For sure, the ancient Israelites had a pantheon of gods, just like the Greeks. I mean, their monotheism developed out their own version paganism, of which Yahweh was but one of their gods. Specifically, the god of the storms that occurred in southern palestinian. He had a wife, multiple kids and a giant oversized novelty penis. Along with his god sized cock, he would often be represented as a bull, as a man with horns or a golden calf.
Why yes, theexact kind of golden calf the Israelites started to worship when moses when up mount sinai to get the 10 commandments. Its specifically the exact reason they did it and not that they just decided to worship some random cow, despite having seen a bag full of miracles and monstrous amounts of child murder from their actual god first hand.
Yup, the calf was most likely a regular part of the northern Israel’s worship, but not of the southern Judah’s. Since most of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) is written from a Judean perspective (which makes sense; it survived longer), it treats it as blasphemous, when in reality, to them, it wasn’t.
