, it's like, to embody this, what is going on. I think in some ways that's what Moses is doing to make it clear, to make it. This is it. This is what you've done. This is what is.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Happening. There's no, and now we have to start over. And that's what you're saying about the tabernacle. It's like, this is where we are. You've destroyed everything. Now we start over. Again, do you think you can pay attention this.

[Greg Koukl (alternate or guest)]

Time? Okay. And isn't the nakedness and the shame also referring back to the Garden of Eden and the original disobedience? So it's going back to square one.

[Greg Koukl]

Again. It's more of a. And what we'll see, I think, when we talk about the new covenant that's about to be created, is that it's a slightly more cautious covenant, right. One of the things that happens after Moses comes off the top of the mountain is that he has to put a mask on his face because there's too much glory of God shining from his face. So the idea is that that sort of raw relationship between God and the people, which had already had to be mediated by Moses. When the commandments are given, right, because only the first couple are given by God directly, then the rest are given by Moses, told over to the people. Even that you need to. God needs to veil himself just a little bit. The rawness of God actually can intimidate people so much that they don't act in accordance with him. They actually act in direct opposition to.

[Ben Shapiro]

Him. One of the things you constantly do as a behavioral psychologist is to put up an ideal. Let's say this in concordance with the will of your client, right? It's a voluntary ascent. Here is the ideal towards which you will organize your behavior in the next week, whatever it might be. Clean up your room. The person comes back and says, well, I had one client came back and he hadn't cleaned up his room for like 18 years and lived in his mother's house in this high school bedroom. He just had a child and felt he should get his life together. So one of our plans was to see if he could clean up his room. And he dragged the damn vacuum cleaner into the room. But then it was an upright, but then left it in the doorway at a 45 degree angle. And then he just walked over it the whole week, which was so symbolically perfect. And he came back and said that. And, you know, one response to that would be, what the hell's wrong with you? So damn useless. You can't even vacuum your rug. It's like you're 30 years old. Get at it. But another approach, and this was the approach I took, was, well, you bit off more than you could chew, and there was a reason you hadn't cleaned up your room for 12 years. It's not trivial. And then when you actually decided to encounter the monster, let's say, and put your life in order, it was too much for you. You got stopped at the threshold. So let's shrink the task. And so one of the things you do if you're a benevolent father is you. You put a requirement, an ethical requirement on your son and you say, can you strive forward to this point? And if the answer is, I attempted dutifully but failed, the proper response on the part of the father is to make is to lower the target or to bring it closer. And you bring it closer. That the rule in some real sense is you bring it close enough so that the person has to improve to hit the target, but that there's a reasonable probability that they'll be able to do it. And that's judicious relationship, right? Because you have to fit the ideal to the capacity of the person that's moving forward. That's what you do as a parent, if you have any sense at all, and maybe as a friend too, and you certainly do that to.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yourself. But the repentance, the orientation has to be correct, or else you're just lowering the bar to manipulative means. And I think that's part of what you were describing, that he reduces the golden calf to the state that it should be, which is something that is nourishing, right? He makes it what's real. He makes them drink it, which is an act of repentance. You're putting this in the right place. Now we can engage again properly. Because if you keep lowering the bar and lowering the bar, the threshold, we also can see that being out of.

[Ben Shapiro]

Control. Yeah, well, that's too much pity. That's an evangelizing.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Act. That's.

[Ben Shapiro]

Right. And then there's bad.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Faith. Players will take advantage of that and keep.

[Greg Koukl]

Pushing. And all these chapters are about the physicalization and the realization of the ethical right. I mean, whether you're talking about the tabernacle or whether you're talking about what he's about to do with the golden calf, right? He's about to pick it up, he's going to burn it, and then he's going to make everybody eat it, which is literally ingest your sin, the sin that you just committed. Understand, that is part of you, the same way that the actual golden calf is now inside your body. And when you recognize that, then you realize the gravity of the that you're doing, that they actually have a real physical and emotional impact on you. They become a part of you. Your sins become a part of you. It's not as though it's something that's apart from you. It's something that's a part of you until you make a move to actually separate yourself out from.

[Ben Shapiro]

It. Okay. So the next thing that happens, and he took the calf which they had made. This is a strange part of the text. And burnt it in the fire and ground it to powder and strew it upon the water and made the children of Israel drink of it. And so that's really the forced admission that that came from within them, that that sin was within them. They couldn't blame it on the.

[Eric Metaxas]

Idol. But I also like the idea that was suggested in what you said yesterday, which is that they had. They took the meat, the animal, and they had made it into something above them that they were supposed to worship. And in Scripture, it's clear, like, God names Adam and Adam names the animal, but he is above the animals and he gives them meaning. That's why we also ride horses and we ride animals. And so it's like he's putting it back at the bottom of the world and saying, no, this is below you. And you have to ingest.

[Ben Shapiro]

It. That.

[Eric Metaxas]

Way. It.

[Ben Shapiro]

Doesn'T. Right. It's food for you and not something that you.

[Dennis Prager (alternate or guest)]

Worship.

[Eric Metaxas]

Yeah. I kind of like that image.

[Ben Shapiro]

Too. And Moses said unto Aaron, what did this people do unto thee that thou has brought so great a sin upon them? And Aaron said, let not the anger of my lord wax.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Hot. He's calling his brother my Lord. That's the worst punishment of.

[Hugh Hewitt]

All. I mean, that echoes, in fact, right at the beginning of the chapter, isn't it the Israelites saying, it's as if this Moses is the man who brought us out of Egypt. So it's kind of completely.

[Ben Shapiro]

Forgotten. Well, Moses is back, and I guess Aaron now remembers who he.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Is. This reminds me so much of Adam when he's caught out with.

[Dennis Prager]

Eve.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Right? With the situation where he's like, she did.

[Jonathan Sacks]

It.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Right? It's another moment like that of.

[Ben Shapiro]

Being totally, totally, let not the anger of my Lord wax hot. Thou knowest the people that they are set on mischief. Yeah. So he blames it on the people. For they said unto me, make us gods which shall go before us. For as this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what has become of him. And I said to them, whosoever hath any gold, let them break it off. So they gave it to me, then I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf.

