When I first read this passage, I thought –”what is this about?” It doesn’t make any sense to make the people who made the idol drink water with the idol, ground up, in it? Was this just designed to make the water bitter, or bad tasting? Was this meant to cause the Israelites to pass the idol through their bodies, so they would see the total worthlessness of this calf? What is the point?
To really understand, we must couple this passage with another idea found throughout the Tanakh, and then apply a particular piece of the Levitical Law to the puzzle.
For they have committed adultery, and blood is on their hands. With their idols they have committed adultery, and they have even offered up to them for food the children whom they had borne to me. Moreover, this they have done to me: they have defiled my sanctuary on the same day and profaned my Sabbaths. For when they had slaughtered their children in sacrifice to their idols, on the same day they came into my sanctuary to profane it. And behold, this is what they did in my house. -Ezekiel 23:37-39
In the language of the Tanakh, idolatry is often equated with adultery. When Israel worships another god, God says there worship is a form of adultery towards God. So the first point to note is that when Israel worshiped the unholy calf in the desert, they committed adultery in God’s eyes.
We all know what the punishment for adultery is —stoning. But what you might not remember is that there is also a test for adultery described in the Mosaic Law.
Speak to the people of Israel, If any man’s wife goes astray and breaks faith with him, if a man lies with her sexually, and it is hidden from the eyes of her husband, and she is undetected though she has defiled herself, and there is no witness against her… the priest shall take holy water in an earthenware vessel and take some of the dust that is on the floor of the tabernacle and put it into the water. And the priest shall set the woman before the LORD and unbind the hair of the woman’s head and place in her hands the grain offering of remembrance, which is the grain offering of jealousy. And in his hand the priest shall have the water of bitterness that brings the curse. …then’ (let the priest make the woman take the oath of the curse, and say to the woman) ‘the LORD make you a curse and an oath among your people, when the LORD makes your thigh fall away and your body swell. May this water that brings the curse pass into your bowels and make your womb swell and your thigh fall away.’ And the woman shall say, ‘Amen, Amen.’ “Then the priest shall write these curses in a book and wash them off into the water of bitterness. And he shall make the woman drink the water of bitterness that brings the curse, and the water that brings the curse shall enter into her and cause bitter pain. -Numbers 5:12-13, 17-18, 21-24The priest mixes water with dust, and makes the woman suspected of adultery drink the water. If she has really committed adultery, then she contracts some sort of disease from the water, resulting in a sort of “personal plague.”
Moses is acting out this very law in the midst of Israel. He is forcing Israel to drink the water of bitterness, so that if they have committed adultery against God by worshiping the unholy calf, resulting in a plague. The plague among Israel is actually mentioned at the end of the story surrounding the unholy calf.
Then the LORD sent a plague on the people, because they made the calf, the one that Aaron made. -Exodus 32:35The text doesn’t say this plague is specifically the result of drinking the bitter water of the calf mixed with the water from the rock, but the parallels with the Mosaic Law on the test for an unfaithful wife is certainly suggestive.
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