The Sin of the Golden Calf and the Broken Tablets

Moses went up for forty days. The people, who had just heard a voice from heaven, miscounted the days and concluded their leader was gone. They surrounded Aaron: make us a god to go before us, for this man Moses, who brought us up, we do not know what became of him. In the Torah's telling Aaron played for time, asking for the gold earrings of their wives and children in the hope that collecting them would take days. The gold arrived at once. A molten calf came out of it, and a festival was declared. God told Moses to go down, and offered to destroy the people and make a nation from him instead. Moses refused and argued on their behalf. He came down with the two tablets, saw the calf and the dancing, and shattered them at the foot of the mountain. He burned the calf, ground it to powder and made the people drink it. The Levites rallied to him; three thousand died. This is the seventeenth of Tammuz, a fast day ever since.

Here the chronologies differ not by years but by a century. Seder Olam Rabbah places the Exodus in 1313 BCE. The prevailing academic date is the thirteenth century, the time of Ramesses II: its firm anchor is the stele of Pharaoh Merneptah of 1208 BCE, the first mention of Israel outside the Tanakh, where Israel is already in Canaan. A minority of scholars holds to the fifteenth century, reckoning by the plain count of I Kings 6:1 — four hundred and eighty years from the Exodus to Solomon's Temple. The timeline shows the prevailing dating.