[Greg Koukl]

Right? Like, magical, right? Just came right out.

[Ben Shapiro]

Right? Hilarious. I never noticed that.

[Jonathan Sacks]

It's. What, kids, it's pretty funny. It spilled. No Kid has ever said, I spilt the.

[Ira Glass]

Juice. And that's very important, right? Because I don't. Of course, I don't know that. I don't have Hebrew. So I don't know what the verb form is. But it's so often the case. If you're trying not to take responsibility, use the passive voice. Just saying, you know what.

[Ben Shapiro]

Happened.

[Greg Koukl]

Right? It is a passive.

[Ben Shapiro]

Voice. It happened of its own accord. I'm sorry about what.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Happened. A friend of mine had a couple where the husband was caught out in an affair and he said, it just happened. And the wife said, who happened.

[Ben Shapiro]

It? Right, right, right, right. So that's very funny. It is reminiscent of the story of Adam and Eve. It's this ironic humor on the part of the perpetrator victim and Moses. And when Moses saw that the people were naked, for Aaron had made them naked unto their shame among their enemies, then Moses stood in the gate of the camp and said, who is on the Lord's side? Let him come unto me. And all the sons of Levi gathered themselves together unto him. And he said unto them, thus saith the Lord God of Israel, put every man his sword by his side and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour. And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses. And there fell of the people that day about 3,000 men. For Moses had said, consecrate yourself today to the Lord, upon even every man, upon his son and upon his brother, that he may bestow upon you a blessing this day. And it came to pass on the morrow that Moses said unto the people, ye have sinned a great sin. And now I will go up unto the Lord peradventure, I shall make an atonement to bring us together for your sin. And Moses returned unto the Lord and said, oh, this people have sinned a great sin and have made them gods of gold. Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin, and if not, blot me, I pray thee out of thy book which thou hast.

[Greg Koukl]

Written. That's such an unbelievable.

[Eric Metaxas]

Thing. Yeah, it is.

[Greg Koukl]

Right? It's an unbelievable thing. You have this. And to understand how unbelievable that is. And you have to understand that Moses is the perennial outsider throughout this story, right? He's a Jew who ends up in the palace of Egypt. So he's a complete outsider there. He goes back out and he tries to save a couple of Jews who are. One Jew is getting killed by an Egyptian, kills Him, the Jews are going to tell on him. So he has to run away from the Jews and then go to Midian. He's an outsider in Midian. He comes back, the Jews don't have any idea who this guy is. The Egyptians hate his guts. He's a lone man. And here he's saying, my whole life story is now bound up in the duty that you gave to me that I didn't want in the first place. So if you decide to destroy this people, then you need to blot me. I mean, it's such an act of heroism for him to say, it's not just kill me or get rid of me. If you're going to get rid of them, it's not just me with them. It's get rid of the book, which is the thing that matters the most. Right. Get rid of my name in your book completely. I don't belong here because the mission that you've given to me, if you obliterate that, you obliterate me. It's an amazing.

[Ben Shapiro]

Thing. So do you read that as his taking on of the fullest form of responsibility, even despite the fact that he's an outsider who hasn't been listened to, who's been betrayed, like, consistently?

[Greg Koukl]

Yeah. I mean, he has to opt into being with the people that he really doesn't. There's not a lot of reasons for Moses to like the Israelites when you read the story. All they do all day is whine and apparently have orgiastic rituals the minute he leaves. So there's really no rationale for him to do this, except that he has so fully embraced the duty that God put on him and that he tried to run away from in the first place. Right. In the incident with the burning bush where he says, I don't want this. And God says, well, tough. This is your job. He so embraced that, that he is his duty at this point. And so if you're going to obliterate the people, then he's already said, take me with him. And not just take me with him, take me out of this book, this whole history that you're writing of the.

[Ben Shapiro]

World. So it's obliterate my existence.

[Greg Koukl]

Right?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Exactly. He is his role. It's like you were saying about headstones or.

[Greg Koukl]

Tombstones. Yeah. My whole theory of human fulfillment is that we play a series of roles throughout our lives and that those roles really are the most important thing about us. And that is why when you go to a cemetery, if you want to see what people actually cared about during their life, you actually read the tombstones and they all read pretty generic, right? It's father, son, daughter, mother. They're all roles that we take on with other people attached to duties. And so Moses is the highest form of the person who has a duty and performs that duty. And so if that duty is taken away from him, then it's his reason for being. There's no reason for his being or for his having been.

[Ben Shapiro]

Right. He never existed, I.

[Hugh Hewitt]

Think. Yeah, you see that very well, in fact, I mean, it's almost as if God recognizes the sort of Moses sort of status as a kind of an outsider in that just in the previous chapter, verse 10, he says, I will make of thee a great nation. We'll forget about the Israelites. And Moses refuses that. He says no. He recalls God to the covenant, to the original.

[Ben Shapiro]

Covenant. Right? Yeah. Well, it's very interesting that Moses is offered that option because that's another way out of the sin is like, to hell with all this. We'll just start new, like. Well, essentially like Noah. Right. And Moses rejects that we'll start.

[Hugh Hewitt]

Over. And he says.

[Eric Metaxas]

No. Yeah, so there's a great sense of just self sacrifice, like an image of self sacrifice here where he's like, basically, it's almost as if he knows God loves him and he's willing to say. He's willing to put himself and say, well, I know you love me, so kill me. And then God, it's like the sacrifice to Isaac.

[Ben Shapiro]

Almost. It feels like himself. It's also reminiscent of that notion that if a few good men could be found in Sodom and Gomorrah, then God won't destroy it. Right. If there's any goodness there, I mean, Moses is making a case, I suppose, that at least he's there and on God's side and maybe that's enough. And why do we think perhaps that he, given that he doesn't really have any reason, why didn't he jump at the chance to start.

