The Bible In the News

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Every so often, I imagine a column, but it just doesn’t work out. I feared the phrase “golden calf” might be one when I uncovered the tale of a British rugby player named Jason Golden, whose injured calf made him an unlikely starter in upcoming matches—this “Golden calf” was clearly not the one I was seeking. But thankfully, “salvation,” in the form of this column, came from an unlikely source: the British artist-of-the-moment Damien Hirst, whose Golden Calf recently shook the often-intertwined artistic and financial establishments worldwide.

Hirst’s creation can be described succinctly as “a bull in a tank of formaldehyde,” but that would be a little like describing the Calf of Exodus 32 as a bovine encased in bullion. Hirst’s Golden Calf consists (in a description combining the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Express) of “a tawny bull calf with hooves and horns of 18-carat gold, preserved in formaldehyde inside a gold-plated tank [which] is raised on a Carrara marble plinth.”

As reported in some feature stories, Hirst was inspired by the Biblical account to produce what one writer (for the London Daily Telegraph) described as “a subtly mocking portrait of the billionaires who are likely to buy it, and a provocative statement on today’s inflated contemporary art market.” In fact, the piece sold for the kingly (or pharaonic?) sum of over ten million pounds sterling (I can barely calculate such an amount in American dollars, to say nothing of Biblical shekels). This led to suggestions such as Fatted Cow or Cash Cow as more appropriate than the Biblically redolent Golden Cow. It also led to cleverly worded headlines like “Cheap at Calf the Price” and classical allusions such as “Hirst’s Midas Touch with Golden Calf,” and this Biblically phrased expression of doubt (uttered prior to the sale itself), “Hooves of Gold or Feet of Clay?” (leading us directly to the “art work” of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, as described in Daniel 2).

Fortunately, at least for me, golden calves, in the more general sense of idols or false gods of excess set up for worship, pop up all over the place. We will start with the world of sports. The following notice appeared in the St. Petersburg Times (Florida): “As NASCAR continues its 2009 struggles, both at the gate and with a declining television audience, her name is starting to come up with more regularity. This league covets Danica Patrick like the proverbial golden calf” (I suppose someone should tell the newspaper’s sports department that the golden calf is found in the book of Exodus, not Proverbs).

The golden calf regularly appears in the international press. From Israel comes this criticism (from The Jerusalem Post): “There is something Biblically magnificent about the red mountains that tower over Eilat, reminiscent of Mount Sinai, not so far away. But the pleasure-loving resort that has grown up on the Red Sea hints more of the Golden Calf.” And from Canada (The Toronto Star) comes this account of small farmers “who want to earn enough to get by, but not so much that they become slaves to the golden calf.”

And of course we can’t forget the entertainment sector. A review (in The Observer) of a new biography of Cecil B. DeMille titled Cecil B. DeMille and the Golden Calf is evocatively headed: “Lights, camera, excess.”

Every so often, I imagine a column, but it just doesn’t work out. I feared the phrase “golden calf” might be one when I uncovered the tale of a British rugby player named Jason Golden, whose injured calf made him an unlikely starter in upcoming matches—this “Golden calf” was clearly not the one I was seeking. But thankfully, “salvation,” in the form of this column, came from an unlikely source: the British artist-of-the-moment Damien Hirst, whose Golden Calf recently shook the often-intertwined artistic and financial establishments worldwide. Hirst’s creation can be described succinctly as “a bull in a tank […]