As one of the most evocative descriptions of the sins of the people of Israel in the Hebrew Bible, the story of the golden calf has been the subject of numerous treatments by subsequent commentators. In this chapter, I focus on Moses’s ritualistic destruction of the calf, where the calf is burnt with fire, ground down into powder and mixed with water – before the Israelites are forced to drink the mixture. Typically, this has been understood as a “trial by ordeal” to identify the guilty. But by connecting this episode to recent research on acts of transformative consumption as well as ritual strategies of inversion, I argue that the consumption of the calf be understood as a ritual of inversion aimed not at transforming the Israelites – but the calf. Consumption functions as a ritual of desacralization. The danger of the calf is mitigated as its divinity is denied and the calf incorporated back into the mundane realm.