[Greg Koukl]

Again? I know, again, I think that that goes to the transformation of Moses from a wanderer to the man who is the mission. I mean, even his argument with God is you're betraying your own mission. Right. I identify with your mission even more than you do at this point. You're talking about destroying the people. That's not your mission. You told me what your mission is. You put me on this mission. And so if you betray that mission, then what are you doing? Right? I mean, everybody else is going to point out that you said you were going to do a thing and Then you didn't do the thing. And that's the theme that he keeps coming back to over and over and over.

[Ben Shapiro]

Again. So it's an index of the depth of his commitment to this particular mission at this particular time, which is.

[Greg Koukl]

Why it's going to lead up to the most intimate moment between man and God that exists in Judaism. Right. He's going to talk to God directly and ask to experience his essence. Right. Which. That's how identified he is with the thing that he is supposed to be and the thing that he is supposed to do. And it's so romantic, all of this language. It really is so.

[Ben Shapiro]

Romantic. I'm murky about this. What we just read 25 to and Moses saw. When Moses saw that the people were naked, for Aaron had made them naked unto their shame among their enemies. What's going on there, do you think? Is the nakedness a reference to the orgiastic occurrence? How is it tied in.

[Greg Koukl]

With. The biblical word for naked is arum. Right? Right, Dennis. So paruah. I've seen it translated a little bit differently. Usually it means that they were sort of running wild or running out of control, and so not like they're physically naked as much as they're completely out of control. And Aaron has made them and allowed them to become out of control. And one thing that's fascinating here in the language is what exactly he then says, right? He says that he wants everybody to take out their sword, but the specific language of where they're supposed to put the sword. Right. Is that he says that you're supposed to put your sword on your thigh. Okay? The word thigh in biblical Hebrew is a euphemism. Okay? Right. It's tacha, yerechi. The word here is yerecho. Right. He's supposed to put it on his thigh. It's not his thigh. Right. It's his organ. The idea here is that if you go back to Genesis, oaths are sworn where the commandment. Where there is a commandment that has been fulfilled. He's reminding them that the command of the original covenant. Again, right. Are you with the original covenant? The original covenant was in this place. Right. With the circumcision, you're going to. You have to put essentially your sword where the covenant is, and that is going to remind you of what it is that you're supposed to do here, which is why he's using that specific.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Language. By the way, you'll find this fascinating. I have checked this out. To the best of my knowledge, testimony comes from.

[Ben Shapiro]

Testicle. Yes. Yes, yes.

[Eric Metaxas]

Yes. So it's important also to understand in other books and in other laws, the idea of exposing nakedness to shame, you could say, is related to sexual impropriety many times. So it's like you don't sleep with your aunt or all these acts of incest and these different types of inappropriate sexual acts are related to this idea of exposure, exposing nakedness in shame. So I think that that's all of that is being said to.

[Ben Shapiro]

Be. And why is it shame among their enemies? Is it. Does anyone understand that particular phrasing? For Aaron had made them naked unto their shame among their.

[Greg Koukl]

Enemies? I mean, that's Moses argument, right? That you've ashamed like the rest of the world is looking at you and.

[Eric Metaxas]

Laughing. So similar to what he said to God.

[Greg Koukl]

Basically. Yeah.

[Ben Shapiro]

Exactly. So is it something like the revelation of their licentious.

[Greg Koukl]

Weakness? Yeah, like how powerful. How powerful is your God and how powerful is your covenant if five minutes after you got it, you guys are engaging in an orgy at the foot of the mountain in front of a golden.

[Ben Shapiro]

Statue? Right. Well. And that nakedness, it's a little.

[Greg Koukl]

Jamming when you put it that.

[Ben Shapiro]

Way. It is a revelation of vulnerability, you know, and you might say that if you reveal your licentiousness to your enemy, you do simultaneously reveal your.

[Eric Metaxas]

Weakness. And so actually this is so, because I have the image that came to my mind, which is that the image of Noah in his tent who's drunk and naked like this, brings it all together in terms of licentiousness. And yeah, I think all those images come together to show you that it does.

[Ben Shapiro]

Have. Well, it's the case that when you do something shameful, you reveal your weakness. I mean, that's just. That's actually why it's shameful. Right. So that's just literally the.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Case. And the nakedness you were talking about yesterday, right, because animals are naked, right? So the nakedness here, even if it's not literal or gi. It's like they're showing their animal tendency. They're showing that which we're supposed to distinguish ourselves by being.

[Ben Shapiro]

Clothed. The modern response to that so often is dispense with the.

[Dennis Prager]

Shame.

[Ben Shapiro]

Right. You don't dispense with the sin. But if the shame. The thing is that the shame is actually an index of weakness. And we talked earlier about the fact that you shall ally yourself with powerful forces of virtue to sustain yourself through life. And then if shame is an index that you've fallen short of that task, to dispense with the shame would mean to not even notice that you've revealed your weakness. And that's going to be bad sociologically because your enemies might get wind of it, but it's not going to be so good for you.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Either. Today there's shame. If a college girl says, frankly, I'd rather get married than have a great career. That's.

[Ben Shapiro]

Shame. And so what do we make of.

[Eric Metaxas]

That? Do we want to talk about the.

[Ben Shapiro]

Massacre? Yes, definitely. Yes. I was just going to point that out. Let's just skip over. No, let's not, let's not. So what do you have to say about that? So there's 3,000 people are now killed because of.

[Eric Metaxas]

This? No, I mean, I think that I tend to understand it analogically and I tend to understand it in the way in which the church fathers would understand it. It's a pattern. And it's a pattern that can help us understand the necessity of that. Like if you could say it within you, if you wanted to apply it to yourself, that if you. That if you fell into that state, then there would be an aspect of you that would have to be.

[Ben Shapiro]

Culled. Well, I think you could also say that if once a society falls into an unbridled idolatrous licentiousness, the probability that massacre is about to occur is very high. So now it's salutary in this sense, in this situation, because it's the price that has to be paid for progress towards the next covenant to be made. But I also think that there's a kind of element of what? Implacability about it, inevitability about.

