From GeekWithA.45, commenting at this post:
One of my old friends, a scholar of Talmud and Kaballah, once opined that there was a really important reason $DEITY lead Moses and the Israelites around the desert for 40 years between their deliverance from slavery and arrival at the promised land, and it had little to do with petty Divine annoyance on the subject of golden calves. It was, he explained, to give that society time to let the slave generation die off and train the new generation to conditions of self reliance, to become people fit to determine their own fate. I think there’s a lot to that. Slave instincts of servility are pernicious, and difficult for even the hardiest to shake off.
There’s more than a lot to that. There is so much truth in that brief summation that I’m mortified that I’ve never put it into words.
The Department of Wildlife says don’t feed the animals because they forget to be independent to find their own food yet under the same umbrella, the Department of Agriculture provides handouts to people. hhhmmmm
It was a matter of trust. Israel did not trust YHWH. To deliver them from the Egyptians. To provide them with food. To provide them with water. To provide them with water again. And so forth. The cowardice of ten of the twelve spies sent to surveil the Promised Land was simply the last straw. Now was their cowardice a function of 430 years of slavery? Perhaps.
More importantly, the phrase “petty Divine annoyance” is quite the defamation against His character; YHWH is never petty: He forbade the Israelites from worshipping Him in the same way that the pagans worshipped their gods; the golden calf was a clear violation of that commandment.