Golden DNA

He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, “These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.”  Exodus 32:4  NIV

They said – The agony of the Golden Calf.  After God demonstrates His complete and utter commitment to Israel by redeeming them from the prison of slavery in Egypt, they respond with an unimaginable break in the relationship.  They are so afraid, so traumatized, that they can’t abide any lapse in God’s presence.  When Moses disappears to the mountain for forty days, they revert to their imposed Egyptian slavery, creating and worshipping an idol as representative of God.  This event sets the stage for virtually all the subsequent actions and reactions of their journey.  Something fundamental has occurred that disrupts all future human-divine interaction.  Moses successfully negotiates forgiveness, but “God is reconciled with them, but the people’s work of atonement is still incomplete.  Only after they have made the appropriate sacrifices will atonement be achieved.”[1]  The Tabernacle and its laws are the start, but not the finish.

In modern terms, the incident of the Golden Calf is a case of epigenetics.  Notice that the text says, “Then they said,” not “Then Aaron said.”  Aaron was certainly complicit and his later excuse is as lame as excuses can be, but it is the people who proclaim the idol as divine.  That proclamation changes who they are, or perhaps it voices what they have become in Egypt.

“The Sages view the apparently discrete crisis of the Golden Calf as returning in repressed form throughout the generations.  ‘There is no generation that does not carry a vestige (lit. a tiny amount) of the Golden Calf.’  A toxin persists to trouble the fantasy life of human beings.  Such a statement presumably refers to the vestigial impact of idol worship.  Some resistant strain remains in the blood, breaking out anew in every generation.”[2]

Epigenetics.  “The pioneering cell biologist Bruce Lipton demonstrates that our DNA can be affected by both negative and positive thoughts, beliefs, and emotions. . . According to Lipton, ‘The mother’s emotions, such as fear, anger, love, hope among others can biochemically alter the genetic expression of her offspring.’ . . In a sense, a child who has experienced a stressful in utero environment can become reactive in a similarly stressful situation.”[3]  But here’s the radical biblical idea.  It’s not just the mothers who affect the DNA of the children.  It’s also the fathers—God sees to it.  What happened to these people in Egypt was now a part of them, passed down from generation to generation.  They all had Golden Calf DNA.

Epigenetics will rock the world of DNA determinists.  It suggests that behavior modifies genes and that these genes transmit newly encoded behavior to offspring.  Suddenly what you do has multi-generational consequences.  Maybe God knew that all along.

Why didn’t Israel succeed in crossing the wilderness to enter the Promised Land in a matter of a few weeks?  The answer is this:  they had Egyptian DNA.  They believed what they had been subjected to for hundreds of years. They believed they were not worthy of redemption.  Living in Egypt convinced them that they were slaves, the subjects of a Master who was cruel and ruthless.  They never embraced Genesis 1:26-27.  And as a result, they constantly desired to return to the hellhole they came from.  The theological evil of Egypt infected them.

According to the rabbis, it still does.  You don’t get rid of Egyptian DNA through forgiveness.  It’s encoded in the cells.  Every generation, no matter how righteous, has a little bit of Golden Calf circulating in the body.  Leviticus is “sacred housekeeping” in an effort to keep Golden Calf DNA in check.  But if you think about it, the story of the Golden Calf becomes much more relevant—and scary.  Maybe we should have paid a lot more attention to what happened afterward.

Topical Index: Golden Calf, epigenetics, forgiveness, Exodus 32:4

You might also want to look at this:  https://skipmoen.com/2019/08/egyptian-dna/

[1] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg , The Hidden Order of Intimacy: Reflections on the Book of Leviticus (Schocken Books, 2022), p. 11.

[2] Ibid., p. 10.

[3] Mark Wolynn, It Didn’t Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are And How To End The Cycle (Penguin Books, 2016), pp 26-27.