[Greg Koukl]

It. If you want to read it, non metaphorically, and we'll read it the Old Testament, biblically, you know, the hardcore way. Yeah, exactly. I'll do the hardcore biblical way. So one of the things that's worth noting here is the number is 3,000 men died that day. Well, we've already been told that about 600,000 men present at the giving of the Torah. That's actually a pretty low number. Right. Because all the people presumably are engaging in the worship of the calf and everybody is given the opportunity to opt out. Moses says, okay, everybody on this side of the line, right, you're either with me or you're with what just happened. Which means that the people who didn't cross that line are pretty stubborn advocates of the idea that idolatry is okay and the covenant ought to be broken. I mean, what they've seen is something unbelievably dramatic. Right. The leader of the people who they thought was dead just Came back down from the mountain and took these inscribed by God and shattered them at the foot of the mountain, took the idol, burned it in fire, made them all drink it. And then he said, everybody who's with me over here, and there's some 3,000 people who are still over there.

[Ben Shapiro]

You say they're just partying away.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Madly. Still, those two, though, of the obstinance of the Pharaoh. Because there's so many times where you're like, how many more plagues do you need, right, to understand.

[Greg Koukl]

That? Well, this is. This goes to actually, you know, people who read the Old Testament and they see all the death penalty sections, right? There's tons of death penalty in the Old Testament. And the Talmudic understanding of the death penalty is that in order for the death penalty to be applied, you have to have two live witnesses who see you before the sin is committed, warn you that you're about to commit the sin, and warn you of the consequence for the sin, and then witness you do the sin and have you acknowledge that that is the consequence for doing that, and then testify to that in court. Which means that in the Talmud it says that essentially the death penalty was never performed. So that's what you're seeing here. Moses just did this incredibly dramatic spectacle, and you still have some people who are like, you know what, fine, let's do this thing. And at that point, you have declared outright.

[Ben Shapiro]

War. So in some way, these are the unredeemable souls, right? Okay.

[Eric Metaxas]

Okay. But it's also, you can understand it also like the breakout of order onto chaos. Like when chaos becomes too big, that there is at some point it's going to happen, right? You can think about a riot. Like there's things. It's a demonstration, It's a demonstration, it's a riot. When that happens, then the pressure that will be applied by the system will be far more violent than what normal the.

[Greg Koukl]

World. By the way, Moses is also forestalling something way worse, right? Because what's about to happen, this parak, this chapter finishes with a plague. Nobody talks about the plague. And it doesn't say how many people died in the plague, but how many people would have died in the plague if Moses hadn't taken care of business, so to.

[Ben Shapiro]

Speak. Okay, so that's where we're coming to now. Verse 33. And the Lord said unto Moses, whosoever hath sinned against him, will I blot out of my book. Now implying that Moses isn't one of them. Therefore, now go lead the people unto the place of which I have spoken unto thee. Behold, mine angel shall go before thee. Nevertheless, in the day when I visit, I will visit their sin upon them. And the Lord plagued the people because they made the calf. They've fallen into this licentiousness, and the plague follows that. That does tend to happen. And the Lord plagued the people because they made the calf, which Aaron made. And that takes us to the end of Exodus.

[Jonathan Sacks]

32. Why? An interesting question is, why wasn't Aaron killed? And I think the answer is he didn't stand on the wrong side at the end. And also he. The general understanding is the leaders in this were the ones who were executed. And he was not a leader in making it. He was a leader in not stopping it. I think that's significant. So I'm just curious, what's the vote on Aaron? Do you have sympathy for the man? Do you think he's just a.

[Ben Shapiro]

Weakling? Well, he's played a pretty useful function so far, you know, so he made a mistake here. But he's been a necessary tool of Moses, like Moses wasn't necessary to.

[Jonathan Haidt]

God. It's hard to be a mediator. It's hard to be a communicator. And for me, I feel like it's.

[Ben Shapiro]

Not. Well, I don't.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Know. I'm curious what you think of that, because we're talking about him being a populist. But is he. Is he being a populist, or does he lose his way once Moses is out of sight? That he just doesn't.

[Greg Koukl]

Know? The impression that you get of Aaron is that of all the people in this book, the most loving person is Aaron. Aaron, he loves his brother, right? His brother shows up. His younger brother shows up and says, I'm leading this people out, and you're gonna be my assistant. And Aaron's, like, all for it, right? Aaron's the older brother. I mean, there could have been conflict there. It's one of the only sibling relationships in the Bible. There really is no conflict. In fact, there's pretty solid sibling solidarity between Aaron and Moses. Aaron obviously loves Miriam also. I mean, there's the sister, and he loves the people, right? Which is why they bewail him when he dies. And so, you know, everything that he does is really sort of out of love. And love for God, too, because he's the high priest, right? So God obviously sees him in that context. And so it shows you how love, when it's not tempered by fear, can bring you to some pretty bad places, which you end up seeing with his sons, Nadav and Avihu, who have the same characteristics. Right. He has two sons. They have the same characteristics as Aaron. They're very loving of God. They're zealous for God, and so they bring a foreign fire in front of God a little bit later on in the Bible, and they end up being killed for that. And there's this really heartbreaking section where Moses is talking to Aaron about it. And Moses is trying to comfort Aaron. And he says, well, God takes those who are closest to him, essentially. And that's sort of the story of Eren is that Eren is. I think that the mistakes that he makes are mistakes that he makes out of love. Love for the people, or love for his brother, trying to preserve the people in spite of their sin. Right. He doesn't really know what to do. I think he's paralyzed in this situation. He can see he's paralyzed by his response, which is nonsensical and.

