Charles H. Spurgeon on Psalms 106:19

In Horeb. There is a peculiar stress on the words "in Horeb", as denoting the very place where the great manifestation of God's power and presence has been made, and where the law had been given, whose very first words were a prohibition of the sin of idolatry. Agellius, in Neale and Littledale.

Verse 19-20. Apis, or Serapis, was a true living black bull, with a white list or streak along the back, a white mark in fashion of an half moon on his right shoulder, only two hairs growing on his tail (why just so many and no more, the devil knows), with a fair square blaze on his forehead, and a great bunch called cantharus under his tongue. What art their priests did use to keep up the breed and preserve succession of cattle with such gwrismata, or privy marks, I list not to inquire...Besides this natural and living bull, kept in one place, they also worshipped boun diacruson, a golden or gilded ox, the image or portraiture of the former. Some conceive this Apis to have been the symbol and emblem of Joseph the patriarch, so called from ba, ab, a father, seeing he is said to be made by God a father to Pharaoh (Ge 45:8), that is, preserver of him and his country; and therefore the Egyptians, in after ages, gratified his memory with statues of an ox, a creature so useful in ploughing, sowing, bringing home, and treading out of corn, to perpetuate that gift of grain he had conferred upon them. They strengthen their conjecture because Serapis (which one will have to be nothing else but Apis with addition of rv, sar, that is, a prince, whence perchance our English Sir) was pictured with a bushel over his head, and Joseph (we know) was corn meter general in Egypt. Though others, on good ground, conceive ox worship in Egypt of far greater antiquity. However, hence Aaron (Ex 32:4), and hence afterwards Jeroboam (who flying from Solomon, lived some years with Shishak, king of Egypt, 1Ki 11:40) had the pattern of their calves, which they made for the children of Israel to worship. If any object the Egyptians' idols were bulls or oxen, the Israelites' but calves, the difference is not considerable; for (besides the objector never looked into the mouths of the latter to know their age) gradus non variat speciem, a less character is not another letter. Yea, Herodotus calls Apis himself moscov, a calf, and Vitulus is of as large acceptation among the Latins. Such an old calf the poet describes —

Ego hanc vitalam (ne forte recuses

Bis venit ad mulctram binos alit ubere faetus)

Depono.

My calf I lay (lest you mistake both tides

She comes to the pail and suckles twain besides).

But to put all out of doubt, what in Exodus is termed a calf, the psalmist calleth an ox (Ps 106:20). —Thomas Fuller.

Verses 19-22. It is to be hoped, we shall never live to see a time, when the miracles of our redemption shall be forgotten; when the return of Jesus Christ from heaven shall be despaired of; and when the people shall solicit their teachers to fabricate a new philosophical deity, for them to worship, instead of the God of their ancestors, to whom glory hath been ascribed from generation to generation. George Horne.