[Ben Shapiro]

Incoherent. There's a kind of goodness in that compassionate love that might be part of that is that, you know, you see people who are so bound by compassion for their fellow people that they will. They'll sacrifice their relationship with what's highest to maintain that compassion. And then they'll sometimes even state that as a virtue, but it's not a virtue. Right. If you're. If you let people off the hook because you love them too much, that's actually a mistake. So it's a complicated mistake. That's the mistake of excess compassion. Right. And that it's very hard for modern people to understand how that can possibly be a mistake. That's what made Freud such a genius, Right? Because he pointed to the Oedipal mother said, no, you know, compassion, untrammeled compassion is a catastrophic monster in modern world. Everybody goes, well, that just can't be the case. How can you be too compassionate? It's like, well, you forget that the good is more complex than the mere compassionate. So shall we move to Exodus 33? And the Lord said unto Moses, depart and go up hence, thou and the people which thou hast brought up out of the land of Egypt, unto the land which I swear unto Abraham, Isaac, and to Jacob, saying, unto thy seed will I give it. And I will send an angel before thee, and I will drive out the Canaanite, the Amorite and the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites unto a land flowing with milk and honey. So. So it's a reiteration of the fundamental narrative here. For I will not Go up in the midst of thee. That's why he's sending the intermediary angel. For I will not go up in the midst of thee, for thou art a stiff necked people, lest I consume thee in the.

[Dennis Prager]

Way.

[Ben Shapiro]

Right. So that's that mediated guidance, right? It's not God, it's a secondary messenger of God. That's all the Israelites can tolerate. And when the people heard these evil tidings, they mourned. And no man did put on him his ornaments. For the Lord had said unto Moses, say unto the children of Israel, you are a stiff necked people, stubborn and tyrannical. I will come up into the midst of thee in a moment and consume thee. Therefore now put off thy ornaments from thee that I may know what to do unto thee. And what ornaments are they referring to there? Is it the ornaments that identify them as people of Israel. What's the.

[Eric Metaxas]

Reference? I think this has to do with the kind of. The same kind of stripping that they participate in different places where clean their clothes, you know, don't have sex with your wife. This kind of. It's almost like an ascetic. It's like an ascetic.

[Greg Koukl]

Practice. I mean, we do this today. When you mourn in Judaism, you're not supposed to wear leather shoes, for example. You're supposed to sit on low chairs, right? This is the. You see it in the book of Esther, right? Where you don sackcloth and ashes. That's essentially.

[Ben Shapiro]

What. So it's a lowering. It's a ritual lowering. It's an actual lowering, a ritualization of humility, something like that. I see they're not worthy of wearing gold, for example. And the children of Israel stripped themselves of their ornaments by the Mount Horeb. And Moses took tabernacle and pitched it outside the camp, without the camp, far off from the camp, and called it the tabernacle of the congregation, the holy place of the congregation. And it came to pass that everyone which sought the Lord went out unto the tabernacle of the congregation which was outside the camp. And it came to pass when Moses went out unto the tabernacle, that all the people rose up and stood every man at his tent door and looked after Moses until he was gone into the tabernacle. And it came to pass as Moses entered into the tabernacle, the cloudy pillar descended and stood at the door of the tabernacle. And the Lord talked with Moses. And all the people saw the cloudy pillar stand at the tabernacle door. And all the people rose up and worshipped every man in his tent door. And the Lord spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend. And he turned again into the camp. But his servant Joshua, the son of nun, a young man, departed, not out of the tabernacle. So what's going on there? Moses goes out to the tabernacle. It's the center of the community, but it's not right. But it's outside.

[Greg Koukl]

Now. This is the whole thing. He's now, because the covenant is broken, God is not dwelling in the midst of the people anymore. God says, you take the tent. You set it up over there, far away, outside the camp, like, away from everybody. Because I'm.

[Ben Shapiro]

Leaving. This is where God is now.

[Greg Koukl]

Right? He's saying, I'm leaving. I'm not interested in you. You broke the agreement. I'm gonna be out here, and I'm keeping, like, the bare bones of my promise, which is, I'll have a messenger, and he'll send you. He'll take you forward to the land of Israel. I'm not sure, you know what's gonna happen to you on the way there, what's gonna happen afterward. But I'll fulfill, like, the bare bones. But I'm no longer amongst you, right? Moses is still good with me, but the rest of you people are, you know, very far from me. It's really symbolic.

[Eric Metaxas]

Language. There's also a training, I think, of the people, because it's like Moses. Someone says, moses went up the mountain, and then as soon as he went up, the Israelites made this calf. And so now we have a setup which is horizontal. It's not vertical, but it has the same notion. So you put a point outside of the camp, that actually is the center of the camp, but it's far away. It's not at the middle. Put it over there.

[Ben Shapiro]

Moses. Every day, that's the true.

[Eric Metaxas]

Center. That's right. And Moses, every day, leaves, goes there. And now the Israelites, instead of making golden calves now, every day, they stand at the door, they honor what's going on. They bow down. They worship the presence of God without their ornamentation. That's right. So it's like they're basically being trained to do this properly.

[Ben Shapiro]

Right? So now they're apprehending that the center has actually moved outside their community because they moved away, actually. God's always at the proper center. Now it's outside the camp because they're so sinful. And now they're a bit humble. So they're paying attention to this. Moses is still in the proper place. And then that's driven home by the narrative because he's so much in the proper place that God, it's kind of half of God descends to talk to him though, right? Because it isn't. It's only one of the.

[Eric Metaxas]

Pillars. Yeah, well, the pillar of cloud is there during the day and the.

[Ben Shapiro]

Pillar of fire is there during the day. I see. So there's darkness in the day that comes to visit.

[Ira Glass]

Him. There's an amazing literary parallel here too, between the taking off the earrings to make them into the calf, which you worship, versus taking off the ornaments. And so, you know, what's going on here. And I think it has to do with the difference between, you know, let's just understand this kind of anagogically taking what you have of value, maybe it's your talents, maybe it's your wealth, maybe it's whatever, and making that into a God that you worship. And that leads. Because it's a self contained loop. It leads to the destruction. That's why they end up having to drink it. Right? Because it's. Whereas in the other case with the ornaments, that's a stripping down of what you have in order to receive what is beyond you, that ritual humiliation. But it's interesting how the same this parallel is. It's the same thing that you have, right? In a different spirit with a different.

[Greg Koukl]

Eye. Well, it's ecstatic. I mean, so it moves from the ecstatic to the sinful to the ascetic. Right? So because there's three instances with the jewelry here, there's the first instance, which I read a few chapters ago, where God says, each man who's motivated to take his finery and everybody who's motivated to take their stuff, give it to me and we'll use it in the tabernacle, right? We'll literally build the communal house out of the jewelry that you're taking out of your ears. And then there's the sinfulness, which is, well, I guess then we can build a God out of our gold, right? I mean, it's not just that we can build a house for God, we can actually build a God out of our gold, out of our material wealth. And then it turns into the only way for us to fight that sinful nature is to strip ourselves of that and to go back to something that's much more.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Basic. It's a shift in some ways between the animalistic nakedness of the golden calf, per the prager discussion, and nakedness before.

[Ira Glass]

God. And it's also, I mean, I don't know where this jewelry comes from. But there is, of course, we've already read when they leave Egypt, God spoils the Egyptians and they give them all of this stuff. So in a certain sense, I think one of the things you can say that's going on here is these things that we have are already given to us by.

[Ben Shapiro]

God. Yes. The wealth that's been bestowed upon them. Exactly. And then you determine what you're going to. What you're going to orient that towards. It's very interesting to lay it out that way, Ben, that it's first the construction of the tabernacle and then there's kind of a sin of pride. It's like, well, if we could build a bloody tabernacle, maybe we can just make God. That doesn't go so well. And they're doing it out of the treasure that's been bequeathed to them by the tyranny.

[Ira Glass]

Right. That's quite bequeathed to them by the principle that transcends the.

[Ben Shapiro]

Tyranny. Right. But it's still extracted from the tyranny. Right. I mean, because it was Egyptian gold. I know it's bestowed upon them by.

[Ira Glass]

God. Yeah. No, it's a logical.

[Ben Shapiro]

Prediction. So it's the treasures of the past, even though they're derived from tyranny. You say in our own life, we can decide what to do with the treasures that have been bequeathed to us even by the tyrannical past. Right. We can make a house for God, we can make a false God, or we can. And when we're missing the mark, we can strip ourselves of the right to that treasure and. And look for the new center. Humbly. Right. Which hypothetically is what we're trying to.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Do. Well, that was your discussion about what do we do with sins of the past. It's the same thing, right. How can we atone for sins that we didn't personally commit? So what do we do? What's the charge? What's the responsibility if we have, you.

[Ben Shapiro]

Know, it's to humbly find the new center that is moved and not to revel in the unearned glory of the past without doing that. And to lower ourselves despite the treasure we could carry. And then to watch as the people who are in communion with God show the way to the new center. It's something like.

[Greg Koukl (alternate or guest)]

That. So I have just a question for Greg as the novelist in our midst, about the dramatic. This will be perhaps upsetting for the more orthodox Hebrews, but I'm going to ask specifically Greg here about the figure of Moses. We've mentioned that he's the outsider, you know, Moses the Egyptian and this liminal dimension to Moses, but also the sort of personality of Moses. I mean, we have a very, I think a strong sense of what David was like. We also have a strong sense of Solomon, of course. But Moses is, I mean, I just isn't what sort of. I know this.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Seems not upsetting at all. Not at.

[Greg Koukl]

All. I mean, from my take, I mean, he's asking you, so why don't.

[Ben Shapiro]

You give your take but.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Go. I'm curious your response and then I'll respond to.

[Greg Koukl]

Yours. I mean, Moses is the man who has an innate sense of right and wrong from the very beginning, right? The first thing that we see of Moses, like the first thing we see of him, we don't get his childhood, right? You just get him as a baby and then you get him as a young adult. And the first thing that he sees is an injustice happening and he immediately moves to stop the injustice. Right? That's the raw material that God is working with. And then he is a man who's out of place in a world that is immoral, essentially. And God provides him with a mission which is to bring morality to the world. And he's not totally sold on the mission. He's saddled with a people that he really does not like very much, which is clearly obvious from his conversations with the people throughout the Bible. And he takes on that mission more and more to the point where the romance in the story is the romance between Moses and God. And so there's this incredibly tight relationship between Moses and God. And the tragedy of Moses is that as he gets older and his relationship with the people that he's put on his back and carried through the wilderness begins to fray, he begins to fall short. That's the story of numbers, right? When he gets to numbers, that's what it's going to be. He keeps getting called and he keeps having trouble answering the call because as you get older, this is what tends to happen. And so he has a really fascinating character arc. He almost has a three act character arc, right, of the person who's reluctant to embrace the call and then the guy who embraces the call and he's at, here we're seeing him at his full glory and his power. And then over the course, after the sin of the spies, you'll see that he kind of goes into decline, but he has this last moment of clarity. And that's the entire book of Deuteronomy. That's sort of the character arc of, of.

[Ben Shapiro]

Moses. That's a good answer. Shall we move on?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Yeah. I mean, the one thing is the one who resists the call, who doesn't want it. Right. It's always a trope. That's a thriller trope. That's a Western trope. Of course, everything's derived from this with the original. But the person of the most value for a position is one who doesn't want to take it. And so it's like he becomes, in a way, you know, in psychological terms, he's the assimilating ego. He's the one who has to constantly navigate between the known and the.

[Ben Shapiro]

Unknown.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Right. And so.

[Ben Shapiro]

There'S. He's very archetypal rather than.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Particularized. Yes, he's archetypal rather than particularized. And it's. You know, there's a Western that could lay down right on top of this and everyone would understand.

[Ben Shapiro]

It.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Right. That's the structure, including what's the great Clint Eastwood movie where he's.

[Ben Shapiro]

Older?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Unforgiven.

[Eric Metaxas]

Unforgiven. That's the last act, sort of the third.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Act. That's the third act.

[Ben Shapiro]

Is. That's.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Right. Can he get up? Can he do this one more.

[Greg Koukl]

Time?

[Jonathan Haidt]

Right. After saying, I don't want this. I don't care about the town I'm leaving. That's the template of the early ones. And so the Western motif is something that we lay down on top of it. And it's a type. It's not specified.

[Greg Koukl (alternate or guest)]

Enormously. And even historical figures like Oliver Cromwell, I mean, don't you think there's a kind of Washington. You know, there's this. The figure leading the.

[Ben Shapiro]

People. Well, historical figures approach the.

[Greg Koukl]

Archetypal. Absolutely right. Exactly. Absolutely, exactly. And I mean, you see that when we get to the very end of the five books, I mean, it is the most tragic moment in biblical.

[Dennis Prager]

History.

[Greg Koukl]

Right. You get to the very end, and Moses has done this entire work, and he gets them there. And God, in this unbelievable image, takes him to the top of a mountain where no one's going to know where his body is. No one's going to know where he's buried. It's not made into a shrine. Right. We have no clue where Moses is buried, and God is going to take him with a kiss. I mean, that's literally the language of the Bible. And he shows him the entirety of the land. He lays out in front of him the entirety of the land. And that's the story of not just Moses. That's the story of every moral human being. You never actually get to go into the promised land. Everybody dies with something left still to do. And that is, you know, the fact that Moses takes these.

[Ben Shapiro]

People. No matter how hard you try.

[Greg Koukl]

No matter how hard you try, the best you can do, and that's the gift that God gives him, is that you can see in the dim.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Future. It's a pretty big.

[Ben Shapiro]

Gift. Yeah, yeah.

[Greg Koukl]

Yeah. It's an unbelievable.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Gift. I'll be very happy if I could see the promised land that I want to enter. I don't need to enter it. I just want to add, if I may, to Ben's point about his preoccupation from the very beginning with evil. He embodies for me my favorite verse in the whole Hebrew Bible. Those of you who love God, it's a command, must hate evil. And as I always repeat to people when I speak, if you don't hate evil, you do not love God. And he hated.

[Ben Shapiro]

Evil. It also might be that if you do hate evil, you love God. Which is why I made reference to the Nuremberg convictions.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Earlier. Oh, that was.

[Ben Shapiro]

Good. Once you decide that there's evil, it's like, oh, you've made another decision.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Too. That is a beautiful addendum which in your name I will cite when I, as he knows I. I am Jewishly bound to cite.

[Greg Koukl]

You. Correct.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Correct. We were.

[Ben Shapiro]

Told. I appreciate.

[Jonathan Sacks]

That. No, no, it's a very beautiful thing you should know because Ben and I went to totally different Jewish schools, but we were taught very similar things and it is a very big deal. If you don't cite a source, you are a thief. And if you do cite a source, you bring redemption to the world. That is how big it.

[Ben Shapiro]

Is. I like using the Lord's name in.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Vain. Yes, that's.

[Ben Shapiro]

True. Don't take unearned advantage. Alright, so let's walk through the end of 33 here. And Moses said unto the Lord, see, thou sayest unto me, bring up this people. And thou hast not let me know whom thou wilt sent with me. Yet thou hast said, I know thee by name, and thou hast also found grace in my sight. Now therefore, I pray thee, if I have found grace in thy sight, show me now the way that I may know thee, that I may find grace in thy sight. That's that horizontal axis. And consider that this nation is thy people. And he said, my presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest. And he said unto him, if thy presence go not with me, carry us not up hence, for wherein shall it be known here that I and thy people have found Grace in thy sight, Is it not in that thou goest with us? So shall we be separated, I and thy people from all the people that are upon the face of the earth. And the Lord said unto Moses, I will do this thing also that thou hast spoken, for thou hast found grace in my sight, and I know thee by name. And he said, I beseech thee, show me thy glory. And he said, I will make all my goodness pass before thee, and I will proclaim the name of the Lord before thee. And be gracious to whom I will be gracious and will show mercy on whom I will show.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Mercy. A provocative thought for you. God describes himself as good, and this is, to me of surpassing importance. And I don't mean to be provocative, but I know it is because I have a big problem with the love bombardment of our time. He doesn't say, and my love will pass before you, my goodness. And Moses asked him, what's your essence? And he didn't say love. He said, goodness. It's very hard to pervertyou can pervert good. You can say anything is good. But when you think of how many bad people have been loved. So many Russians loved Stalin that vast numbers of them were trampled at his funeral. The number of people who have loved horrific human beings, the number of individuals you would know much better than I, who love bad men, women who love bad men, or men, I guess, who love bad women. Love, in other words. I think goodness is more trustworthy a guidepost than love. That's what I'm.

[Eric Metaxas]

Saying. So what is it that you don't think that it's God's love that made him want to show Moses his.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Glory? It might have been, but that's reading. It's not what it says. I'm not denying what you're.

[Greg Koukl]

Saying. That might have been the motivation. But I think what Dennis is saying is that his essence, that if one sort of iteration is God is love, the Old Testament iteration is God is goodness. Right. That's actually what he's saying. And by the way, pretty obvious that his definition of goodness is not ours. Right. Because then he essentially reiterates what he says at the burning.

[Dennis Prager]

Bush.

[Greg Koukl]

Right. I will be what I will.

[Hugh Hewitt]

Be. Yeah, there's a definite echo, isn't.

[Dennis Prager]

There?

[Greg Koukl]

Right. He says, I'm going to be gracious to whom I will choose to be gracious, and I'm going to show mercy to whom I will decide to show mercy. In other words, I'm telling you I'm good. Your definition of good is not my definition of good. And then that's exactly what. Because the question that Moses is asking him, really, here, show me your glory, right? Really, the way that a lot of rabbis interpret that anyway, is it's essentially Moses asking him, why do bad things happen to good people? Which is the big question, right? Like why? You say that you're present in the universe. You say that you're a part of our lives. You say that you're intimate with humanity, and yet we see all these terrible things happening around us.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Explain. I wonder if this comes in part from his. From his willingness to sort of negotiate with God, to hold God in some ways to account for the first covenant, right? And you talk about him when Moses is starting. He's got the raw stuff. He's got the raw goods of being a hero. He kills an Egyptian who's beating somebody, right? He's got all of it. But he's a continuous outsider. And this is like this slow approximation. And in some ways, if he wasn't willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, to have his name be blotted out and then he spared that, would he have the courage to progress, to keep making another ask? It's this very delicate.

[Ben Shapiro]

Dance. Do you think he's also asking God to make manifest his commitment to him in some sense? I mean, because Moses is. He's stuck leading again. And there's some ambivalence in.

[Greg Koukl]

That. That's step one, right? That's clear. I mean, that's the last paragraph, right? The paragraph where you told me to lead these people forth, but you're not telling me who I'm going with, right? You said, there's going to be an angel who comes with us or a messenger who comes with us. But you didn't say, it's you. So I need your commitment. You're going to come with us. And God, it's like, do I.

[Ben Shapiro]

Know this is the.

[Greg Koukl]

River? That last ask is such an unbelievable ask, right? Because he's not just saying, I want you to fulfill the original covenant, right? The original covenant is you're going to do all these things personally for us, right? You're going to take us forth to the land. You personally, not an angel, it's going to be you. You're going to travel with us. You're going to be with us. And God says, okay, you got it. And then he says, but I want more than that. I want to know you. I want to know you at the deepest level. And God answers him, and he doesn't just say no, right? He actually Says. He actually says, I'll show you as much as you can take, basically. Right. Which is what the next part is. Right. The next several verses are just that. So I think maybe you should read the next few verses and finish off the.

[Dennis Prager (alternate or guest)]

Seconds. No, the way I see it is he's negotiated and got to this point. They're back on track. But he knows, as you said, there's going to be tough days ahead. The people are still the people. So I think this is the most audacious prayer in the Bible. He's praying to know everything of the Lord that a human being can know and not.

[Ben Shapiro]

Die. Right, right. Which is also a daring prayer. It's sort of take me to my.

[Dennis Prager (alternate or guest)]

Limits. He doesn't see the Lord face to face. And at the end the tribute, he speaks to the Lord face to face, but he doesn't see.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Him. By the way, whenever no is used, K N o W with regard to another person, it means sexual congress. So it's very interesting, and I'm not in any way implying that there's a sexual element.

[Ben Shapiro]

Here. We appreciate that. We appreciate.

[Jonathan Sacks]

That. Yeah. No, no. For the record, I know you all know that, but.

[Greg Koukl]

Maybe. Well, all your friends in Media.

[Ben Shapiro]

Matters, but no in that sense also means to enter into creative union with. That's why there's the sexual.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Connotation. Fair.

[Ben Shapiro]

Enough. But it is.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Powerful. It's very powerful that he uses that word. That's all I wanted to.

[Greg Koukl]

Know. The highest level of intimacy that you can achieve with another being, what he's trying to.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Do. And the Jungian, the young line, beware of unearned wisdom, in some ways is the response. It's like, you can't take. What I have to show you.

[Dennis Prager]

Is essentially what he.

[Greg Koukl]

Says. The way that he phrases it, though, like, his answer that we're about to read is just such an unbelievable answer. It's such a great.

[Ben Shapiro]

Answer. And God said, thou canst not see my face, for there shall no man see me and live. A full revelation of the core of being. And the Lord said, behold, there is a place by me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock. And it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover thee with my hand while I pass by. And I will take away my hand, and thou shalt see my back parts, but my face shall not be seen. And that ends Exodus 33. And so we have the very end of Exodus to deal with tomorrow. And we'll move beyond that into the accompanying following stories that flesh out the narrative of tyranny, desert, desert and promised land. And so thank you all for episode 13. Everyone watching and listening. Thank you very much for your time and attention to the Daily Wire crew so carefully filming. Thank you for your efforts on our behalf and to the Daily Wire executives for sponsoring and supporting this venture. And gentlemen, onward and upward to episode 14. Thanks.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Again. Thank.

[Ben Shapiro]

You. What was it like, Merlin, to be alone with God? Is that who you think I was alone.

[Jonathan Sacks]

With?

[Greg Koukl]

Maradin? I knew your.

[Ben Shapiro]

Father. I am yet convinced that he was not of this world. All men know of the great.

[Greg Koukl]

Taliesin. You are my.

[Ben Shapiro]

Father. That the great God should war for my.

[Greg Koukl]

Soul. Princess Garrus, savior of our.

[Ben Shapiro]

People. I know what the bull God offered.

[Eric Metaxas]

You. I was offered the same. And there is a new power.

[Ben Shapiro]

At work in the.

[Eric Metaxas]

World. I've seen.

[Ben Shapiro]

It. A God who sacrifices what he loves for us. We are each given only one.

[Eric Metaxas]

Life.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Singer.

[Eric Metaxas]

No. And we're given.

[Ben Shapiro]

Another. I learned of Yazu the.

[Dennis Prager (alternate or guest)]

Christ. And I have become his.

[Ben Shapiro]

Follower. He's waiting on a miracle. And I think you can give him.

[Greg Koukl]

One. Trust in Yezu. He is the only hope for men like.

[Ben Shapiro]

Us. A to Britain never rests in the hands of the great light. Great.

[Eric Metaxas]

Light. Great.

[Ben Shapiro]

Darkness. Such things mattered to me then. What matters to you now? Mistress of lies. You, nephew. The sword of a high king. How many lives must be lost before you accept the power you were born to.

[Eric Metaxas]

Wield. So clinging to the promises of.

[Ben Shapiro]

A God who has abandoned you. I cannot take up that sword again. You know what you must.

[Greg Koukl]

Do. Great.

[Ben Shapiro]

Life. Forgive.

[Eric Metaxas]

Me. The time has come to be.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Reborn. Looking for a last minute gift for your people. You know, your.

[Ben Shapiro]

People. That weird bunch of friends and.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Family that you love dearly. Well, here's an easy Oregon Lottery Holiday.

[Greg Koukl]

Scratch. It's because your people, they're the.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Ones that amidst all the holiday crowds and endless notifications, help you find the fun. Which calls for a little gift that brings big cheer. Oregon Lottery Holiday scratchets. You know where to find.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Them. Grab some.

[Jonathan Sacks]

Today. Must be 18 or older to.

[Jonathan Haidt]

Play lottery Games are based on chance and should be played for entertainment.